Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

And Theo would eat her cereal solemnly. She hated her mother’s controlled tone and hoped something would disrupt it. Maybe a forearm burn at the stove or an unrestrained fart. But nothing like this ever happened. Linda maintained her measured display of arousal. Maybe she had been molested as a child. Theo thought yes, certainly.

Linda patted her high hump of gelled hair and Theo pressed her face down onto her mother’s lap. She tried to be her heaviest self, to be immovable, but Linda pulled one hand through her hair and she softened. Linda carried her to bed and sat running her fingernails up and down Theo’s back. Theo hated how she could be wooed into a relaxed state so easily. She fell asleep enraged.

Theo dreamt deeply of revenge, drowning the guinea pig of a girl she particularly disliked. She considered the possibility of jail time and jerked awake.

• • •

It was dark. She was alone and instantly furious, belly down and clammy in the clothes she had put on that morning: high-waisted corduroys and a T-shirt with a winking cartoon puppy on it. The crosstown bus hissed down her block and bars of light shot across the ceiling. She wanted so badly to sneak to her mother’s bed, to burrow her face in Linda’s warm wall of back fat. She wanted to say that her stomach hurt, even though it didn’t.

Theo tiptoed to her mother’s bedroom and reached beneath the massive comforter, hoping to find a shoulder or hip or hand. She listened for her mother’s whistling nose. After a few seconds she realized she was alone. Theo turned on the light. Her mouth trembled as it always did before she cried, but she decided not to since there was no one there to watch.

Theo walked to the kitchen and dumped a stack of saltines onto a plate. She swung open the refrigerator and knelt before the radiant room of batteries and yogurt, then dragged her crackers one by one across a lump of butter, dropping them in rows on the plate.

She climbed back into her mother’s bed and turned on the television, leaning back, pleased to discover that Losing Sarah was on again. Sarah was only out of her mother’s sight for an instant before she vanished forever. Though missing photos were posted door-to-door and every townsperson with a flashlight joined the search, Sarah’s body was found jammed into the trunk of an abandoned car. Her body was never shown, only the scene of the crime, the aftermath. A dirty street in daylight, littered with the vestiges of her last living moments: a path of blood with smears from her struggling fingers, one scuffed Mary Jane the size of a potato chip, a fistful of blonde wisps blown up into the branches of a nearby tree.

Theo’s favorite part of the film came at the end, when the kidnapper was torn from his home in handcuffs and dragged through a crowd of hysterical townspeople and news reporters. He had beady eyes and pocked cheeks, his freckled scalp protruding from a ring of frizzy red curls. Sarah’s father launched his body onto the criminal, spitting and weeping onto him, yanking his carroty hair. Theo watched fixedly as he cowered on the pavement; she felt she had participated in both his capture and his crime.

Theo imagined where a kidnapper would hide in her apartment if he had the opportunity, if her mother left the door open. She pictured him, breathing quietly under the bed, ready to grab an ankle. How long had he been waiting so patiently? Hours and hours, she decided. Theo felt flattered that she had been chosen out of so many other gorgeous children. She wondered if it was her narrow, upturned nose or pleated jumper. Or maybe the fact that she was such a likable child, never throwing tantrums or wetting the bed. Her kidnapper was in love with her and Theo knew that his love was a kind of sickness, but she cherished this wild, wrongful affection, precisely because it could not be suppressed. Being kidnapped seemed like a compliment.

Theo envisioned her violent capture and eventual murder. Her teeny killed body: hard and discolored with rot, propped within a ring of candles in her kidnapper’s apartment. He would be caught because he couldn’t bear to throw her away. The smell would alert the neighbors.

Theo lifted whole crackers into her mouth, picturing her mother’s face as a private investigator leaned in with the bad news, his beefy palm on her shoulder. He would be sure to tell Linda that Theo was too good for this world and promise to keep the monster behind bars. Perhaps he would add that it must have been difficult having such a beautiful daughter, that there must have been so many other men who wanted to kidnap her, what with that narrow nose, that white-blonde hair.

At the funeral, her mother would sit hunched over a fistful of sodden tissues, crying the way people try not to in public. Charlie would stand over Theo’s powdered corpse, lowered into a glossy casket with her teeny fingers assembled carefully on her breast, two tough curls around one long white lily. Charlie would know that his ears were too big and he smelled too much like a neglected turtle to ever be kidnapped, as he stared down at the only friend he’d ever had. And Sandy would be there too, feeling ugly in her dress.

News reporters would barge through the crowd of inconsolable weepers, lifting their microphones to the mouths of her classmates, who said they really missed Theo and meant it. One student would read Theo’s poems aloud, poems that consisted of long, thoughtful lists of her dislikes, complete with supplementary illustrations. The sobbing kid would stand before a blown-up picture of Theo in a frame inscribed with the words WE WILL NEVER FORGET. The crowd would sit hushed by every poem, touched, nodding in unison. In a variety of ways they said God her life had been hard. Even the reporters would cry and then take breaks to fix their makeup. That night on the news, they would announce that a new law had been passed to punish particularly choosy perverts in especially merciless ways. This law would be named after Theo.

Theo would spy on her body from heaven. And heaven was a great white sea of the similarly beautiful, the unlawfully adored, the stalked. Theo appreciated the promise of death and the dependable traditions that followed it. Everyone she had ever met would be at her funeral, leaning over her pink pleats in prayer. Not to say goodbye, but to say hello for the first time. A real hello, hello from her nose to her feet. With their eyes, they would reach into her perfect mouth, bright and quiet. They would dip into her hair and duck beneath her dress to see those purpled places, those finger-shaped bruises. They would analyze her marks to determine the size and placement of her kidnapper’s hands, to see how she had been touched. People are able to look longer at a dead girl because they do not need permission, a dead girl does not look back when watched.

• • •

Theo grew tired of waiting for her kidnapper and decided to go find him instead. She brushed her cracker crumbs onto Linda’s pillow and hurled the plate at the wall. She marched to her room, cramming her backpack with a blue carnival bear and a flashlight. She yanked the sheets half off her mattress and shattered her bedside Bambi lamp, swatting all the framed photos from the walls on her way to the front door.

Theo walked up to the roof. She sat on the cool tar, petting the yellow hairs on her shins and wondering when her mother would notice she was missing. And how long would she search for her? Would she find her in time? Theo peeked down at the street, biting her fingers, to see if any cop cars were parked outside. The orange-lit avenue was dotted with nuzzling pairs of heads and Theo spat at them. She lay on the tar the way someone would to get a suntan.

• • •

The weak line of light streaming from Theo’s flashlight only reached so far, disappearing a few feet beyond her grasp. He could be here, she thought, tucked under a square of shadows. And if he was here, he would take her to a damp corner of land, overgrown with trees and shrubs. She closed her eyes to see him better. In the moonlight his boxy teeth beamed bright and white as hospital coats, his hairdo hung over one eye. The other eye was gigantic and blue; it knew every angle of her, towering loyally, possessed with love.