Read The Geography of Girlhood Online
Authors: Kirsten Smith
everyone is having the time of their goddamn lives
and all I can think about is my funeral.
I’m on my way into second period gym
and that’s when I see Jenny Arnold
standing in the locker room,
wearing nothing but her underwear and a rose tattoo
on her hip—
a thorny invitation to sniff
and get pricked.
Jenny Arnold doesn’t care who sees her and why
should she?
She’s a rock star in a room full of doofs,
she’s done things the rest of us have never even
read about.
She walks towards me, topless and queenly and
I realize I’ve been dreaming about getting hit by
Jenny Arnold
all summer long, the way some girls dream about
getting kissed.
Suddenly, I can’t wait for the punch;
at least I’m going to die at the hand
of someone who’s beautiful and cool.
I close my eyes and wait
to get smacked, but instead
Jenny Arnold smiles and says,
Welcome to high school
and then she walks away,
heading toward the showers
like a flower blooming towards the rain
and for no reason at all,
I go from feeling cursed to blessed,
because like any goddess on high,
Jenny Arnold has the gift of taking life
and she has the gift of giving it back.
Why I have to have a locker right next to Randall Faber,
I will never know.
Every day I see him and we pretend like it’s normal
like we’re “just friends”
except inside I feel kind of sick,
knowing that no matter how old I get,
Randall Faber will always be my first kiss,
my first beginning, my first end.
I guess the upside is that
now I’m a woman with a past,
I’m not all present and future like I used to be
and maybe that’s a good thing
if it weren’t so absolutely awful.
Some people are only happy if they are making your life
miserable and Mr. Horter is one of them. He enjoys the
torture of frogs and freshmen. His life is sure to be
awful, because his head is pointy and he is cruel and
his pants are weird. He is destined to a life with a wife
who (I’ve seen her) is as mean as he is. I imagine them
kissing each other at the door when he comes home.
Then I try to imagine him getting her pregnant (which
she is) and all I can imagine is two people bumping up
against each other in a pitch-black room. I don’t know
what my life holds, but if it’s anything like Mr. Horter’s,
I don’t want it. What I’d like to know is, shouldn’t they
have teachers that inspire you to grow up, instead of
people whose lives seem to say,
Stop now because it’s
never going to get any better?
Denise and Elaine don’t talk at all anymore.
They are like that cliff in town,
the one that’s sliding into the sea.
Geologists say the erosion was inevitable.
Nothing could stop it,
not with the rain and the wind the way it is.
Whether it’s soil or best friends,
things can’t help but slip away and disappear.
I guess nothing on the map ever stays fixed.
All you can do is make sure you’re not standing on it
when it goes.
I don’t know much about my mother, just that she had
wanderlust all her life, even at fifteen, with her lipstick
and her too-short skirt and her foster parents yelling at
her from the house. My mother was a person who
always wanted to leave wherever she was.
She told me once that her first kiss was with a traveling
salesman. She told me once that she left home at
sixteen. She told me once that I was just like her.
After the first semester of tenth grade
is over, I ride my bicycle
into Anderson Valley.
I’ve never been down here before
and there’s something faraway about it,
the way it’s overgrown with cows and plum trees
and the distant cat calls of dogs and birds.
I guess the thing I never imagined about high school
is how suddenly there would be a whole landscape
of boys
and it’s not like I get to take my pick or anything,
but I can be in love with whomever I want,
I could love someone who’s two years older
or six inches taller,
I could love someone who hunts
or someone who fishes,
or someone who doesn’t believe in either.
The rain is starting now and
I pedal further into the valley,
no idea where I’m going
except knowing that when I get there
I’m going to realize
just how lost I really am.
I pedal home, following the smell of motorbike.
Bobby just bought one, so my sister
has spent the week with her arms
wrapped around his waist
racing through alleys and other parts unknown.
My sister is sparkly with friends and people that
love her,
my sister is a walking tiara.
She is everyone’s prize
but the only thing she seems to want
is the smell of gasoline in her hair
and the taste of something
that doesn’t taste like anything else
on her lips.
After a dinner of succotash stew
my stepmother does dishes
and my father looks at our report cards.
He tells Tara just because she’s in love
it doesn’t mean now she can flunk all her classes.
He tells me that just because I get A’s in English
it doesn’t mean I can get C’s in every other subject.
He tells my stepbrother
Good job
because he gets straight A’s in everything.
That’s probably because he has no life
,
my sister says and I laugh.
Our stepmother gives us one of her vegan glares
because her son is the model of perfection
and we are just the messes
she’s being forced to clean up.
I think the only reason Denise started smoking is
because she likes to see things burn. I’m starting to
think she likes lit matches more than being my friend.
I guess it makes sense; she’s always lived her life like it’s
going up in flames any second. One day, she’s going to
start a fire and she’s not going to be able to stop it.
One day she’s going to start a fire and I won’t have the
water to put it out.
As for my other (so-called) friends,
Elaine and Skyler walked into history class today
with Charlotte Ames and some other girls
and they were all waving their pom-poms around
and squealing about the game tomorrow
and I wanted to throw up on their shoes
until Mr. Stearns said,
For those of us who aren’t sports fans,
can you keep it to yourselves?
I loved him for that.
And have you ever noticed what
nice hands he has?
Charlotte Ames rides my bus
and she’s the kind of girl who’s born happy.
She is sunny and bright and pure,
she doesn’t have crazy thoughts
passed down to her by a mother
who left town before she knew how to count.
Her parents are PTA All The Way.
When it comes to crazy,
I am definitely a “have”
and she is a “have-not.”
Except this morning, Charlotte Ames
gets on the bus and she can’t stop crying
and she tries to hide it
but it’s like a thunderstorm is raging
inside her pep squad uniform.
She sits down next to me and
I pretend not to notice the typhoon of her sadness
is gaining speed and velocity.
Soon, cars and homes will be in danger.
Soon, there will be mandatory evacuations.
I know nothing about Charlotte Ames
But I know what it means to be that sad
and how sometimes sadness is the loneliest kind
of bad weather,
it’s more like lightning than rain
because it only strikes a person who least suspects it.
But I don’t say this to Charlotte Ames.
Instead I just hand her the napkin from my bag lunch
and she mops her face and
we ride the bus together to school
without speaking, the two of us floating down a river
whose banks have long since flooded.
Tonight is the night
of the big game
and it’s so dumb
people call it that
because it seems like
it’s the same size
as any other old game.
I do not want to love you
because that’s everyone else’s job.
It’s the job of Elaine and Dawn,
of Skyler and Maggie and Charlotte,
girls I’ve grown up with,
girls who line the field at night
to watch you sprint and score,
your face a never-ending flush of tiny victories.
I do not want to love you
because I fall to ruin watching you
run and sprint and lob things
into the air so high
they might never come down.
I do not want to think about you
walking towards me or
taking me to places I have never been.
I do not want to think about you
at night, when no one is thinking of me.
I do not want to love you,
so I am giving you to the other girls;
they can have you and the sun that smiles down on you,
they can have you and the sky that opens up for you,
they can have you
and they can keep you.
In that “I hate my life” voice of hers,
Mrs. Shields is going on and on
about polygons and parallel lines
when somebody pokes me on the back.
It’s Jenny Arnold, passing me a note.
I open it, thinking it might be from Denise
but I don’t get many notes from Denise
because she barely comes to school anymore.
Instead it’s in Jenny’s famous handwriting:
Where’d you get those shoes?
They’re vintage
, I write back,
which is sort of true
because technically they are secondhand,
having been stolen from my sister’s closet
just this morning.
Jenny writes back,
Cool
which is practically like getting a note from God
telling you you’re getting into heaven.
If that weren’t enough, she writes back:
What kind of music do you like?
The usual stuff
, I write and she writes back,
Then obviously you need my help.
She gives me a grin
and suddenly, I love quadrilaterals
and supplementary angles
and I love geometry
because Jenny Arnold
just became my friend.
My stepbrother comes into my room
reeking of spaghetti and video games.
What are you listening to?
he asks.
A mix CD.
I shrug.
Who’s on it?
You wouldn’t know the bands
, I say.
And he says,
Maybe I should make a mix CD for
Beth Sczepanick.
I ask him who Beth Sczepanick is
and he says, all blushing and dorky,
She’s this girl.
Then he blurts,
She’s really good at ice-skating!
I stare at him.
Are you in love?
Instead of answering,
he runs out of the room,
tripping over a pair of shoes
and then spastically falling down in the hallway
which is further proof that he just might be
the most ridiculous person
I have ever met.
You’re the girl my stepbrother’s in love with
and he’s just the twelve-year-old kid
of a lady my dad married last year.
It’s not like I care about him,
in fact, he drives me crazy
with his stories about you,
the figure skater who’s skated
a perfect flower on the rink of his heart.
He won’t shut up about your double axels
and your triple-toe loops
and how once you smiled at him in the hall.
Personally, I suspect you’ve never even noticed him
and why should you?
He’s not much to look at
but he’s got shiny hair and
sometimes he smells like cinnamon
and yesterday, he went to the mall
and bought me a pair of really ugly earrings
that are kind of cute.
Which is why I’m telling you now