“So you’re saying girls are fruit that only exist for boys to eat?” I asked. “Sounds sexist.”
“No,” she says, “that’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“You’re literally calling me a bad apple.”
“I’m not,” she says. “The other girls are bad apples.”
“Why do any girls have to be bad apples? Why do we have to be apples at all?”
Mom took a deep breath, pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “My god, you’re difficult,” she says. “All I’m saying is it takes longer for boys to mature. I just don’t want you to feel frustrated.”
She meant to be reassuring, but her logic was easy to follow: boys never paid attention to me, therefore I wasn’t pretty, and if I wasn’t pretty, I’d have to wait a long time before anyone noticed me, because boys had to mature before they cared about anything else. In the meantime, apparently my only option was to wait. Like girls sitting in the bleachers at basketball games watching the boys play, or girls sitting on the couch watching boys play video games. Endless waiting.
It’s funny to think how wrong Mom was about all that. Because there’s another option for those brave enough to take it: bypass boys altogether, go straight to men. Men who will never make you wait; men who are starved and grateful for scraps of attention, who fall in love so hard they throw themselves at your feet.
When I’m home over February break, I go to the grocery store with Mom and, as an experiment, stare at every single man, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones. Who knows how long it’s been since a girl last looked at them this way. I feel sorry for them, how desperate they must be, how lonely and sad. When the men notice me looking, they’re visibly confused, brows knit as they try to figure me out. Only a few recognize what I am, a hardness taking over their faces as they match my stare.
Strane says he can’t go a week without hearing from me. So one night halfway through break, after my parents go to bed, I bring the cordless phone up to my room, stuff pillows along the bottom of my bedroom door to block out the sound. My stomach flips as I dial his number. When he answers with a groggy hello, I say nothing, suddenly mortified at the thought of him rolling over and answering the phone like an old person who goes to bed at ten.
“Hello?” he says, impatience raising his voice. “Hello?”
I relent. “It’s me.”
He sighs and says my name, the s whistling through his teeth. He misses me. He wants me to tell him how my break has been, wants to know everything. I do my best to describe my days—walks with Babe, shopping trips into town, ice-skating as the afternoon sun sets on the frozen lake—while avoiding any mention of my parents, making it sound as though I do everything alone.
“What are you doing now?” he asks.
“I’m in my room.” I wait for him to ask another question, but he’s quiet. I wonder if he’s fallen back asleep. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“About you,” he says. “And the time you were here in this bed. Do you remember how that felt?”
I say yes, though I know that what I felt and what he felt are probably two different things. If I shut my eyes, I feel the flannel sheets, the weight of the down duvet. His hand wrapped around my wrist, guiding it down.
“What are you wearing?” he asks.
My eyes dart to the door and I hold my breath, listening for any sounds from my parents’ bedroom. “Pajamas.”
“Like the ones I bought you?”
I say no, laugh at the thought of wearing something like those in front of my parents.
“Tell me what they’re like,” he says.
I look down at the pattern of dog faces, fire hydrants, and bones. “They’re stupid,” I say. “You wouldn’t like them.”
“Take them off,” he says.
“It’s too cold.” I keep my voice light, feign naïveté, but I know what he wants me to do.
“Take them off.”
He waits; I don’t move. When he asks, “Did you?” I lie and say yes.
It goes on from there, him telling me what to do and me not doing any of it but letting him believe I am. I stay indifferent, a little annoyed, until he starts saying, “You’re a baby, a little girl.” Then something in me shifts. I don’t touch myself, but I close my eyes and let my stomach flutter while I think about what he’s doing and that he’s thinking about me while he does it.
“Will you do something for me?” he asks. “I want you to say something. Just a few words. Will you do that? Will you say a few words for me?”
I open my eyes. “Ok.”
“Ok? Ok. Ok.” There’s some muffling, like he’s moving the phone from one ear to the other. “I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’”
For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I don’t call my own father that, can’t ever remember calling him that, but as I laugh my mind flies out of me and I don’t find it funny anymore. I don’t find it anything. I’m empty, gone.
“Go on,” he says. “I love you, Daddy.”
I say nothing, eyes fixed on my bedroom door.
“Just once.” His voice haggard and rough.
I feel my lips move and static fills my head, white noise so loud I barely hear the sounds my mouth makes or the sounds of Strane—heavy breathing and groans. He asks me to say it again, and again my mouth forms the words, but it’s just my body, not my brain.
I’m far away. I’m airborne, freewheeling, the way I was the day he touched me for the first time, back when I soared across campus like a comet with a maple-red tail. Now I fly out of the house, into the night, through the pines and across the frozen lake where the water moves and moans beneath the ice. He asks me to again say the words. I see myself in earmuffs and white skates, gliding across the surface, followed by a shadow underneath the foot-thick ice—Strane, swimming along the murky bottom, his screams muted to groans.
His labored breathing stops and I land back in my bedroom. He’s finished; it’s over. I try to imagine how it works when he does that, if he comes into his hand, or a towel, or straight onto the sheets. How gross it is for men, having the giveaway of a mess at the end. The thought You’re fucking disgusting surges through me.
Strane clears his throat. “Well, I better let you go,” he says.
After he hangs up, I throw the phone and it breaks open, batteries rolling across the floor. I lie in bed for a long time, awake but unmoving, eyes fixed on the blue shadows, my mind full of nothing, glassy and still enough to skate on.
Mom doesn’t tell me that she heard me talking on the phone until we’re driving back to Browick. When she says this, my hand grips the door handle, as though I might open it and hurl myself into the ditch.
“It sounded like you were talking to a boy,” she says. “Were you?”
I stare straight ahead. It was mostly Strane doing the talking, but she could have picked up and listened in. My parents don’t have a phone in their bedroom and I’d been using the only cordless. Maybe I hadn’t heard her go downstairs?