The Geography of Girlhood (7 page)

and he looks at me with this dorky look

as if I’m Arwen the Elf Queen

instead of just me.

Today I got a 96 on my driver’s test

which means I am as close to free

as being sixteen can be.

I am four tires and a miniskirt,

I am heaven on wheels.

According to the guy from the DMV,

I got the highest score

of any girl this summer.

He said, statistically, women

score at least 75% lower than men do

and I said, that must be one good thing

about being left with a dad

and not a mom.

Bobby calls our house tonight

to talk to Tara

and I can’t bring myself to tell him

she’s out with Jeff Eckman

so I lie and say

she’s at a movie with Lisa Tavorino.

I ask if I can take a message

and he says
No,

but you have a good night, Penny
.

I sit there for a few minutes

listening to the dial tone

like it’s music or something

because that’s the first time

he’s ever said my name.

The summer ended with a rainstorm,

the only rain August had seen in years.

It came down strange and sudden

as if to remind us

we may think we know

what’s going to happen

but we don’t.

While I was inside safe and warm,

Randall Faber went out

into the summer storm

with his brothers and his father.

While I was inside, safe and warm,

that’s when Randall Faber’s hand

first touched the live wire.

I imagine that was the moment

when everything went gold,

sonnets loosening in his cheeks,

the universe uncaged like a pack of stars,

the molecules sloping through him,

his mouth opening as if ripening for a kiss

and that small
ah
escaping into the rain,

the three men watching their fourth

fall to the damp ground,

platter of leaves and shoes,

watching as their boy falls upon it,

his body a heave of light.

5

At school, there’s an unspoken contest

to see who loved Randall the most.

The results are based on things like

the amount of Loud Sobs Emitted During Third Period

or Handwritten Notes From Randall In Your Possession.

So far, his ex-girlfriend Janelle

seems to be gaining the edge

on his current girlfriend Tammy,

simply based on the sheer number of

Items of Clothing Received.

Tammy started dating Randall this summer

so she didn’t have time

to collect his letterman’s jacket

or his track jersey or his used wristbands,

two of which yesterday

Janelle wore simultaneously.

As for me, people barely remember

those few weeks in junior high

when I belonged to Randall Faber,

making this a contest I don’t care to enter

because all I have to show

is a sloppy old first kiss

and the ratty memory of a dead boy’s hand

that somehow found its way

into mine

and then out again.

In big cities, kids die all the time

so when someone dies in a small town,

statistically speaking,

it’s like you lose

25 people

all at once.

At Randall’s funeral,

Elaine talks to me for the first time in a year.

By the bathroom, I see Stan Bondurant

and Pete Larson, who last week

were almost in a fistfight,

and now they’re locked in a hug.

Fullbacks are crying by a spate of orchids,

girls who hate each other are holding hands.

Tennis players are sitting next to punk rockers,

band nerds and brainiacs are in the same pew

as cheerleaders and art freaks.

Jenny for the first time in a long time doesn’t make fun
of anybody.

Denise for the first time in three weeks comes out of
her room.

Elaine says,
I’m sorry
, and hugs me

and I don’t know if it’s about Randall or for the year

we’ve spent apart, but it doesn’t matter.

I don’t know how to put it other than

everything is turned upside now,

like a crab on its back

that can’t get upright again.

Look what losing you has done to us.

The student body president doesn’t even bother

to give a speech on the first day of school.

A month later, the town slut gets voted
homecoming queen.

All the boys who were your friends

lose every bit of promise they have

to the bottle or bad grades.

You are in the ground now

and I stand at the Kanouk Island bridge,

fishing for something I’ll never catch

reeling in nothing but moss

losing nothing but time

my hook coming up empty

over and over again.

Do you ever think of us here on Earth,

wishing you back,

turning to drug or drink?

Do you ever come back to spy on us?

Nights like this one, I spend the night

in the yard, looking at the stars and wondering

Are you somewhere up there in all that?

On the day of your funeral,

your mother handed out 4×6

copies of your school photo

and then we never saw her again.

Wherever she lives now,

it’s a place that never stops being night.

Me, I’m giving myself over to a foggy fiction,

photo in a yearbook,

sweet remnant of a kiss I’ll never have again.

In the end, I’m just a girl

on a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere,

at the starting line of every mistake

she’ll ever make.

Lately, I’ve been having dreams about stealing

so I decide what’s the difference

between dreaming it and doing it.

At the market at the drugstore,

I take lipsticks, hard candy like the kind

in Grandpa’s dish, items small as bones.

The stolen lipstick looks perfect on my mouth

and I know that stealing

does not make me an evil person.

In fact, the easy fever

that comes when I step outside

makes me feel beautiful, ripe and waxy,

crazy for a man to come

sweeping along, fresh from prison,

and show me all that crime can be.

The bother and the guns,

the smell of urine in the front parlor.

With my pocketful of loot,

I traverse the halls

like some kind of starlet.

I eye the boys and the girls at school

and wonder if any of them

are living out their dreams

like I am.

God, you’re depressing
, my sister tells me as we’re
driving to school.

You really should snap out of it
, Jenny says in the
library one day

before leaving to go talk to Jenny Able.

Denise would probably tell me the same things

but she’s busy sneaking cigarettes with the burnouts
out back.

Are you always going to be this sad?
my stepbrother
asks.

All I know is that

the urge to run or kiss or steal or fight

is coming faster now, and maybe

my mother was right,

maybe the only place to go

is away.

You are the ex-boyfriend of my sister

a girl I’m not even sure I care about,

let alone love.

I am the girl who was always in her room,

lips sweating at the thought

of your police record.

Tonight, you show up at our house

and my sister is nowhere in sight.

I am a bungle of hubcaps on a hot day

waiting for someone to drive me off the lot.

Could I get a ride?
I ask

and you open your car door for me.

All I want is for some of your bad boy

to rub off on my hands like newsprint.

As your blue-jeaned leg

whispers against mine,

the smell of grade school,

of paste and geography texts,

rises around us,

like the smell of something

already long gone,

like some powder

dropped on the ordinary world.

In Bobby’s car,

I feel like I’m a cork about to pop.

Bobby says,
Where do you want to go?

and I shrug and say,
Anywhere
.

What I really want to say is,

Take me everywhere you took Tara

and do everything you did to her

and say everything you said
.

What I really want to say is,

Show me what it was like

so I could know now

what I could only guess at

back then
.

Bobby smells like beer and wood chips

and as we walk down the dock

he takes my hand

and a hot flash of happiness hits me.

The boats heave and squeak around us

and the moon sits fat and bright above us

as if from somewhere across the sky

the sun is sending it a kiss

full on the mouth.

My stepmother asks me when I got home

and I say
nowhere
.

My sister looks at me funny.

She’s been with a guy
, she says.

What guy?
My dad sits up straight.

My stepbrother looks like he wants to leave the room.

I haven’t been anywhere
, I lie.

After dinner, my sister stops me in the hall

and says,
C’mon, who were you with?

You wouldn’t want to know
, I say

because if anything is the truth,

that is.

My stepbrother is telling me

how he danced with Beth Sczepanick

at the Friday Afternoon Dance

and he goes on and on

about what he said

and what she said

and what he did

and what she did.

It’s only been two years

since I was at that very same dance

but when I think of those days

they feel like snapshots

from the story

of someone else’s life.

It was typical Bobby, typical me:

typical of him to call me into his garage,

typical of me to follow.

I was sixteen, hoping for a kiss

or a jar of his mom’s peaches.

Little did I know I’d be greeted

with a freshly skinned half-buck,

another one of Bobby’s prize marks.

Red and helpless, it swung there

as Bobby showed me around

the circumference of the body,

showed me the parts his mother

would make into a meal.

Never much of a braggart,

Bobby didn’t put the deer’s horns

on his roll-bar the way Stan Bondurant does.

And he hasn’t told many

about last night in the woods

when I scampered into his camper

and ended up staying there,

giving him things he was used to hunting for

but never catching.

Be it in the slow dance or the forest,

Bobby likes to have flesh here and there.

He likes bringing me into his garage

and kissing me beside the kill.

Give him an animal without its skin,