The girl who is bait asks Debbie if she will go with her to her car as she has something she picked out for Debbie. Something Debbie might like. It’s that easy. The girl who is bait is, today, everything focused on Debbie, and Debbie cannot resist this, could never have resisted it; even when she thinks about it later, there is no twenty-twenty hindsight. It is the stopping of her heart. A dream come true. She has no interest in the boys, or if she does, it is only in how they will make her look to us. And today! The girl has something for her! Something for Debbie! At last it will be true, at last we will have seen Debbie, at last we will have noticed the way she has been improving her walk and clothing choices, and that beauty her one aunt always compliments on the Fourth of July barbecue will finally be a truth in the company at large.
We follow the bait and the fish, hooked. We follow the fate and the wish. Cooked. Silent on our toes. Walk soft, like whispers.
We don’t wait long. Naturally, there’s nothing in the car and only so long that the bait can pretend to rummage around in the backseat. After a minute, we pounce. Two of us hold Debbie down against the passenger door. Two others grab her feet so she can’t run or kick. The one with rings strikes Debbie several times-a few times hard in the stomach and one fist in the face so it will show, tomorrow. So she will have to explain. Debbie is screaming and crying. We rip the skirt off with our bare hands and her underwear is almost too much to bear, with that pattern that is the knockoff of the expensive one, and a giant maxi pad weighing down the middle. We rip the skirt into pieces, which is what all the mothers have wanted to do, because it is rags anyway, it is a rag skirt, made of rags. The one with the rings slides her hands down Debbie’s arms and the rings she bought at the street fair cut lines into Debbie’s skin, where drizzles of blood rise freely to the surface. The bait sits in her car, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. It’s a giveaway; the tenth caller gets tickets to go to New York City.
We release Debbie once she’s bleeding, and she slinks off, sobbing. Trying to pull her shirt down over the whiteness of her ass. Shoulders hunched, hair askew. She will never tell on us. She will never be the rat. She has a tiny part of her, the tiniest part, that still hopes this is part of some cruel initiation or test, and that if she passes it, she will still be included.
We think we could not despise Debbie more. But when we realize this, the loathing is bottomless. Possibly we could bait and hook her every day for a year, preying on that tiny hope until all of Debbie’s clothes are in a rag pile and her face is a disaster. If it was not so boring, maybe we would.
We do not speak to our mothers. Long ago we gave up on our mothers. All of us, even though some of us don’t have mothers at all. Our mothers died, or our mothers left. Our mothers changed form into a toad. Our mothers became presidents of companies or jumped off of buildings. Our mothers gave up everything for us. One of us has a father who beats the mother. We cheer him on. We like to hold the belt in our spare time and slap it against our palm like we are in a movie, with a cigar, and a damsel in silver tinsel that is ours waits privately on the couch. We go home after the Debbie beating, thrumming from some kind of adrenaline high, and somewhere close by, Debbie checks herself in the mirror. We can sense this. We begin to be concerned she might slightly admire her bruise, so we are hoping the bruise is in an unflattering spot. Since Debbie is not particularly good-looking, the odds are high in our favor. In general, we feel terrific about it all, maybe we even call each other up on the phone to talk, but generally the phone is for people like Debbie. We have better things to do. We realize life is not just a dress rehearsal and if you realize it, you don’t need a bumper sticker to remind you. We take off our rings one by one and in the sink we wash them clear of any blood left from Debbie’s arm. Her arm hairs were a little too black, frankly. We remember this as we stay up late, watching wrestling on TV because it’s so funny. We don’t mind being tired in the morning; often, we prefer it.
• • •
Many years later, we make a mistake. We make a grand error. It begins with the girl who comes to ask for directions on our college campus because we look like we always know where we are. In our features, we resemble, somehow, a compass on a neck. We see the girl approach us, with that walk of hers, very quick-paced, and her eyebrows seem funny. We have to look twice. Her eyebrows are straight and black and fierce but underneath the arch we see a garden of tiny weak brown hairs growing out from under the black. She is, apparently, in between eyebrow maintenance. She is one of those girls. We, ourselves, have never once given a shit about our eyebrows, which are fine and prosperous on their own. Still, she asks nicely, so we give her directions, and then we follow her, because there’s nothing else to do today and our classes are over. At her location we find we are waiting outside. Strangers float past, in particular that embarrassing person with her cell phone talking so loud. If our cronies were here, we would nudge her into a dark corner, but our cronies have gone off to different settings by now and are extremely poor at writing letters.
Where did Debbie go? Who cares. As soon as Debbie was removed from her skirt, we washed her from our viewpoint. She of course will remember us forever. Such is the deal we make with memory.
After about an hour or so, the one with the eyebrows exits her building, which seems like it might hold within it doctor’s appointments. We follow her. Eventually, she looks behind her. We ask her her name. She recognizes us and makes a witty comment. Because it is college, we seem less like a stalker than we will later in life. We are not sure what is going to happen as we are only one today, and therefore less certain, but there is something in those eyebrows that makes us take her hand unexpectedly near the lower parking lot. We end up kissing her by the fountain that is straight shoots of timed water. She is not as surprised as we might expect. She seems to be used to this. We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke.
It lasts almost a year. It is our longest relationship. She has nightmares all the time, and huddles into our armpit in the darkness, but during the daytime she walks like she’s a cartoon hero. We actually catch some of her tears in a vial and hold it in our pocket and finger it when she’s at events working the crowd with all her teeth doing all that business. We grip the vial of tears knowing that at any moment we could expose her and the crowd might turn and tear her to pieces. We want to take care of her every minute. We want to make sure her eyebrows are safe; every time she shows up with those weak brown hairs growing in like poor weeds, like murmurs from a third world country, we are filled with a desire to strangle her while we whisper her name for the rest of our lives. We are worried all the time because she seems like the type to walk into danger without realizing it; after all, she let us kiss her by the fountain in broad daylight. She, however, is not worried about herself, or about us. We are very rarely the receptacles of worry, what with that compass we hold upon our neck.
On month eleven, she leaves us. She finds the tear vial creepy, and she’s annoyed with the constant worrying and questionings. After waxing her eyebrows until they are invincible, she goes somewhere else, to ask someone new for directions. She has taken on a new map; us, we have lost our sense of order. We find ourselves heading over to sit by the same wall where we met her. We go there every day. We go there too often. We cannot stop going. We end up Debbie.
Many years later from that, we meet Debbie again. It is not at the reunion because we don’t attend reunions. We have lost touch with one another anyway, and why else would we go? The rest of the people in high school were an uninteresting blur. We do not know who Debbie is, but she knows who we are, as we sit outside at Bob’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard pulling change from deep inside our pockets. She has a couple of kids that she is lugging along, and she stops to say hello. Remember? she says. You used to beat me up?