“Put that away!” he said, looking quickly back and forth. “Meet me here after school.”
“I don’t have a pipe,” Girl said.
“I’ll take care of it.”
After school Danny, Leonard, and two of his friends came over to her house.
“Do you have a coke can?” he asked Girl. She fished one out of the garbage and handed it to him. Danny squashed it in the middle and took a fork and carefully made a series of holes in the indention. Lastly, he poked a hole in the bottom of the can.
“That’s the carb,” he told Girl. Danny pinched some of the shake weed onto the holes and showed Girl how to light it and put her lips to the can opening, one finger closing off the carb hole, then releasing it. Girl tried it, but coughed out a cloud of smoke.
“You aren’t inhaling,” he told her.
“I’m trying!”
“No, you’re breathing through your nose and taking it into your mouth. Here.” He walked behind her and held the can to her lips with one hand and held her nose shut with the other. “Breathe,” he told her. “Now hold it.”
Girl’s eyes were running when he released her, but the smoke soothed all the sad and scared feelings that lived inside her chest. She felt giggles rising like bubbles, but pushed them down. She wasn’t going to look stupid. The giggling feeling went down between her legs, and she kissed Danny, even though his nose was too big and he was too skinny. She had finally found something to make all the sadness go away.
thanksgiving with father
Girl unlocked her apartment door at noon. Jenna, her favorite of her new friends, was moving to Seattle, so she had a sleepover party on her last night in town and invited Girl. It was her first sleepover since she left New York.
“I want you to meet my best friend, Suzy,” Jenna had said. “Now that I am moving, you two will be best friends.” The sleepover was Jenna’s way of introducing the two, and both girls accepted that they would become best friends like Jenna said. They had stayed up all night talking. The girls slept till eleven, which was pretty early to wake up at a sleepover, in Girl’s opinion, but it was Thanksgiving. At Mother and Stepmother’s house, they watched the parade in the morning, then ate dinner in the midafternoon. She would be home with plenty of time to spare.
“Father?” Girl called as she walked into the apartment. He wasn’t there—but had left a note.
“I called all twenty names on your phone list, and no one knows where you are. I went to the potluck dinner at church without you. You are grounded off the phone for two weeks, and you have to write a two-page essay on acceptable behavior,” he had written on a yellow pad of paper. Girl went to pick up the phone to call her brother in outrage, but it was gone. Father had taken it with him. She couldn’t talk to her mom, even. Her first holiday, and she was alone, but she was not going to be silenced. Girl picked up the yellow legal pad and ripped off her father’s note. She wrote two pages on acceptable behavior, “blah blah blah, coming home on time, blah blah blah, leaving the phone number of where I’ll be …” and then wrote two more pages on exactly what she thought of him as a father. “You never called on my birthday, you didn’t tell me what time to come home, you always loved Brother more than me …” a long emotional vomit of old hurts and new injustices. She left her pages on top of her father’s note, went into her room, and waited.
That evening she heard her father come into the apartment. Click—that was his key in the door, thud—the door shut. She stayed in her room, one ear pressed against her door. She heard the rustle of him taking off his shoes, and knew he was lining them up neatly on the mat, like always. The closet door opened and shut as he hung up his coat. Mother and Stepmother never took off their shoes neatly or hung up their coats the minute they came home, but Father was regimented about everything in his life. When she heard the crinkle of paper, she sat on her bed and picked up a book, so it would look like she wasn’t nervous. She was not very good at insolence.
Father tapped lightly on her door. When she opened it, he stood there holding out the cordless phone. “I can see you learned your lesson,” he said, then pulled Girl into a tight hug. “I love you so much, Girl.” She didn’t reply. Father reached in his pocket and pulled out his shiny eel-skin wallet and peeled off three twenty-dollar bills. “Here,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Girl took the money and put it in her jeans pocket.
“Love you, too, Father,” she said, and listened to him talk about Thanksgiving at church. All she wanted was to call her mother.
cool
Suzy gave Girl two pairs of skintight jeans. Suzy was tiny, and the jeans were so tight on Girl that she could barely sit down, but Girl didn’t care. She was finally cool. She had to lie down on her bed to zip them, and then her stomach hurt so much that she couldn’t eat, which was awesome, because even though she was too tall, she figured if she kept her weight under one hundred pounds she could still be a jockey someday. Girl had never had a flat stomach even though she was thin, and not eating made her happy. Suzy showed her how to melt the tip of her eyeliner to make the line thicker and blacker. Father let her buy a pair of black satin stiletto heels, and she wore them to school every day.
Girl woke up at 5:30 every morning to catch
