I stand in front of the mirror and I look at my body in this little dress I’m wearing, and my socks folding over different lengths and I try and forget that I just fucked a sixty-five-year-old man who only bought me one drink. I think about that whole dick fantasy, and I try to get myself to want to fuck myself. Here you go, I say, look at that fine ass, look at that body, you want to take her don’t you, you want to fell this girl.
But I just see some girl in a blue dress with short hair and sad eyes and I really don’t want to fuck her at all. She looks so tired to me. I go to the window and look out at the lights of the city which are every color and I stick my head out. It’s pretty windy, so it throws my hair back and I feel like a dog riding in a car and the wind is cold and brings tears to my eyes and I try to pretend they’re sad tears and sniffle a little.
The night is mostly quiet and I can only hear the sounds of things far away. After a while a cab pulls up downstairs. It honks and three girls come out of my building in little skirts and shiny hair and they get in the cab and they’re already laughing. The wind keeps pulling tears from my eyes. I’m poised like a gargoyle above them and I think about letting myself fall out the window and landing on the top of the cab to go where they’re going. Bending the metal of the roof until it presses down hard on one of the girls’ heads and she panics and yells at the driver who doesn’t listen. Help, she says to her friends, something’s going on, the car is caving in! They think she’s kidding but it’s reaclass="underline" there is a mass that is me on top of her, watching the lights and the sky pass me by in a rush, pushing down on that metal until I’m crushing her skull. My ass and her brain. My weight and her burden. I will close my eyes and feel the speed. I will feel the wind fill up my dress and pass through me in tunnels until I am so numb with cold, I can’t tell when we stop.
PART THREE
THE HEALER
There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. Everyone else’s hands were normal. The girls first met in elementary school and were friends for about three weeks. Their parents were delighted; the mothers in particular spent hours on the phone describing over and over the shock of delivery day.
I remember one afternoon, on the playground, the fire girl grabbed hold of the ice girl’s hand and — Poof — just like that, each equalized the other. Their hands dissolved into regular flesh — exit mutant, enter normal. The fire girl panicked and let go, finding that her fire reblazed right away, while the ice spun back fast around the other girl’s fingers like a cold glass turban. They grasped hands again; again, it worked. Delighted by the neat new trick, I think they even charged money to perform it for a while and made a pretty penny. Audiences loved to watch the two little girls dabbling in the elements with their tiny powerful fists.
After a while, the ice girl said she was tired of the trick and gave it up and they stopped being friends. I’d never seen them together since but now they were both sixteen and in the same science class. I was there too; I was a senior then.
The fire girl sat in the back row. Sparks dripped from her fingertips like sweat and fizzed on the linoleum. She looked both friendly and lonely. After school, she was most popular with the cigarette kids who found her to be the coolest of lighters.
The ice girl sat in the front row and wore a ponytail. She kept her ice hand in her pocket but you knew it was there because it leaked. I remember when the two met, at the start of the school year, face-to-face for the first time in years, the fire girl held out her fire hand, I guess to try the trick again, but the ice girl shook her head. I’m not a shaker, she said. Those were her exact words. I could tell the fire girl felt bad. I gave her a sympathetic look but she missed it. After school let out, she passed along the brick wall, lighting cigarette after cigarette, tiny red circles in a line. She didn’t keep the smokers company; just did her duty and then walked home, alone.
Our town was ringed by a circle of hills and because of this no one really came in and no one ever left. Only one boy made it out. He’d been very gifted at public speech and one afternoon he climbed over Old Midge, the shortest of the ring, and vanished forever. After six months or so he mailed his mother a postcard with a fish on it that said: In the Big City. Giving Speeches All Over. Love, J. She Xeroxed the postcard and gave every citizen a copy. I stuck it on the wall by my bed. I made up his speeches, regularly, on my way to school; they always involved me. Today we focus on Lisa, J.’s voice would sail out, Lisa with the two flesh hands. This is generally where I’d stop — I wasn’t sure what to add.
During science class that fall, the fire girl burnt things with her fingers. She entered the room with a pile of dry leaves in her book bag and by the time the bell rang, there was ash all over her desk. She seemed to need to do this. It prevented some potential friendships, however, because most people were too scared to approach her. I tried but I never knew what to say. For Christmas that year I bought her a log. Here, I said, I got this for you to burn up. She started to cry. I said: Do you hate it? but she said No. She said it was a wonderful gift and from then on she remembered my name.
I didn’t buy anything for the ice girl. What do you get an ice girl anyway? She spent most of her non-school time at the hospital, helping sick people. She was a great soother, they said. Her water had healing powers.
What happened was the fire girl met Roy. And that’s when everything changed.
I found them first, and it was accidental, and I told no one, so it wasn’t my fault. Roy was a boy who had no parents and lived alone. He was very rarely at school and he was a cutter. He cut things into his skin with a razor blade. I saw once; some Saturday when everyone was at a picnic and I was bored, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom and he was in there and he showed me how he carved letters into his skin. He’d spelled out OUCH on his leg. Raised and white. I put out a hand and touched it and then I walked directly home. It was hard to feel those letters. They still felt like skin.
I don’t know exactly how the fire girl met Roy but they spent their afternoons by the base of the mountains and she would burn him. A fresh swatch of skin every day. I was on a long walk near Old Midge after school, wondering if I’d ever actually cross it, when I passed the two of them for the first time. I almost waved and called out Hi but then I saw what was going on. Her back was to me, but still I could see that she was leaning forward with one fire finger pressed against his inner elbow and his eyes were shut and he was moaning. The flames hissed and crisped on contact. She sucked in her breath, sss, and then she pulled her hand away and they both crumpled back, breathing hard. Roy had a new mark on his arm. This one did not form a letter. It swirled into itself, black and detailed, a tiny whirlpool of lines.
I turned and walked away. My own hands were shaking. I had to force myself to leave instead of going back and watching more. I kept walking until I looped the entire town.
All during the next month, both Roy and the fire girl looked really happy. She stopped bringing leaves into science class and started participating and Roy smiled at me in the street which had never happened before. I continued my mountain walks after school, and usually I’d see them pressed into the shade, but I never again allowed myself to stop and watch. I didn’t want to invade their privacy but it was more than that; something about watching them reminded me of quicksand, slide and pull in, as fast as that. I just took in what I could as I passed by. It always smelled a bit like barbecue, where they were. This made me hungry, which made me uncomfortable.