Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

The boys liked this. “You’d better be good,” said Greg. “We’re baby-sitting you seventh graders, and if you don’t do what we say, you’re gonna get it.”

The game was on. They sat on the couch, moving closer and closer, the boys getting drunk, the girls getting giggly and excited. They teased and flirted and made fun of each other, the boys commanding the girls to do things, like pick a piece of paper up off the floor. The girls would fiercely resist and then do it, pouting and flouncing. There was a thick current of feeling coursing through the room, a wide band of glittering yellow-gold that swept them off the floor and into another sphere. At first Justine stood aloof and looked at this process with wonder; then she let it move her.

Greg and Deidre left the room, disappearing behind a closed door. The two other boys became rougher and more demanding; one of them told Dody to make him a drink, and when she didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed her hair and pulled her toward the kitchen. “You leave my friend alone!” Justine yelled in the phony little-girl voice employed by sluts and whores the world over (and she an actual little girl!) as she leapt up to grab the boy’s shirt, pummeling his back with deliberate futility. She and Dody overpowered him and pinned him to the wall, greedily savaging him with tickling fingers until his friend leapt off the couch and the girls ran screaming until they were cornered in a parental closet.

“You guys are really gonna get it now,” advised the blank-eyed boy. “You have to stay in here and wait while we decide what we’re gonna do. You have to stand back to back with your hands behind you.”

The boys left the room, and they did as they were told, standing and telling each other how afraid they were in thrilled voices. “Do you think we should try and run for it?” asked Dody. “No, we’d better not,” Justine said. “They’d really kill us then.” Justine thought of her parents sitting at the table eating dinner, her mother daintily picking an errant morsel from her teeth, and for a minute she actually did feel afraid. What if she really was in another sphere and couldn’t get back to the old one? Then she relaxed; but of course, it would be as simple as the times she lay in bed and, putting her hand between her legs, became a victim nailed to a wall, and then, as her body regained its tempo, became Justine once more.

The boys came back into the room. One of them said, “Okay LaRec, follow me.” And Dody sneering, “Oh, I’m really scared,” followed him into the bathroom, visible at the end of a short hall, leaving Justine to stare at this pretty-eyed creature with chiseled features, peachy skin, and no human expression. Her heart pounded. She wanted to sit down. He forbade her. He told her his friend was “going to strip Dody and finger her.” Her underwear became wet. She told him Dody was probably beating his friend’s butt, but no sound of butt-beating emanated from the bathroom. They stood silently, Justine’s breath getting quicker and shallower, every detail of the boy’s bored, sideways-looking face becoming larger by the moment. She felt as if he were right next to her, his breath filling her pores, his smell up her nose. The longer they stood the more genuinely afraid she became. The more afraid she became, the more bolted to the floor she was, her armpits damp, her throat closed, her pelvis inflamed and disconnected from her body, her head disconnected from her neck. She heard Deidre laughing in the bedroom.

The bathroom door opened, and Dody paraded out with her boy lurking and smirking behind. Her face was red but her body exuded pride.

“Come on,” said Justine’s boy, “your turn.”

The bathroom was pink-tiled and green-rugged, the sink decorated with large, stylish shells and glass jars filled with bubble bath balls. The boy sat on the green toilet and looked at her. “You hafta get over my lap,” he said.

Justine thrust her hip out and tried to look like she was making fun of him, but she didn’t know how to do that without her friends. The music from a ballpoint pen commercial was playing in her head, and she imagined huge-eyed Cool Teens dancing to it. “I’m not gonna do that,” she said.

“You hafta.”

Back and forth they went. Heat and tension sat between her legs; the rest of her felt cold. He grabbed her hand and pulled her face down across his lap. She tried to appear graceful, feeling heavy and fat on his slim haunches. She looked at the toilet cleaning brush in the corner as he pulled down her pants. Her breath held itself as his numb fingers pushed into her numb contracting body. He fingered her with strange mechanical movements. His hand felt far away even when his fingers were inside her, as if he were doing something someone had told him to do and was pleased because he’d succeeded in doing it, not because he liked it. His remoteness made him authoritarian and huge, like a robot in a comic book. It inflamed her. She thought of Richie whipping her at the swing set amid the red flames of her little cartoon hell. His fingers hurt her. She gripped his thighs — and, in contrast to his hand, felt him there, a quick boyish spirit in the warm, feeling body of a young human. “It hurts,” she said.

Perfunctorily, he stopped, took his fingers out of her, wiped them on her bare ass and moved his hands so that she could stand.

She walked out of the bathroom feeling like a busty blonde on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; womanly, proud, almost inert in the majesty of her dumb, fleshy body.

Then she and the D girls went to Dody’s house and had ice cream and vanilla wafers.

She never saw those particular boys again but, although she had occasion to “make out” a few times after that, the boys who kissed her and felt her tiny breasts never made her feel the way she had felt while standing in Greg Mills’s house. The only person who provoked that feeling again was a girl — a girl she didn’t even like much! She was Rose Loris, a mousey pretty thing with thin lips and eyebrows who wanted with fierce anemic intensity to be “in the group” and who was tolerated on the fringes because she was Debby’s friend, although it was a friendship based mainly on Rose’s devotion to Debby, who was always standing Rose up at the mall.

This intent yet drooping girl with the shoulders of a rag doll and the alert, quizzical head of a bird, whose sleepy limbs seemed at odds with her straight spine, followed Justine around wanting to be her friend. This annoyed or flattered Justine, depending on her mood. Rose was always saying weird things that she thought would sound cool, and it embarrassed Justine. Still, she sometimes went to Rose’s house to watch television and to look at Mr. Loris’s pornography collection.

Among the many magazines, postcards, and books, Mr. Loris had a comic entitled Dripping Delta Dykes about two huge fleshy rivals who, through a strange plot with many perplexing changes of locale, battled each other in their changing lingerie ensembles. On the kitchen table, in the boxing ring, on tropical isles, in hospital rooms (where they worked as nurses), they met and settled one another’s hash, the brunette, after a lot of hair-pulling, arm-twisting, and tit-squeezing, generally trussing the blonde up in a variety of spread-eagled poses so she could stick different objects into her vagina.

Although Rose laughed and squealed “Gross!” while perusing this book, Justine noticed she kept coming back to it over and over. Rose’s reaction irritated Justine; it made her want to shove or slap Rose. Instead she said, “God, this is no big deal, I’ve done this stuff with Debby. It’s fun.”

Rose’s stunned face seemed to fractionally withdraw, and for a moment Justine was embarrassed at her lie. But Rose drew near again. Then, as had happened in Greg Mills’s house, they crossed a border together.