When Ruthie got bored of the swings Donna said she was going to take her home, because I wasn’t a dispensable girl and Ruthie’s mammy only wanted her to play with dispensable girls. I called Ruthie a lump and Donna a lamp, but Donna just took Ruthie’s hand and said, “Come on, Ruthie, let’s go home to your mammy.” I said I would go with them, because I wanted to look at all Ruthie’s toys, but when we got to the end of the road I saw two policemen walking toward the church. I wanted to speak to the policemen more than I wanted to see the toys, so I ran after them. They were quite a long way ahead of me, and before I could reach them they got in their car and drove off. I kicked the curb and felt my toenail break. I didn’t care. I wished Ruthie had still been there. I wanted to slam her against the curb. I wanted to see what color her blue dress would turn when it had her brains smashed all over it.
Julia
Guess what,” Molly called. I turned off the taps and went back to the kitchen. “It’s assembly next week,” she said. Her voice was muffled.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said.
She leaned over, opened her mouth and gently released a clod of chewed potato onto the chip paper. “It’s assembly next week,” she said.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“You told me to,” she said.
It was four thirty. I took her reading book out of her book bag and sat down at the table opposite her.
“Come on. Reading,” I said.
She knelt up on her chair and stretched until a sliver of skin appeared under her polo shirt. “I think I’m going to be a cat,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“I’m going to be a cat. That means I only talk in ‘meow’ and I do things like this.” She curled her hand over, licked the back, and rubbed it behind her ear. “I play it with Abigail. It’s a really fun game.”
“You can be a cat later,” I said. “Now you’re going to read your book.”
“Cats can’t read,” she said.
“I think this one can,” I said.
“Meow,” she said.
After fifteen minutes, I agreed that I would stop trying to make her read if she stopped meowing. She trotted into the bathroom looking mildly victorious, and stood on the mat, waiting for me to undress her.
“Do you know what I’m being in assembly?” she asked as I peeled off her vest.
“What?”
“Narrator Four,” she said. She was bare now, ribs cording the skin above her belly, which stuck out like a mixing bowl. Her knees were patchworked with bruises, pushed to the surface of the skin in a mauve-brown sheen. I lifted her into the tub and propped her plastered arm on a stool.
“Narrator Four,” she said.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s the most important one in the whole assembly,” she said.
“How many narrators are there?” I asked.
“Four,” she said. “Miss King said Narrator Four is the most important.”
According to Molly, Miss King spent most of her working life telling Molly she was better than all the other kids in the class. I wasn’t sure it was ever an honor to be the last in a procession of narrators. Linda had been Narrator Five (of five) three years in a row, because she couldn’t read and she cried whenever she had to speak in front of people. The first year it happened I was next to her on the stage. I knew her lines as well as mine, because I knew everyone’s lines, and when I realized she wasn’t going to say them I stood up and said them for her. I was surprised there was room in my head for the memory—I felt stuffed to the sides of my skull with echoes of Sasha’s voice and visions of Molly’s new mother—but it slipped fluidly into the cracks. Linda’s pale face. The silence before I rescued her. The feel of her hand, cold and sweaty, curled around my wrist.
I filled a plastic cup with water, tipped Molly’s head back, and poured it over her hair. It turned it to a thin black snake, and the heat turned her skin slick and spongy. Sometimes I felt I was closest to Molly when she was in the bath, because in water she was back to the creature I remembered: a thing made of naked tissue, like a girl-shaped graze. That was how she was when she tore out of me, washed through in a wave of pain that made me want to collar someone and say, “This can’t be real, this must be a joke, you can’t seriously expect me to cope with this,” because nothing that was natural could hurt so much. She came out screaming, as if I was the one who had hurt her, and I wanted to say, “This isn’t fair. It isn’t fair of you to act this way. You’re the one who hurt me.”
The pain crested and dissolved, and a nurse held her up like an offering.
“Skin-to-skin, skin-to-skin!” she said.
“I don’t want it on my skin,” I thought. “It hurt me.”
“Time for a cuddle!” she said.
“I don’t want to cuddle it,” I thought. “It’s too loud.”
“Lovely healthy girl!” she said.
“A girl,” I thought. “A girl like me.”
Then she was there, hot and slimy on my chest. Her face looked made of folds of skin, and it struck me that perhaps this was my punishment. Not the years behind locked doors or the lifetime of probation. My punishment was to have given birth to a baby with no face, only fold upon fold of skin. I heaved, and the nurse shoved a kidney-shaped bowl under my chin, and I vomited into it. Molly stopped screaming, lulled by the hacking she
