Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(36)

Relax, lez, she says, pulling away. Suck it in.

We circle this blunt, and then another, several more times. My tongue feels like a pinecone. Everything I say ticks around my head like a film projector, and I can’t tell if the words are coming out now or if they came out fifteen minutes ago, or if I haven’t even said them yet.

Look at Chinky’s eyes, says Nelle. Now you can actually tell she’s Asian!

Why do you both say white girl shit like that? I say, surprising myself.

Excuse me, I’m one-eighth Bolivian, says Harley.

I laugh so hard at this that a long string of drool drips down to the gravel. The drool looks bedazzled to me with the bonfire behind it. Slow motion.

I wonder if my mother feels like this all the time. If my father did, before rehab. In this moment, I think I understand drugs and booze and the big deal about them. I feel infinite here, with these girls, strong, like either one of them could choke me or yank out fistfuls of my hair and I would love it. It’d be the feel-good burn of a loose tooth you can’t stop tonguing, a thoroughbred pounding beneath you on a track, those flashes of life when your own body surprises you with no more ache, no more tenderness.

I think, This is why they like it. Mom and Dad. This is why they don’t come back to themselves, and I feel connected to them in places I’ve never felt before. I’m their daughter.

In what feels like seconds, or maybe hours, another man approaches us. He is tall, with high-spiked hair. For a moment, I wonder if he’s a talking tree.

Go away, Paul, Nelle says, and the words tunnel out.

And then another man. Short, bald. Granite eyes. His name, someone says, is Tonka.

I hear more words in no particular order: Paul / No / My girl / Fucking kill you / Tonka / Jump him / Nelle / My girl / Paul / Fucked her / Chicken-head / When, before Monty and Paul and Tonka begin swinging their arms and smashing their glass bottles and Monty’s face is pressed against the asphalt, beneath a sneaker. I think, This is sexy.

In what feels like seconds, or maybe minutes, the blue of sirens whirls in my eyes, and Nelle says Run, run, and the trees turn to coral, we’re all underwater, and my body is pulled into Harley’s sinking car before we speed off, looking for Monty. He limps out of the woods to the street, bloodied pulp of a body in Harley’s headlights. Nelle and I let him lie across our laps as we drive him to a hospital, Nelle kissing his forehead, smoothing his hair back with the wet black of his blood. Smashed ruby of a boy, all those cut-open places—it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.



I have this problem, Harley screams from her bathroom toilet. I hate wiping my own ass.

It’s true, Nelle says. Nelle’s flipping through a beauty magazine on Harley’s bed, peeling open the pockets of sample lipsticks and perfumes between the pages. She sniffs the spine.

Are you shitting me? I ask, reaching for the joke.

I just can’t, Harley says.

I don’t understand.

Chinky, can you come and wipe my ass for me? Please?

I look at Nelle. Is she serious?

She shrugs. The Lips beckon.

In the bathroom, Harley extends her arm with a wad of toilet paper pinched between her nails, her toes pointed inward like a toddler on the aquamarine tiles.

Be my best best best friend, will you?

There’s a glittering viciousness to Harley Pelletier when she wants something. The slight cock of her face to the left, the bend of her pupils as they gaze up at you at just the right angle. A look that says, Love me? Even when I’m fucking with you? Even when I’m not? Prove it.

But I’d do anything. That’s the problem with me. It still is.

I never even pretend to hesitate.



There are nights without parties sometimes. On these nights, we pull on sweatshirts and yank off the top of my father’s navy convertible, which we’ve decided to take as our own—Just until he comes back. We drive around until the sun bulges out of the sea, back and forth along A1A, Usher or Juvenile or Bubba Sparxxx on the speakers. The heat blasts in streams against the thick wet cool of the Florida winter, and we call it hot-fudge-sundae-driving.

I haven’t seen my father in several months. He flies down to northern Florida every weekend to visit my uncle in prison, but he does not make the full trip to see me. He says it’s because my mother is using, and seeing her high is triggering to him and his sobriety. When my father does not visit, my mother uses more. She says his not loving us is triggering to her and her sobriety.

In my father’s car—that corrugated edge of fear and desire that I can’t stop touching. What if we all get found out? What if I get sent away to live in the system? Could the girls come with me? Would they?

The music thumps in our stomachs and we never talk much, we just smoke and smoke until our throats burn our voices out. When this happens, Nelle and I plug one nostril with a finger and put the filter into the other nostril. We snort the cigarettes as hard as we can, until our vision curls and collapses like a wave.

Long live our tribe of fatherless girls, Nelle says, wind-whip of hair stinging our faces, daybreak warbling from bird-blackened trees.



Both girls like to kiss me with their tongue rings. They like the way guys look at us when they do this. When they take the new girl’s face in their hands and kiss me hard and sloppy, running their fingers through my hair, letting me tug at their barbells with my teeth.