Girl quavered a little, but she clutched Kitsy’s hand and held her breath when they got close to the guardhouse. She was glad that she didn’t have to talk. The drab green men loomed over Girl like evil trees from a fairy tale, except they had machine guns.
“Get back over the line!” one of them called, and Kitsy and Girl stopped walking.
“We just want to give you a rose,” Kitsy said firmly, not sounding even a little bit scared. “Can we approach?”
The men talked among themselves for a few seconds, then one of them called out again, “Okay, but then you must turn and leave immediately.” Girl couldn’t tell if it was the same man who had spoken before. They all looked and sounded the same to her, with growling, angry voices.
The legs of Girl’s size-nine-slim jeans whisked against each other as she continued her forward walk, the tsk-tsk louder in her ears than the crickets—or were they locusts? Girl could never remember. Her sneakers were the exact color of raspberry bubblegum, jarringly childlike against the dull, gray road. The floodlights stripped Girl’s shadow and made it trail behind so she didn’t even have that dark specter-child for comfort. She was glad Kitsy held her hand so tightly. There wasn’t enough room between their palms to feel any dampness.
When they got within a few feet of the MPs, Kitsy nodded to Girl. It was too late to say, “This is too much for me.” Girl didn’t look back at the crowd of protesters, but she knew they were watching. She held the white, long-stem rose out to the closest soldier, glad she didn’t have to speak, and proud that her arm didn’t quiver.
“We give you this rose as a sign of peace,” Kitsy said, just as she had planned. Later, Kitsy became a minister, and the profession suited her perfectly. She was meant to give roses to soldiers and hold the hands of scared children.
The MP took the stem from Girl’s outstretched hand. “You have thirty seconds to get back across the line or we have orders to shoot,” he said. He didn’t smile or acknowledge the gift in any way. Girl’s youth hadn’t cracked his composure in the least—no thank you, or even a hint of movement at the edges of his mouth.
Kitsy and Girl turned and walked back across the line as quickly as they could and still appear dignified. If Kitsy hadn’t held Girl’s hand so firmly, Girl would have run, her bubblegum shoes slapping the pavement. She wouldn’t have looked back until she found Mother, but Kitsy didn’t let go and Girl didn’t run. Girl wondered what she could have done differently to have made her brave, useless gesture matter to those olive-green, unsmiling men. If she had cried and let herself look like a scared child instead of trying so hard to be a perfect, small-scale adult, if she hadn’t tied her shoes so tightly, and one had come undone, maybe it would have made a difference. Maybe one of the soldiers would have bent down to tie it.
The rest of the night was uneventful, just more singing of songs and holding candles. Girl waited until she was in the back seat of the car to cry in the dark, where no one could see her. The MP’s face was so hard-looking as he took the rose, as if he would have been just fine with shooting Girl. Girl didn’t say anything to Mother, though, because Girl had said she wanted to go with Kitsy, and had even been proud to be the one chosen. Girl looked out the window as they drove home, but instead of seeing the dark countryside roll by, she saw only orange faces of flame and stoic men holding guns.
the downhill slide
Girl had been given a diary for her birthday. It was brown fake leather with a tiny, gold lock and key. That was the crucial part of the diary—the lock. Here she could write all her secrets down in her messy, left-handed handwriting, her hair tickling the side of her face as she bent over her desk. Like many gifts, it was a slight disappointment—she wished it were pink or purple or a more girly color, but the gold lettering on the front made up for it. My Diary, it said in block letters, and when she ran her fingernail over the letters she could feel how they were slightly raised. Gold leaf, she decided, and that meant it was expensive, and everyone knew expensive was better. The edges of the pages were gold, too, and it had a red satin ribbon sewn in to mark your place.
She listed the boys she liked, turned the page, and wrote “Dirty Words” at the top of the next page, followed by a list of every bad word she knew: boobs, tits, shit, vulva. She wrote in her third-grade penmanship that she wished she was prettier, like the other girls at school. Her handwriting always looked like a boy’s, but it wasn’t her fault, she was left-handed, and she wrote with her elbow sticking straight out and her wrist curled into a half circle that made her hand ache and the other kids laugh at her. Still, she liked being left-handed. It made her special, and her long-dead uncle had been left-handed, and Brother was only right-handed like everyone else. All the teachers told her it meant she was creative. Girl didn’t put much stock in that, though. She knew she wasn’t creative—she couldn’t draw or paint—she was just a little bit weird. She wasn’t as weird as Brother, but she was odd enough not to watch the right TV shows or own the right clothes. She paused to think
