That’s her, Manda had said. That’s Hannah-beast.
She was still in her costume, now dirty, stinking of smoke and gasoline.
Girls like that, they’re going straight to hell. You stay away from them unless you want to get burned.
Her face itched, didn’t feel like her face at all. The wig was on crooked. The cape was torn.
She looked up, saw a rope dangling down — an old piece of clothesline maybe — looped around the overhead beam. The rope that had held the ghost piñata earlier. The little kids had swung at it with a stick, the ghost bobbing, dancing in circles until it was hit dead-on, torn open, candy flying out, the little kids all pushing each other, scrambling to collect the most pieces.
Hannah stood, reaching for the rope, hands shaking a little. She gave it a tug like she was ringing an invisible bell.
I ring but I’m not a phone.
The rope was looped over one of the rafters, tied tight with a string of knots. She gripped it with both hands and swung, feet drifting over the refuse of the evening — the clear cellophane of Manda’s Smarties, the bright scraps from Mel’s Tootsie Pops, the wrappers from all those Hershey’s bars Katie had eaten.
She was her own piñata, swinging. The rope held her weight.
She climbed up on the low wall of the gazebo, cape flapping in the breeze like she really was some kind of superhero about to take flight. The cowboy boots were slippery and she had to lean quite a bit to reach the center, but she kept her balance. She made a careful slipknot in the rope. Her hands didn’t feel like her hands at all.
It was like it was some other girl. Like she was watching some other version of herself in some far-off place tie the knot.
A ghost of a girl.
A beast of a girl.
Hannah-beast unleashed.
The real Hannah was home, tucked up all safe and warm in her bed like a good girl, right where she belonged, a girl who wasn’t going to hell. A girl who had a best friend named Manda who’d given her a pair of special pink boots, boots that fit so perfectly it was like she and Manda were one.
The candy wrappers got caught in the breeze, skittered across the floor below her, empty and forgotten.
Hannah looped the rope around her neck over the rainbow wig, over the pink boa. She heard the girls’ voices in her head as she jumped off the wall — Hannah-beast takes flight! — swinging, flying, legs dangling over the floor.
Say boo!
2016
Amanda held her breath, listening to the footsteps come up behind her. They were real; she was sure of it. Not born of paranoia and too much wine, right? She glanced down at the pumpkin, her knife now turning the blocky teeth into pointed ones, giving it a vampire grin.
Hannah-beast’s a real monster, that’s for sure. Be careful, or she’ll eat you up!
Amanda looked up, out across the kitchen at the window over the sink, and saw the reflection in it: the dim kitchen lit only by the candle in the jack-o’-lantern; herself, hunched over before it, whittling away; and a figure behind her — a girl with a blue face, a bright clown wig, a pink feather boa, a silver cape.
She blinked, but it did not go away, just came closer, closer still.
I love you, Manda Panda.
She could hear the creature breathing as it drew near, could smell smoke and gasoline.
Amanda could not move, could not speak or scream.
She was twelve years old again, looking at Hannah as she stood with the gas can by her feet, the lighter in her hand, staring desperately at Amanda: Please. Don’t let them do this to me.
But Amanda had only pointed. That’s her. That’s Hannah-beast.
“Boo!” Hannah roared in her ear, right behind her now.
“Go away!” Amanda screamed as she spun. They were the words she and the other girls had said so many times to Hannah when she followed them around like some pathetic dog at school, when she sat down at their lunch table, when she showed up at Amanda’s house, wanting to ride bikes, wanting to sleep over again. Why can’t you just go away?
Amanda plunged her carving knife deep into Hannah-beast’s belly, shouting, “Go the fuck away!”
But the creature did not disappear like smoke, like the ghost she should have been.
Amanda’s hands were warm and sticky with blood.
Hannah-beast looked down at the knife in her belly, slack-jawed, stupid.
When she looked up, Amanda saw her, really saw her.
And in that moment, she realized Hannah had won.
“No!” Amanda cried, the word a wailing sob. “No, no, nooo!”
Erin looked so surprised, so puzzled, as she reached down and touched the knife, like she couldn’t believe it was real. Amanda could see traces of cat whiskers beneath the blue face paint.
“Mom?”
Joyce Carol Oates
The Archivist
from Boulevard
1.
He would protect me. He promised.
Kissing the scar at my hairline. Smoothing the hair back, that he might press his lips lightly against the scar. Making me shiver.
He would take measurement of me. Establish a record. The size of my skull, the length of my spine, the size of my hands and feet (bare). Height, weight. Color of skin.
Then taking my hand. Pressing it between his legs where he was fattish, swollen like ripe, rotting fruit. Pressed, rubbed. When I tried to pull away he gripped my hand tighter.
Don’t pretend to be innocent, “Vio-let!” You dirty girl.
Sometimes he called me Sleeping Beauty. (Which had to be one of his jokes, I was no beauty.)
Sometimes he called me Snow White.
“I am ‘Sandman.’ Do I have a sandpaper tongue?”
Seven months. When I was fourteen.
If it was abuse, as they charged, it did not seem so, usually. It was something that I could recognize as punishment.
Each time was the first time. Each time, I would not remember what happened to me, what was done to me. And so there was only a single time, and that time the first time as well as the last.
Each time was a rescue. Waking to see the face of the one who had rescued me, and his eyes that shone in triumph beneath grizzled eyebrows. Sharp-bracketed mouth and stained teeth in a smile of happiness.
Vio-let Rue! Time to wake up, dear.
Mr. Sandman was the teacher who’d sighted me lost in the ninth-grade corridor, when I was in seventh grade. When I’d first come to Port Oriskany as a transfer student. The teacher with the grizzled eyebrows and strange staring eyes who’d seemed to recognize me. As if (already) there was a secret understanding between us.
And now you are in my homeroom. “Vio-let Rue.”
No alternative. Mr. Sandman was the ninth-grade math teacher.
At last, I was his. On his homeroom class list and in his fifth-period math class.
For both homeroom and math class Mr. Sandman seated me at his right hand where he could keep a much-needed eye on you.
He’d helped me to my feet. Before he’d been my teacher. Discovered me sleeping in a corner of the school library where I’d curled up beneath a vinyl chair as a dog might curl up to sleep, nose to tail, a shabby little terrier, hoping to be invisible and not to be kicked.