Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(41)

Hi, Mommy, I say. Sure.

At nine thirty P.M., my mother is waiting outside the back exit of the mall. She’s punctual, and I am impressed by this. As I walk over to the car, I pull a fistful of my hair beneath my nose to make sure it doesn’t still smell like tobacco.

Hi, MomMom, I say, as I climb into Big Beau. I snap the seatbelt.

Hi, Baby, she says, really looking at me, rubbing my knee. How was work?

Slow, I say. Didn’t hit our numbers.

I hate the idea of you and Eliza walking to your cars this late at night, she says. It gets so dark here. Is there even any security?

This is the Boca Raton mall, I say. Safest place in the world. What’ll they do, hold us up with Botox needles?

After I graduate high school, in December, the same month it is now, a serial killer will hit the Boca Raton Town Center mall. The killer will ask mothers to withdraw money from a nearby ATM before duct-taping their wrists and snapping black-out swimming goggles around their faces. The first victims will be found alive, but the killer will shoot two of the victims—a mother and her daughter—point-blank, the car still running, and never be caught.

But we don’t know that yet.

Ten minutes into our drive, at a red light, my mother opens the car door and pukes on the street. We’re on Glades Road, and the headlights behind us are a blinding spotlight on her face, on the stream of yellow liquid spilling from her throat. When the light ticks GO, cars begin to honk. I rub my mother’s back. You okay?

I’m fine, she says. Something I ate.

My mother pulls over and pukes four more times before she asks me to drive.

Do you need to go to the hospital? I ask.

She is shakes; her lips greening. Her teeth clatter so loud I can hear them from the driver’s seat. Something I ate, she says.

What’d you want to talk to me about? I ask her. Why’d you pick me up?

I just wanted to see you, she said. That’s all. Just wanted to see my baby girl. She squeezes my hand.

My mother will later tell me that this was the day she made a decision—this was the morning she flushed the bottles of pills down the toilet in a colorful clicking stream, changed her bedsheets, got dressed, sprayed perfume. She wanted to pick me up from work and tell me about it—this new life that would unfold for us, this new chapter, how sorry she was for losing herself again, how she was done this time, she really was.

She’ll tell me she wanted to make me proud. She wanted to live.

Instead, she’s sick all week. She kicks the new sheets off her bed. She sweats, sleeps, gags herself with the corner of her pillow when she can’t stop crying. She mumbles words to herself—sentences I can’t make out. She stares at the ceiling with eyes like seeds. Something I ate, she says over and over again, as I press cold washcloths to her forehead.

On the seventh day, she is not sick anymore, but she is also no longer my mother.

The piercing parlor is just off the train tracks and you don’t need an ID to get poked. Instead, you offer to pay cash, keep a secret, and wear the shortest skirt you can find. This is what I’m told, anyway, by some of the girls at school. Addison Katz got her nipples pierced here, and she shows off the wink of silver by pulling her white uniform shirts tight against her chest. Can’t wear a bra till it heals!

I have the night off work, so I’ve decided to go to the train tracks after school and do my best. Jenny, who is still DJ Banana, wants to get poked, too, and we decide that we’ll hold hands. I want my tongue pierced, because it reminds me of Harley and Nelle, and because it’s the one thing my mother has said she would break my neck over. Tattoo your eyeballs for all I care, she has said, but you’ll have a tramp-ring over my dead body. Or yours. Jenny says she’ll decide what to pierce once she gets there. She’s spontaneous like that. A few girls from school decide they want to tag along and watch. Even Beth shows up.

On the way to the tracks, I call my mother. I’m going to a movie with Jenny, I say. So don’t try to call me tonight.

Well then maybe I’ll go to the movies, too, she says. I could use a laugh, a self-date.

In the parking lot of the parlor, I roll my khaki uniform skirt four times and pull off the Soffes I wear beneath it. I roll the skirt high enough so that the slight curves of my butt show below the pleats. I goop on lip glass. Tie my shirt into a neat side-knot to expose my stomach, my tanning bed tattoos.

Seventeen? Eighteen? I ask Jenny.

You’re not fooling anyone.

Jenny has always looked older than me, and she’s wiser, too. She knew how to rim her lids with liner when I still used Milky Pens on my own eyes, and she was the first person to tell me what a Brazilian wax is. Most important, she’s got the nicest, roundest ass at our school. I know she won’t have any trouble convincing the men inside.





The shop is quiet when we open the doors. Two men stand behind the counter, under a wreath of mistletoe, looking at something on their computer.

We’re here for tongue rings, says Jenny. And we’ll pay cash.

Four girls stand behind us in their school uniforms, waiting.

You old enough? says the bigger man, with butter-colored sweat stains mooning under his armpits.

Yes, says Jenny.

How ’bout little China?

Yes, I say. We’ve got cash.

All right then, says the thinner man. The holes of his ears dangle like stalactites of skin. Give us five, we’ll get set up.