Emma Cline - The Girls

I tried reading parts of books I’d liked when I was young. A spoiled girl gets banished underground, to a city ruled by goblins. The girl’s bared knees in her childish dress, the woodcuts of the dark forests. The illustrations of the bound girl stirred me so I had to parcel how long I could look at them. I wished I could draw something like that, like the terrifying inside of someone’s own mind. Or draw the face of the black-haired girl I’d seen in town — studying her long enough so I could see how the features worked together. The hours I lost to masturbation, face pressed into my pillow, passing some point of caring. I’d get a headache after a while, muscles jumpy, my legs quivering and tender. My underpants wet, the tops of my thighs.

Another book: a silversmith accidentally spills molten silver on his hand. His arm and hand probably looked skinned after the burn had scabbed over and peeled. The skin tight and pink and fresh, without hair or freckles. I thought of Willie and his stump, the warm hose water he sloshed over his car. How the puddles would slowly evaporate from the asphalt. I practiced peeling an orange as if my arm were burned to the elbow and I had no fingernails.

Death seemed to me like a lobby in a hotel. Some civilized, well-lit room you could easily enter or leave. A boy in town had shot himself in his finished basement after getting caught selling counterfeit raffle tickets: I didn’t think of the gore, the wet insides, but only the ease of the moment before he pulled the trigger, how clean and winnowed the world must have seemed. All the disappointments, all of regular life with its punishments and indignities, made surplus in one orderly motion.

—

The aisles of the store seemed new to me, my thoughts formless from drinking. The constant flickering of the lights, stale lemon drops in a bin, the makeup arranged in pleasing, fetishistic groupings. I uncapped a lipstick, to test it on my wrist like I’d read I should. The door rang its chime of commerce. I looked up. It was the black-haired girl from the park, in denim sneakers, a dress whose sleeves had been cut at the shoulder. Excitement moved through me. Already I was trying to imagine what I would say to her. Her sudden appearance made the day seem tightly wound with synchronicity, the angle of sunlight newly weighted.

The girl wasn’t beautiful, I realized, seeing her again. It was something else. Like pictures I had seen of the actor John Huston’s daughter. Her face could have been an error, but some other process was at work. It was better than beauty.

The man behind the counter scowled.

“I told you,” he said. “I won’t let any of you in here, not anymore. Get on.”

The girl gave him a lazy smile, holding up her hands. I saw a prick of hair in her armpits. “Hey,” she said, “I’m just trying to buy toilet paper.”

“You stole from me,” the man said, shading red. “You and your friends. Not wearing shoes, running around with your filthy feet. Trying to confuse me.”

I would have been terrified in the focus of his anger, but the girl was calm. Even jokey. “I don’t think that’s true.” She cocked her head. “Maybe it was someone else.”

He crossed his arms. “I remember you.”

The girl’s face shifted, something hardening in her eyes, but she remained smiling. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever your thing is.” She looked over at me, her glance cool and distant. Like she hardly saw me. Desire moved through me: I surprised myself with how much I didn’t want her to disappear.

“Get on outside,” the man said. “Go.”

Before she left, she stuck out her tongue at the man. Just a peep, like a droll little cat.

—

I’d only hesitated for a moment before following the girl outside, but she was already cutting across the parking lot, keeping up a brisk pace. I hurried behind.

“Hey,” I called. She kept walking.

I said it again, louder, and she stopped. Letting me catch up to her.

“What a jerk,” I said. I must have looked shiny as an apple. Cheeks flushed with half-drunk effort.

She glared in the direction of the store. “Fat fuck,” she muttered. “I can’t even buy toilet paper.”

She finally seemed to acknowledge me, studying my face for a long moment. I could tell she saw me as young. That my bib shirt, a gift from my mother, was considered fancy. I wanted to do something bigger than those facts. I made the offer before I’d really thought about it.

“I’ll lift it,” I said, my voice unnaturally bright. “The toilet paper. Easy. I steal stuff from there all the time.”

I wondered if she believed me. It must have been obvious how lightly I was wearing the lie. But maybe she respected that. The desperation of my desire. Or maybe she wanted to see how it would play out. The rich girl, trying out kid-glove criminality.

“You sure?” she said.

I shrugged, my heart hammering. If she felt sorry for me, I didn’t see that part.

—

My unexplained return agitated the man behind the counter.

“Back again?”

Even if I’d really planned to try to steal something, it would have been impossible. I dawdled down the aisles, making an effort to wipe my face of any delinquent glimmer, but the man didn’t look away. He glared until I grabbed the toilet paper and brought it to the register, shamed at how easily I snapped into the habit. Of course I wasn’t going to steal anything. That was never going to happen.

He got on a tear as he rang up the toilet paper. “A nice girl like you shouldn’t hang out with girls like that,” he said. “So filthy, that group. Some guy with a black dog.” He looked pained. “Not in my store.”

Through the pocked glass, I could see the girl ambling in the parking lot outside. Hand shading her eyes. This sudden and unexpected fortune: she was waiting for me.

After I paid, the man looked at me for a long moment. “You’re just a kid,” he said. “Why don’t you go on home?”

I had felt bad for him until then. “I don’t need a bag,” I said, and stuffed the toilet paper in my purse. I was silent while the man gave me change, licking his lips as if to chase away a bad taste.

—

The girl perked up as I came over.

“You get it?”

I nodded, and she huddled me around the corner, her arm hurrying me along. I could almost believe I had actually stolen something, adrenaline brightening my veins as I held out my bag.

“Ha,” she said, peeking inside. “Serves him right, the asshole. Was it easy?”

“Pretty easy,” I said. “He’s so out of it, anyway.” I was thrilling at our collusion, the way we’d become a team. A triangle of stomach showed where the girl’s dress wasn’t fully buttoned. How easily she invoked a kind of sloppy sexual feeling, like her clothes had been hurried on a body still cooling from sweat.

“I’m Suzanne,” she said. “By the way.”

“Evie.” I stuck out my hand. Suzanne laughed in a way that made me understand shaking hands was the wrong thing to do, a hollow symbol from the straight world. I flushed. It was hard to know how to act without all the usual polite gestures and forms. I wasn’t sure what took their place. There was a silence: I scrambled to fill it.

“I think I saw you the other day,” I said. “By the Hi-Ho?”

She didn’t respond, giving me nothing to grab on to.

“You were with some girls?” I said. “And a bus came?”

“Oh,” she said, her face reanimating. “Yeah, that idiot was real mad.” She relaxed into the memory. “I have to keep the other girls in line, you know, or they’d just fall all over themselves. Get us caught.” I was watching Suzanne with an interest that must have been obvious: she let me look at her without any self-consciousness.