Laura Adamczyk - Hardly Children

AT HER MOTHER’S HOUSE, Danny gets a letter in the mail from her old classmate Margaret. Margaret tells her that it has been hard adjusting to the new town where she and her family moved last summer. The girls at school don’t talk to her, she says. The school is bigger than she’s used to. Margaret has a twin brother, and when she wore his clothes—velour shirts in anemic browns and navy-blue tennis shoes with Velcro straps—she became a lanky, slouching boy. Her hair formed the dirty top of a mushroom, and she talked slowly out of the side of her mouth like it had been numbed.

Margaret wishes she could come back. You’re my best friend , she says. Am I yourbest friend? Danny used to get excited for the letters. She never gets mail. Now she gets annoyed. She can feel Margaret asking her to feel bad for her, wanting it too plainly. Danny hardens against the want, refusing to feel sorry for Margaret, but then feels bad for not feeling sorry, then feels angry that Margaret made her feel that way, and a different, twisted feeling stands up and falls down inside her stomach. Margaret says maybe Danny could visit her some weekend. It’s only five hours away, she says. Could her mother drive her? Please write back soon, even a postcard. Danny puts the letter in a shoebox under her bed.

THE NEXT WEEKEND,Danny follows her stepbrother into the crawl space off his room. Leave a crack, he says, and she pulls the door closed behind her without shutting it all the way, as the handle is on the outside. The space is wedged beneath the sloped ceiling and has the same unfinished walls as the rest of the upstairs. Danny sometimes dreams that something bad, a faceless person or thing, is coming to the house and everyone needs to hide. There is very little time. Her sisters and stepbrothers and dad and stepmother all hide elsewhere, and she hides there, inside that tiny room, closing the door all the way shut then piling garbage bags of old underwear and bras on top of her. The dream ends with the thing opening the door, a blade of light cutting into the small, dark space.

The walls are covered with pictures of naked women ripped from magazines—their hair blonde and feathered, their genitals fleshy and blank. Danny pretends she cannot see them then stares. Their eyes are sleepy. Their mouths coo the O lip shape of babies who’ve just had their pacifiers tugged out. Everything is soft.

Where’d you get these pictures? Danny asks.

Daddy, her stepbrother says, but Danny doesn’t know if he’s talking about her dad or his. Cardboard boxes crowd behind him, some tops flapped open in flat shrugs. Sitting cross-legged, he lights a fat candle between the two of them. He pulls out a red bottle of cologne from the back of his jeans. It’s Danny’s father’s.

Watch it, he says, and sprays a long pump into the candle, the flame whooshing large, licking Danny’s knee, then disappearing. She scoots back.

The power is mine. Eat my fire, he says, mimicking a superhero with round, rubbery muscles and small candy-red underwear. The cologne smells rotten and sweet. He sprays it again. With each flame’s breath, Danny’s chest flares then cools, the paper women on the wall rising and falling with soft sighs. The cologne darkens a small, damp circle around the base of the candle like a sweat stain.

Her stepbrother moves the candle aside and takes out his small gray tape recorder and slides one of his tapes in. It’s a bunch of songs from a cartoon full of cussing that he and his brothers watch. The first song is the cartoon people singing a cover with the words changed. The song bounces and turns and stretches. It’s a funny song, and Danny smiles when her stepbrother begins to squeal with laughter, the song’s plasticity unhinging her stomach. The troublemaker character buzzes in one ear then the other, delivering his defiant catchphrase, a chaotic hammering of short, blunt words. It makes her think that the world could turn upside down at any moment, and the cartoon character would think it was all a game. When the tape grinds then clicks to silence, her stepbrother sighs and looks up at the pictures on the wall, then he looks at Danny’s chest—dull-eyed, his white-blond hair buzzed into a square, his face infested with freckles. He stares, and Danny feels hot and hushed, as she did the other day with the girls in the locker room. There was nothing to do but stay very quiet.

THE WEEK BEFOREMargaret’s family left town, Margaret’s mother had brought her over to see Danny. A bright, summer Saturday. The two of them had gone into Danny’s mother’s bedroom and sat on the bed—a slice of light coming through the window around the drawn shades. Danny had wanted to go outside. She never went into her mother’s bedroom during the day, only sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep. Danny’s legs dangled off the side of the bed, almost touching the floor. Margaret told Danny that her family was leaving because Margaret’s father was bad. He had shown her a video. He had taken her into a bedroom just the two of them and sat her next to him on the bed and watched the video. He did not touch me, Margaret said, but he sat her beside him and he snorted drugs while they watched. Danny likes to forget the story. She likes to forget the story, and she thinks that Margaret likes to forget particular pieces of the story. It’s only reasonable, Danny thinks. But Margaret’s letters remind her. Danny had listened to Margaret’s story silently, the two of them sitting on the bed’s edge, Danny looking down at Margaret’s Velcro shoes. Danny kept her hands folded neatly in her lap, thinking, This is a very adult conversation we’re having.

WHEN HER HAIR COMES IN, Danny takes her father’s electric razor and, sitting on the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, gets rid of it all. The razor crunches, her mouse-brown hairs falling light as ash into the bowl to rest on the water’s surface. She blows the hair crumbs out of the razor’s foil. She is so smooth. She pets herself, closing her eyes, tired. The bathroom, just off the kitchen, is cool, and she thinks about taking a bath, when there is a bang on the door.

What the hell are you doing in there? Son of a bitch, her father says.

Danny can hear the wet cigar wedged in the crook of his mouth. She flushes the toilet, pulls up her pants, and unplugs the razor, stuffing it in the cabinet under the sink. Danny opens the door, but her father is gone. There is only a pot of sauce on the stove, spitting red on the white walls. Her jeans rub her differently now. She walks upstairs into the second floor’s coolness, then down into the parlor’s heat. Up and down again. As hot as a stripped wire, her mother would say. Or, Ooh la la. Or, like the time her older sister rubbed lipstick on before school, Look at this hot bitch! Her sister had then erased it with her shirtsleeve.

The following week, Danny’s hair comes back itchy, poking out straight through her underwear. Son of a bitch, she hisses. She scratches herself, leaving red fingernail tracks amid bumps and ingrown hairs. She squeezes one until glue-colored pus pops out. Son of a bitch.

MARGARET HAS A SURPRISE. She has a surprise, but first she has to tell Danny the whole situation. Margaret says the walk home from school has been longer than it was at home, which at first was really annoying. It was so annoying I could not even believe it! Her mom can’t drive her because she has to take her younger sister, Elle, to ballet after school. Elle, a yellow-haired pixie, once told Danny that the freckle above her lip was not a freckle as Danny had said but a “beauty mark.” Danny never believed she and Margaret were really sisters. Margaret’s mom calls Elle the prima ballerina, Margaret says. Whatever that means. But anyway , the only thing that makes the walk better is that there’s a boy, an older boy who is not in school anymore who talks to her on her walk. He drives a car, she says, and sometimes he drives it alongside her, but the last time, he parked and walked next to her. Do you want to know what we talk about? I’ll tell you if you want. Just write back and ask. Danny rolls her eyes and puts the letter in her box.