Emma Cline - The Girls

—

I followed Suzanne past the motorcycles parked at the front of the main house, as big and heavy looking as cows. Men in denim vests sat on the nearby boulders, smoking cigarettes. The air was prickly from the llamas in their pen, the funny smell of hay and sweat and sunbaked shit.

“Hey, bunnies,” one of the men called. Stretching so his belly strained pregnant against his shirt.

Suzanne smiled back but pulled me along. “If you stand around too much, they’ll jump on you,” she said, though she was pushing her shoulders back to emphasize her breasts. When I cut a glance over my shoulder, the man flicked his tongue at me, quick as a snake.

“Russell can help all kinds of people, though,” Suzanne said. “And you know, the pigs don’t mess with the motorcycle guys. That’s important.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, like it was obvious. “The cops hate Russell. They hate anyone who tries to free people from the system. But they stay away if those guys are here.” She shook her head. “The pigs are trapped, too, that’s the bullshit. Their fucking shiny black shoes.”

I stoked my own righteous agreement: I was in league with truth. I followed her to the clearing beyond the house, toward the campfire hum of voices in chorus. The money was banded tightly in my pocket, and I kept starting to tell Suzanne I’d brought it, then losing my nerve, concerned it was too meager an offering. Finally I stopped her, touching her shoulder before we joined the others.

“I can get more,” I said, flustered. I just wanted her to know the money existed, imagining I would be the one to give it to Russell. But Suzanne quickly corrected that idea. I tried not to mind how swiftly she took the bills from my hand, counting them with her eyes. I saw that she was surprised by the amount.

“Good girl.”

—

The sun hit the tin outbuildings and broke up the smoke in the air. Someone had lit a joss stick that kept going out. Russell’s eyes moved around each of our faces, the group sitting at his feet, and I flushed when he caught my gaze — he seemed unsurprised by my return. Suzanne’s hand touched my back lightly, possessively, and a hush came over me like in a movie theater or church. My awareness of her hand was almost paralyzing. Donna was playing with her orange hair. Weaving sections into tight, lacy braids, using her pinched fingernails to flay split ends.

Russell looked younger when he sang, his mess of hair tied back, and he played the guitar in a funny, mocking way, like a TV cowboy. His voice wasn’t the nicest I’d ever heard, but that day — my legs in the sun, the stubble of oat grass — that day, his voice seemed to slide all over me, to saturate the air, so that I felt pinned in place. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to, even if I could imagine there was any place I could go.

In the lull that followed Russell’s singing, Suzanne got to her feet, her dress already thick with dust, and picked her way to his side. His face changed as she whispered to him, and he nodded. Squeezing her shoulder. I saw her slip him my wad of money, which Russell put in his pocket. Resting his fingers there for a moment as if giving a blessing.

Russell’s eyes crinkled. “We’ve got good news. We’ve got some resources, sweethearts. Because someone has opened themselves up to us, they’ve opened their hearts.”

A shimmer passed through me. And all at once, it seemed worth it — trawling my mother’s purse. The stillness of Teddy’s parents’ bedroom. How cleanly that worry had been transmuted into belonging. Suzanne seemed gratified as she hurried to settle back beside me.

“Little Evie’s shown us her big heart,” Russell said. “She’s shown us her love, hasn’t she?” And the others turned to look at me, a current of goodwill pulsed in my direction.

—

The rest of the afternoon passed in a drowsy span of sunlight. The skinny dogs retreating under the house, tongues heaving. We sat alone on the porch steps — Suzanne rested her head on my knees and recounted scraps of a dream she’d had. Pausing to take ripping bites from a length of French bread.

“I was convinced I knew sign language, but it was obvious to me I didn’t, that I was just flailing my hands around. But the man understood everything I was saying, like I actually did know sign language. But later it just turned out he was only pretending to be deaf,” she said, “in the end. So it was all fake — him, me, the whole train.”

Her laugh was an afterthought, a sharp addendum — how happy I was for any news of her interior, a secret meant for me alone. I couldn’t say how long we sat there, the two of us cut adrift from the rhythms of normal life. But that’s what I wanted — for even time to feel different and new, washed with special import. Like she and I were occupying the same song.

—

We were, Russell told us, starting a new kind of society. Free from racism, free from exclusion, free from hierarchy. We were in service of a deeper love. That’s how he said it, a deeper love, his voice booming from the ramshackle house in the California grasslands, and we played together like dogs, tumbling and biting and breathless with sun shock. We were barely adults, most of us, and our teeth were still milky and new. We ate whatever was put in front of us. Oatmeal that gummed up in the throat. Ketchup on bread, chipped beef from a can. Potatoes soggy with PAM.

“Miss 1969,” Suzanne called me. “Our very own.”

And they treated me like that, like their new toy, taking turns hooking their arms through mine, clamoring to braid my long hair. Teasing me about the boarding school I’d mentioned, my famous grandmother, whose name some of them recognized. My clean white socks. The others had been with Russell for months, or years, even. And that was the first worry that the days slowly melted in me. Where were their families, girls like Suzanne? Or baby-voiced Helen — she spoke sometimes of a house in Eugene. A father who gave her enemas every month and rubbed her calves after tennis practice with mentholated balm, among other dubious hygienic practices. But where was he? If any of their homes had given them what they needed, why would they be here, day after day, their time at the ranch stretching on endlessly?

—

Suzanne slept late, barely up by noon. Groggy and lingering, her movements at half-speed. Like there would always be more time. By then, I was already sleeping in Suzanne’s bed every few nights. Her mattress wasn’t comfortable, gritty with sand, but I didn’t mind. Sometimes she reached over blindly from sleep to sling her arm around me, a warmth coming off her body like baked bread. I would lie awake, painfully alert to Suzanne’s nearness. She turned in the night so she kicked off the sheet, exposing her bare breasts.

Her room was dark and jungly in the mornings, the tar roof of the outbuilding getting bubbly in the heat. I was already dressed but knew we wouldn’t join the others for another hour. Suzanne always took a long time to get ready, though preparation was mostly a matter of time and not action — a slow shrug into herself. I liked to watch her from the mattress, the sweet, blank way she studied her reflection with the directionless gaze of a portrait. Her naked body was humble at these moments, even childish, bent at an unflattering angle as she rummaged through the trash bag of clothes. It was comforting to me, her humanness. Noticing how her ankles were gruff with stubble, or the pin dots of blackheads.

Suzanne had been a dancer in San Francisco. The flashing neon snake outside the club, the red apple that cast an alien glow on the passersby. One of the other girls burned off Suzanne’s moles backstage with a caustic pencil.

“Some girls hated being up there,” she said, tugging a dress over her nakedness. “Dancing, the whole thing. But I didn’t think it was so bad.”