Continued, Girl’s Girl
Three weeks is an eternity in the summer, and that’s how long my mom forbade me from having sleepovers or seeing my friends, though she never actually named this duration for my punishment.
When I asked how long I had to stay at home, she said she didn’t know.
She said she’d tell me when she figured it out—which was like her, not to punish me with any numerical certitude but instead with her infinite, ongoing measurement of my worth.
She thought I should use this time productively.
She thought I should sign up for an activity.
But I refused. Instead, I stomped around the house and closed all my drawers with dramatic flourish and force.
If I signed up for an activity, she’d be able to plausibly conclude that punishing me led to an expansion of my horizons, which I could not allow.
I didn’t want her to feel justified in exerting more control over me when I so badly wanted her to exert less.
Of course, at the same time, I was hoping she wouldn’t change at all.
So I had to remain at home all day every day with her for as long as the interval of her anger turned out to be—weeks, months, the whole summer, who knew.
Eleanor didn’t text me back, and eventually I stopped texting her.
Day after day passed in digital silence.
She had incredible control over herself for a person of that age, likely on account of having grown up in the wake of so many adult siblings.
She’d had to count on herself to provide her own entertainment.
This was one of the things I’d loved about her from the start, her magnetized pillar of self—that you could throw yourself against her and would rebound.
For the same reason she couldn’t play team sports, I wanted to be her friend.
I’d accepted her into what existed between myself and Margaret, after almost ten years of best friendship without a third, and now I had to accept the consequences.
I had to accept I’d thrown myself against her, and I’d rebounded.
“Now is a good opportunity to go through your closet,” my mom suggested over breakfast. It was eight o’clock in the morning, five days after Eleanor kissed me. I gave her a look of vile loathing.
“You need to learn how to be alone,” she said to me.
“Because you’re so self-reliant,” I countered, and then felt like a monster. She didn’t have a job other than me. “Fine, we can do it,” I said. Because I’d just insulted her for no reason, I felt I had to agree.
My mom blew on her hot spoonful of un-sugared oatmeal and then put it in her mouth and chewed.
Did she consider me a rude and heavy backpack she was obligated to carry up a hill?
This was a new thought, and though I asked myself the question, I lacked the capacity to appreciate its possible answers.
After we finished our meal, I followed her upstairs to my bedroom, where I put on and took off all my clothing piece by piece while she sat on my bed and we both looked at me in the large mirror mounted on my wall.
I liked how I looked, but I thought I could like myself even more with certain alterations, if only I could figure out what they were.
Something to do with my hair and manner of expression and thighs and sense of style and way of standing and nose and which pairs of pants I owned and also my face.
I moved my phone from my dresser to my bedside table, screen-side down next to my cloud lamp.
Because my mom didn’t take away my phone or my computer as part of my punishment, I periodically had to take them away from myself.
I couldn’t tolerate the minute-to-minute continuous confirmation that Eleanor still hadn’t said anything.
Especially given that if she did decide to text me, for the sake of my dignity, I’d have to wait at least an hour before responding.
I liked to imagine I was getting a head start.
I tried on a tank top with finger-width straps and a high, square neckline that my mom had made me buy against my will the year before.
Annoyingly, the top now looked good on me.
I turned my torso to the left and right in the mirror, wanting to see myself over my shoulder.
I put my fingers in my hair and shook it out.
Late June was humid, and I welcomed the movement of air on my neck.
My mom had pinned her hair into a twist. Her arms were bare, her watch on her wrist, her nails unpainted.
She looked like she approved of my appearance, so I felt a great yearning to disagree.
I smothered the instinct, still in a state of recoil from my recent cruelty.
Then I changed into a triangular dress I wanted to get rid of.
My mom picked up its hem, shrinking the length by a good four inches.
“We could have it altered,” she said. “Or wait until you grow.”
I hated that my mom seemed to know where I was heading ahead of time.
It wasn’t fair she could pick clothes for a body that didn’t exist yet when I had so little sense myself of who I might become.
I wanted to know what I would eventually look like and where on the spectrum of attractiveness I could reasonably expect myself to arrive.
It bothered me that I couldn’t be an impartial judge of myself.
I could merely watch for whatever changes took hold in me.
I could merely part my hair down the middle and then the side and then the middle again in an attempt to discern which looked best. I had wanted armpit hair up until the moment it arrived, and then I wanted it to go away again.
My breasts, alas, were arriving unevenly.
Sometimes I’d talk to the smaller one, urging it, in a kindly voice, to hurry the fuck up.
I walked over to my bedside table and turned my phone right side up. The lock screen illuminated empty. I turned it over again.
“You’ll never be the most beautiful person you know,” my mom had once told me. “No one is. Everyone always knows someone else.”
Upon hearing this, I felt both terribly sad and also deeply reassured.
Over and over, we negotiated my body. What looked good on me and what didn’t.
The right to wear my hair unbrushed or wet.
The right to forget sunscreen and accidentally burn myself to a crisp in Eleanor’s backyard.
The features I’d inherited from her—what she did with them versus what I did with them.
The genetically stubborn black circles beneath our eyes that she covered up with concealer every morning.
I thought they made me look moody, like I was in the aftermath of a party—an effect worth cultivating seeing that it was basically never true.
She didn’t make strict rules. I didn’t have to wear knee-length skirts or get her permission on my social media posts.
But she had opinions about every inch of my person, and I knew what all of them were and could not unknow them.
For this reason, I never wanted to speak Eleanor’s name to her again.
Whatever she said, I’d never be able to un-hear.
I handed the triangle dress to my mother, who notably did not place the item in the donation pile.
Next, I tried on a pair of shorts that were obviously too small for me but that I refused to get rid of because they looked good too small.
I liked when my legs looked like cartoon legs.
My mom was skeptical but wary of inflaming me further during such a delicate operation.
“Those are good weekend shorts,” she said.
“There’s no real dress code at school,” I replied. “I could wear these if I wanted to.” I probably wouldn’t, though. I’d stand in front of the dresser holding the shorts and wonder if she was right and lose confidence.
Rain began to fall outside, pattering on the roof. My phone vibrated. My mom sat back down on my bed, anticipating that I’d want to check my messages, but now that I knew for sure a notification awaited me, I wanted to open it alone.
“I’m keeping them,” I said of the shorts, and then dismissed myself and my phone to the bathroom.
The notification was a weather alert: It had in fact begun to rain.
Useless. Peeing, I scrolled through my feed.
First the algorithm fed me a meme from The Sims of a woman sitting at a desk in a bath towel playing a video game while her baby lies on the ground beside her on fire.
Next appeared a picture Margaret had posted of Eleanor standing in a parking lot in front of a black SUV.
She wore an extra-large crewneck sweatshirt, a miniskirt, and her hair pulled up into a high ponytail tied tight enough to change the angles of her face.
I checked both Eleanor’s and Margaret’s profiles for additional content, but neither had posted anything else.
I’d once been afraid of losing Margaret to Eleanor, and now I was forced to consider the pain of losing Eleanor to Margaret.
I looked at the picture one more time, then opened my web browser and navigated to the tab I never closed and read one of my favorite chapters of Ginevra, in which the fairy journeys deep within a mystic cave to bathe in its healing waters.
While she bathes, the waters part to reveal a pearl wand.
The pearl wand thrums with ancient power.
This power will enable Ginevra to resolve certain pressing political conflicts that plague her realm, but first she lies down on a rock adjacent to the pool and uses the wand to fuck herself until she comes thirteen times, and after the thirteenth time, she sleeps, and while she sleeps, a beautiful pearlescent mist spreads over the adjacent village, causing its inhabitants to ascend into a divine orgy that lasts for thirteen days and thirteen nights.
And when Ginevra wakes and emerges from the cave, everyone is pregnant with babies obviously destined to be born with their own magical powers, and the village worships Ginevra as their new goddess, and she is like, Sure, why not? and then flies away on her lilac wings.
I can go back to my room, I told myself. I can go try on some more clothes and be nice to my mother.