Emma Cline - The Girls

I flinched when he pushed my head toward his lap. A singe of clumsy fear filled me. He was good at not seeming angry when I reared away. The indulgent look he gave me, like I was a skittish horse.

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Evie.” Holding out his hand again. The strobe of my heart going fast. “I just want to be close to you. And don’t you want me to feel good? I want you to feel good.”

When he came, he gasped, wetly. The salt damp of semen in my mouth, the alarming swell. He held me there, bucking. How had I gotten here, in the trailer, found myself in the dark woods without any crumbs to follow home, but then Russell’s hands were in my hair, and his arms were around me, pulling me up, and he said my name with intention and surety so it sounded strange to me, but smooth, too, valuable, like some other, better, Evie. Was I supposed to cry? I didn’t know. I was crowded with idiot trivia. A red sweater I had lent Connie and never gotten back. Whether Suzanne was looking for me or not. A curious thrill behind my eyes.

Russell handed me a bottle of Coke. The soda was tepid and flat, but I drank the whole thing. As intoxicating as champagne.

—

I experienced the whole night as fated, me as the center of a singular drama. But Russell had put me through a series of ritual tests. Perfected over the years that he had worked for a religious organization near Ukiah, a center that gave away food, found shelter and jobs. Attracting the thin, harried girls with partial college degrees and neglectful parents, girls with hellish bosses and dreams of nose jobs. His bread and butter. The time he spent at the center’s outpost in San Francisco in the old fire station. Collecting his followers. Already he’d become an expert in female sadness — a particular slump in the shoulders, a nervous rash. A subservient lilt at the end of sentences, eyelashes gone soggy from crying. Russell did the same thing to me that he did to those girls. Little tests, first. A touch on my back, a pulse of my hand. Little ways of breaking down boundaries. And how quickly he’d ramped it up, easing his pants to his knees. An act, I thought, calibrated to comfort young girls who were glad, at least, that it wasn’t sex. Who could stay fully dressed the whole time, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

But maybe the strangest part — I liked it, too.

—

I floated through the party in a stunned hush. The air on my skin insistent, my armpits sliding with sweat. It had happened — I had to keep telling myself so. I assumed everyone would see it on me. An obvious aura of sex. I wasn’t anxious anymore, wasn’t roaming the party squeezed by nervous need, the certainty that there was a hidden room I wasn’t allowed access to — that worry had been satisfied, and I took dreamy steps, looked back into passing faces with a smile that asked nothing.

When I saw Guy, tapping a pack of cigarettes, I stopped without hesitation.

“Can I have one?”

He grinned at me. “The girl wants a cigarette, she shall have her cigarette.” He held it to my mouth and I hoped people were watching.

I finally found Suzanne in a group near the fire. When she caught my eye, she gave me an odd, airless smile. I’m sure she recognized the inward shift you sometimes see in young girls, newly sexed. It’s that pride, I think, a solemnity. I wanted her to know. Suzanne was giddy from something, I could tell. Not alcohol. Something else, her pupils seeming to eat the iris, a flush lacing up her neck like a trippy Victorian collar.

Maybe Suzanne felt some hidden disappointment when the game fulfilled itself, when she saw that I’d gone with Russell, after all. But maybe she’d expected it. The car was still smoldering, the noise of the party cutting up the darkness. I felt the night churn in me like a wheel.

“When’s the car gonna stop burning?” I said.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her, the air soft between us.

“Jesus, I don’t know,” she said. “Morning?”

In the flicker, my arms and hands in front of me looked scaly and reptilian, and I welcomed the distorted vision of my body. I heard the brood of a motorcycle ignition, someone’s wicked hoot — they’d thrown a box spring in the fire, and the flames soared and deepened.

“You can crash in my room if you want,” Suzanne said. Her voice gave away nothing. “I don’t care. But you have to actually be here, if you’re going to be here. Get it?”

Suzanne was asking me something else. Like those fairy tales where goblins can enter a house only if invited by its inhabitants. The moment of crossing the threshold, the careful way Suzanne constructed her statements — she wanted me to say it. And I nodded, and said I understood. Though I couldn’t understand, not really. I was wearing a dress that didn’t belong to me in a place I had never been, and I couldn’t see much farther than that. The possibility that my life was hovering on the brink of a new and permanent happiness. I thought of Connie with a beatific indulgence — she was a sweet girl, wasn’t she — and even my father and mother fell under my generous purview, sufferers of a tragic foreign malady. The beam of motorcycle headlights blanched the tree branches and illuminated the exposed foundation of the house, the black dog crouching over an unseen prize. Someone kept playing the same song over and over. Hey, baby, the first lines went. The song repeated enough times that I started to get the phrase in my head, Hey, baby. I worked the words around with unspecific effort, like the idle rattle of a lemon drop against the teeth.

I WOKE TO A WASH OF FOG pressed against the windows, the bedroom filled with snowy light. It took a moment to reoccupy the disappointing and familiar facts — I was staying in Dan’s house. It was his bureau in the corner, his glass-topped nightstand. His blanket, bordered in sateen ribbon, that I pulled over my own body. I remembered Julian and Sasha, the thin wall between us. I didn’t want to think of the previous night. Sasha’s mewlings. The slurred, obsessive muttering, “Fuck me fuck mefuckmefuckme,” repeated so many times it failed to mean anything.

I stared at the monotony of ceiling. They’d been thoughtless, as all teenagers are, and the night didn’t mean anything beyond that. Still. The polite thing to do was to wait in my room until they had left for Humboldt. Let them clear off without having to perform any dutiful morning niceties.

—

As soon as I heard the car back out of the garage, I got out of bed. The house was mine again, and though I expected relief, there was some sadness, too. Sasha and Julian were aimed at another adventure. Clicking back into the momentum of the larger world. I’d recede in their minds — the middle-aged woman in a forgotten house — just a mental footnote getting smaller and smaller as their real life took over. I hadn’t realized until then how lonely I was. Or something less urgent than loneliness: an absence of eyes on me, maybe. Who would care if I ceased to exist? Those silly phrases I remembered Russell saying — cease to exist, he urged us, disappear the self. And all of us nodding like golden retrievers, the reality of our existence making us cavalier, eager to dismantle what seemed permanent.

I started the kettle. Opened the window to let a slash of cold air circulate. I gathered what seemed to be a lot of empty beer bottles — had they drunk more while I slept?

After taking out the trash, the tight heave of plastic and my own garbage, I caught myself staring at the poky blankets of ice plants along the driveway. The beach beyond. The fog had started to burn off, and I could see the crawl of waves, the cliffs above looking rusted and dry. A few people were out walking, obvious in performance wear. Most of them had dogs — this was the only beach around where you could take dogs off-leash. I’d seen the same rottweiler a few times, his coat a color deeper than black, his heavy churning run. A pit bull had recently killed a woman in San Francisco. Was it strange that people loved these creatures that could harm them? Or was it understandable — that they maybe even loved animals more for their restraint, for the way they blessed humans with temporary safety.