In the fall, the girls chain-smoked in Lizzie’s bedroom until the shades turned gray and their fathers pulled into the driveway with ties loose and cherry necks throbbing in love bites from women who would never be the girls’ mothers. The girls clawed at the scabs on their ankles, marks from drowning in pools of mosquitoes. They missed summer camp. At night, they would wash their feet in dew and cry on the dock as the stars moved. They would hold hands and watch midnight storms melt into the tree line. Hoped the lake would flood so they could disappear by daylight. Sometimes, they’d go for drives. The boys told them to swallow pink pills beneath the cold light of a rest stop bathroom somewhere off the edge of the highway. They were nowhere girls. Ate cold cheeseburgers from convenience stores. Smoked in the parking lot during school assemblies. Never told their parents when they were coming home. They thought life was escapable. Rode it like a roller coaster until the tracks squealed and the cart flung them into a black pit of babies crying, mail piling, and husbands whining, until they couldn’t hold their breath and drowned in thank-you cards and bake sales and grocery lists like their mothers, and the mothers that came before them, until they drowned in the things that they were told made them women.
*
Lizzie was the leader. Her loose lips signified her power. She never cut her hair or plucked her eyebrows or painted her nails. The boys liked her chaos. They liked the stains on her shirt, leftover ketchup from the fourth of July, ashes from the cigarettes she smoked in the dark. They liked her cut-off shorts and her bony legs. The way she looked at them after gym class, her hair tied back, cheeks sweating red, like she wanted them to follow her into the showers and paint her neck with the scent of their tongues.
*
Courtney always slept in, her rough hair suffocating the sheets, staining it with loose bobby pins and the smell of the sea. Everyone called her sweetheart. Everyone nibbled on her neck, tangled her locks, and hid her panties in their trunks so they could spend longer drowning in her thighs. Her parents owned a cottage by the ocean, lined it with baby pictures and teacups, with sand dollars and watercolor paintings, with the things that separated them from her and the nights she spent naked by the shore. The nights she spent waiting to disappear. Her aunt sent her fancy bags from Paris that she hid from her sisters in the back of their father’s corvette. After dinner she sat with the purses in the front seat, rested her head against the dash, and rubbed them until their shine came off in her hand, until they glittered with bright lights and parasols, until the Eiffel Tower was close enough to touch.
*
Mia wanted to kill herself. On Thursdays after school, she would go to the park and strip naked except for her glittered purple pumps and lay under the largest elm tree, smoking cigarettes and tracing her knees until the sun moaned through the leaves dangling above her. Middle-school boys hid their gaze behind baseball bats, careful not to explode as they watched her nipples harden with the sweep of a breeze. On the weekends, she managed to drown her pain in cups of vodka. Bloodstained baby-blue tights climbed her legs, split at her thighs, exposed her snow-white skin and made the boys think she had flicked her open sign on. Mia knew how good they felt lying on their backs in the bed of her grandfather’s pick-up truck. She liked to keep them there, watch their eyes change color as the sun set, run her palms down their legs until their mouths caved in. They tasted sour. Made her tongue peel. But she kept suffocating in their sweet misery because they wanted her, and it made her feel alive.
*
The girls grew up too fast, painted their eyes with glitter on Halloween and vanished under black cloaks and lace stockings, hiding their long faces and broken cherries from the boys sleeping in shadows outside Mr. Pink’s Deli, the lingerie shop on Seventh Avenue, their front step once their daddies turned the light out. They watched the horror of life unveil itself in their childhood bathrooms, let their blood run deep into the rug. Made their mothers believe it was ketchup before they disappeared downtown where the darkness could hide their scars. Banana splits and pinball machines became their camouflage, and they buried themselves in it until it tasted like the sea.
*
The night felt heavy on their chests as the girls made their way through quiet streets, snow kissing the backs of their necks. It coated mailboxes, rusted out their hollow organs. Licked the row of cars parked on Park Street, the metal hoods swelling. The girls joined hands, caught in a flurry of remembering and forgetting. Mia dreamed of standing on her stepmother’s balcony, inches away from the edge. Courtney’s eyes held the kinds of monsters that tore white undies off middle-school girls, shredding them behind broken bleachers before pep-rallies, cheers and chants eroding in her mind like gunshots. Photographs delicately lined the rim of Lizzie’s imagination. She sang out hallelujahs to the cab drivers, the drug dealers, to the businessmen wrapped in cigarettes and faded pin stripes, the men who would lay her on scratchy cushions, an empty bottle of Cognac poking her inner thigh. It was the teenage gaze, burdened with exposed skin and heavy smoke, dizzy and untrue. The girls knew that there were plenty of things that didn’t mean a thing to those boys hiding inside shady Cadillacs, outside the homes of girls who liked to waste their time believing in a kind of man who only existed in a dollhouse.
*
At the party, Mia cut all her hair off over a mountain of empty bottles in the kitchen sink. She tells me that he touches her everywhere, that he claws her pink cheeks in the midnight air, turns them red. That he suffocates his hand between her fluttering thighs. She wants to shave off her eyebrows too, so he won’t want to hold her eyes anymore. She wasn’t always like this, her eyes strung out on a clothesline, dripping with salt and mascara from yesterday. None of us were. We used to tie our skinny ankles in ballet slippers, prance over linoleum squares under fluorescent bulbs, suck on popsicles at the playground until our mothers came and scooped us off the merry-go-round. She slumped her frail body against the fridge, a rainbow of pills sliding under her skin.
*
“Li?”
“Yeah, darling?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“I know, sugar.”
*
I pull Mia from the floor, bare feet kissing the soiled carpet as we make our way to the bedroom. We watch Courtney from the hallway, her ruby red pumps pulsating in the dying air. She needed saving, her dress on the floor, legs spread on the mattress, mind lost somewhere between a dream and another nightmare. They lined up at the door to have a piece of the girl tied to the bed. I caught her gaze and she cracked open her mouth as they pounded into her, deep as they could go, the bed frame smooching the wall.
*
“Li,” said Mia, digging her fingers into my arm, her nails wet with blood from her constant chewing, her glittering eyes stained in tears, “We’re drowning.”
Our mothers watched us sprint across the sands when we were kids. Watched our stubby toes get caught on smoothed pebbles and chipped shells, watched our bare bottoms breathe in the sun’s wandering glow. Our mothers closed their eyes and prayed the waves would pull their daughters out to sea. To somewhere that would keep their hearts safe.
_
Chelsea Harris has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Minloa Review, Literary Orphans, Grimoire, Always Crashing, and The Fem, among others. She co-runs a zine and reading series in Bellingham, Washington called Wallpaper Magazine and received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago.