“It was used to punish women who had sex with Satan,” Mom said, her voice matter-of fact, “and to punish women who allowed themselves to miscarry.”
“Allowed themselves to?” I didn’t know which sounded more insane—thinking that women were having sex with the devil or blaming women for their miscarriages. But then I remembered with a twinge how I had felt when my mother’s crystal tumbler reappeared after she had lost the baby I’d named Chloe. Part of me had been angry. Part of me did blame her, even though I had never spoken about it with her, with anyone.
“As long as there have been women,” Mom told me, “there have been ways to punish them for being women.”
Once there was a girl who lived in a nest. It was the right place for her to live, because where she should have had soft girl lips, instead she had a hard beak that could only curve down into a grimace and never up into a smile, causing the other girls—those with soft, pretty mouths—to call her “Resting Bitch Face.”
She lived in a nest and she had a beak instead of lips, and just as terrible was her secret shame: she had only one large hole between her legs instead of three smaller holes, an opening from which came urine and shit and monthly blood, all of it mixing together unreasonably and terribly.
Her nest was upstairs at the end of the hallway in an otherwise unremarkable home. And just as the girl had learned to pretend to ignore her beak and her one hole, so did her parents pretend to ignore the existence of her nest.
“Clean your room!” they would call up the stairs, as if by vacuuming and straightening the girl could transform the mess of sticks and straws into something resembling normalcy.
“That girl,” they would mumble, rolling their eyes and lifting their shoulders as if their girl and her problems were no different from the girls and the problems in the houses that neighbored their own.
And she lined her nest with cutouts from magazines of all the pretty mouths of all the pretty girls, and each feather that emerged on her arms and legs and chest she pulled out at once, clamping down upon them with her beak and prying them away, weaving them into the sticks and straws that surrounded her, feathering her nest with her own shame.
But feathers are strange things. For one end of the feather is the quill, sharp enough to pierce flesh, and the other end is the vane, soft and smooth and stronger than it looks. And after a time, the bird girl pulled a feather from her side and this time, instead of weaving it into her nest, she dipped its quill end in ink, and she placed it to paper, and she began to write.
I know where I am going when I leave my house after showering off the urine and fear of the tortured dog. I am going where I am not invited, where I am not expected, and where I will not be welcome.
Louise was too excited about the party to keep from diarrhea-talking, completely unable to contain herself no matter how rude it was to fill me in on all the details of a party I wasn’t invited to.
Was she really that oblivious? I’d always thought Louise was harmless—kind of vapid, but nice. But the texts she sent me in the days leading up to Apollonia’s party—pictures of the shoes she was thinking about wearing, a question about what she should bring as a gift, stuff like that—they didn’t feel thoughtless. They felt purposeful. They felt sort of mean. And they made me think again about the years we’d spent obsessing together about Seth—what it would be like to hold his hand, to kiss him, to be his girlfriend. The texts made me wonder how it must have felt to Louise when I got to find all that out, and she didn’t. Of course, she also didn’t have to discover what it felt like to be left by him. To be replaced.
Well, I guess in a way she did know what that felt like—to be left, to be replaced. After all, I had left her as cleanly and completely as Seth had left me. Both of us were strays.
Along with all the texts about her shoes and gifts and plans, Louise told me where Apollonia lives—Silhouette Lane, in Irvine’s Quail Hill neighborhood. It’s a gated community, I find out when I arrive, with a guard at the booth. He wears a ridiculous black hat, like a chauffeur, and a shiny black vest that stretches across his belly.
“I’m here for Apollonia’s party,” I tell him, and he looks a little doubtful because I’m wearing jeans and a sweater instead of something fancy, and because the party started hours ago, but I just stare at him right in the face without flinching, and after a second he presses the button that lifts the mechanical arm, and in I go.
I have no idea which of the streets is Silhouette Lane, and I have no idea which house Apollonia lives in, but it turns out to be not that hard. Once I find it, it’s obvious which house is hers.
It’s the one that looks like a castle.
It has a turret. A ridiculous thing to have in the middle of Irvine. It, like the rest of the house, is shaped from stucco. It’s ridiculous in principle, because this isn’t the thirteenth century, but in practice it does look pretty cool, the turret.
The long driveway is full of cars. I see Seth’s black Acura, parked way up close to the garage. He must have been the first person to arrive, because now his car is boxed in behind others—I see Dante’s truck and Cassie’s bug and Carver’s dad’s Audi, which he lets Carver borrow on special occasions.
Every light in the house is on, spilling gold down into the driveway, bathing the cars and the flower-filled planters and the steps up to the door. I park in shadow, across the street, several houses down.
I don’t know what I’m doing here, only that I’m drawn here and that I will not leave. I see the dog in my head. I see it twitch as the medicine goes in. I see it soften as it dies.
Dogs’ bodies, after they’re dead, do you know what they do with them? You’d probably guess cremation, or maybe burial. You would be wrong.
They render them.
So this is what happens. In some shelters, after the animal is euthanized, they’re bagged and tagged—you know, where did the animal come from, what kind of animal is it, that sort of stuff. But our shelter doesn’t have the funding for extra steps like that. When the dog is dead, its body is added to the others already in a big black rubber oil can. The cans are rolled into a freezer room so they don’t start smelling before they’re collected by the city.
Then the bodies are boiled. Yes, boiled. To separate the fat, which is sold through a bidding process to whoever can pay the most for it.
The fat is used to make lipstick. Household cleaners. Dog food. Cat food. The bones are ground up, and they end up in pet food, too. Like the Soylent Green of the animal kingdom.
Only when everything useful has been stripped from the dog’s carcass is it burned to ash.