Sixteen

by Megan Mccafferty

  The Dead Girls get to my house around one. Shanna brings bread and bologna and chips and cheese. I have some mayo and mustard in the fridge. Cleo brings salad greens and carrots and some frozen peas. Brandy has a box of cookies, some sodas, and a gallon of milk. It’s the organic milk and we all look at her like she’s lost her mind.

  “That stuff costs about four dollars,” Shanna says. She puts the meat and cheese on a plate. Opens the bread and takes out a bunch of slices.

  I’m sitting with TJ on my lap and he’s looking hard at the bologna, so I give him a small piece and for a while he works it with the twelve teeth he has in his mouth. I wait to see if he swallows or if it’s gonna end up goo in my hand. He’s the youngest of all our kids, the only one not in day care. The Dead Girls love coming over here after dropping their kids off. TJ’s a good baby, easy to be around.

  “It’s supposed to be better for us,” Brandy says. She’s grown her hair out. It’s red now. Used to be brown. She’s still got the brown tips and roots. I like the way it looks. Her skin’s clear as the milk she’s pouring us and her body is long and skinny and beautiful. I run my hand over my stomach. It’s still a bit round from my pregnancy days. All the Dead Girls’ bodies bounced right back but mine is taking its time. Shanna said that’s the good thing about having babies when you’re sixteen—your body says, Okay, I’m back and at it again in no time. I tell her, “Well, then, that’s the only good thing.”

  TJ says, “Yuck,” and spits the pink goo of bologna out onto his chest. I pick it off with my hand and eat it. It don’t taste like anything. A year ago, if I had seen someone doing that, I would have puked. But a year ago is a long time passed now.

  TJ says, “Milk,” and Brandy gives us a look like I told you so. She fills up his sippy cup and TJ says, “T’anks.”

  “The regular milk’s all full of hormones and stuff,” Brandy says. “Drink that and you’ll be dead of cancer in no time. And I read how we shouldn’t give it to our kids, either. Causes precociouspuberty .”

  We all look at her, then at one another. Then we start laughing so hard it hurts. I hold TJ tight to keep from dropping him, but I’m laughing so hard it scares him and he starts to cry.

  “Well, we may as well drink it,” Cleo says. “ ’Cause we already got that disease!”

  Brandy shakes her head. She’s smiling but the smile’s kinda sad. She had college plans. Straight A’s. Words and numbers come easy to her. Once she wanted to be a lawyer. She’d met one once at a conference she got picked to go to in eighth grade. The lawyer was a woman from Thedford. She’d told Brandy to go for it.

  I look around the table. I’m the only one that’s sixteen. Brandy and the others are all going on eighteen now. They treat me like their little sister some days, helping me figure out TJ’s ways and how to stay living with Tommy, even though I’d rather be a hundred other places. Some days all the doors seem like they’re slamming in my face. My mama was the first one to say, “You made your bed. . . .” Then her door closed behind me. Then school. Then the door to whatever little bit of love Tommy once had for me and me for him. Slam. Slam. Slam. The Dead Girls give me hugs and good words and let me know it’s all gonna be all right. Most days, I need that kind of loving.

  Outside, the sun’s trying to come out. This part of Nebraska is so close to South Dakota, we get all of its light—and cold, too. Nebraska 99 takes you straight across, from one end of the state to the other. I’ve never driven it; Tommy keeps the car. But Brandy said she did once. Said if you start out looking west from Lincoln, it feels like you’re looking at the whole world. “And the light is pink like dawn,” Brandy said. “That’s what I’ll always remember—how that road glowed with my favorite color for miles and miles and miles.”

  We weren’t always the Dead Girls. Once we were cheerleaders—them all in tenth grade and me in eighth but tall and loud enough to cheer Varsity. Shanna got pregnant first. Her belly started poking out and they kicked her out of school. Then Brandy. Then Cleo. TJ’s the last of the babies. I met Tommy when he was twenty-two and I was fourteen. I lied and told him I was sixteen. Later on, he said he hadn’t even believed me. “He’s got those pretty eyes,” Cleo had said, rocking her baby on her lap. “But if I was you, I’d stay away from him. You gonna be looking like me in no time flat.”

  But Tommy said he knew what he was doing. And even though I didn’t believe him, I let him keep going.

  I wipe snot away from TJ’s nose, give him a piece of bread and cheese.

  “T’anks,” he says.

  “How’d you get so polite?” Shanna says, smiling at him. She’s wearing a new shirt. She’s good at stealing from the Super Kmart, but I don’t like to go with her. Bad luck and prison run in my family, and there ain’t a soul I’d trust with TJ if something happened to me. I wait for things to go on sale at the Old Navy. End of season you can get nice stuff for three or four dollars.

  We eat our sandwiches and drink our milk and talk about the good old days to come. Cleo’s quiet mostly, looking off, daydreaming.

  “One day, I’m not gonna be a teenager with a baby,” Shanna says. “I mean, she’s already a toddler, but one day . . .” She looks off, her sandwich halfway to her mouth. Shanna’s the prettiest one if anyone asked. Pretty lips and high cheekbones. Dark hair that curls like crazy. Hazel eyes. Sad now but the color catches all kinds of light. “One day, me and my baby girl are just gonna take off. Not even look back at anything.”

  Cleo picks at the edge of the table. It’s wood. I used to use lemon oil on it. Shine it up and have the tiny kitchen smelling nice. But that stuff ain’t good for babies to be around. Now the table looks dull and chipped and like it wasn’t ever new.

  “Yeah,” Cleo says. “Me, too. Soon as . . . soon as this one’s grown.”

  Brandy squints at her. “This one? What’s this one?”

  Cleo’s eyes get kinda watery, but she blinks and keeps staring down at the table. She points to her belly, then puts her head down on the table and moans.

  “Fuck, Cleo!” Brandy says. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” She hits the table.

  TJ hits the table, too. I want to tell them both to stop hitting my damn table but I don’t. Instead, I pull TJ a little closer to me and swallow. The room feels tight now. Tight and hot and cold all at once.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen to any of us again. We were gonna get out. That’s why we call ourselves the Dead Girls. As in dead and gone. Out of here! Us four and our grown kids driving west on Nebraska 99.

  “Fuck, Cleo,” I say.

  “Tuck,” TJ says. “Tuck, Cleo.”

  “Get rid of it,” Shanna says.

  Cleo holds up her fingers. “Five months,” she moans. “I’m five months.”

  “How’d you let yourself get to be five months?” Shanna says. “Jeez, Cleo.”

  “Because for two of those months, I got my stupid period. And then when I didn’t, I just figured it’s ’cause I’ve been running so much.”

  “So much for the marathon,” Shanna says. Cleo had bigger dreams than all of us. She’d been a cheerleader and a runner. She’d said cheerleading was just for fun but running was gonna be her ticket.

  She sits up now and covers her mouth with her hands. She’s crying, tears coming down but no sound coming up.

  “No cry,” TJ says. He reaches out and touches her. Cleo lets out a little laugh.

  We all get quiet. Our sandwiches half-eaten. Our expensive milk hardly even touched. There’re chocolate chip cookies waiting. When we eat them, they’ll probably taste like dust.

  I don’t love Tommy anymore. Cleo doesn’t love Jake. Shanna doesn’t love Alex. Brandy doesn’t love Daniel. Feels like years and years ago we wrote our boyfriends’ names inside hearts with our own. We love TJ and Shania and Alexandra and Jake Jr. We love these moments when we can sit around and talk about what’s gonna happen in the future. We love television and fat love stories with shiny letters on the cover. We love what we dream and the smell of our chil
dren’s hair and mouths. We love the promise of NE99—the pink light and the black road. Us burning it up and leaving everything we don’t love anymore far, far behind.

  “Maybe you’ll get a girl this time,” Shanna says. She gets up and puts her arms around Cleo’s shoulders. “I’ll give you all of Alexandra’s pretty dresses.”

  Cleo smiles, a small, sad smile.

  And all of us get quiet because none of us knows how to fit this into our dreams.

  At night, Tommy turns toward me. Puts his arm across my belly.

  “Remember the first time we kissed?” he says, pressing his lips to my cheek.

  I nod in the darkness. It’s late and the house is quiet. Tommy’s brought home a down comforter from somewhere. I’m warm underneath it. His hand is soft and gentle on my belly. He moves closer to me, his lips moving all over me at once. I let him. Say a prayer that this is an okay time of the month to do this. And let him. Think about Cleo and the other Dead Girls. And let him.

  South Dakota’s a long, long ways away from here. And not even one of us has a car to start that trek across Nebraska 99. Tommy moans and I wrap my arms around him. Like he’s that pretty pink sky Brandy told us about. Like he’s some kinda promising future.

  Cowgirls & Indie Boys

  Tanuja Desai Hidier

  On Saturday, May 22, at 11:14 A.M. in her birthplace, India (though 12:44 EST here out West), Sulekha Madhav Shahane would turn sweet sixteen and never been kissed. This was something her best friend, Gemma Nicks—who by sixteen, it seemed, had never never been kissed—decided to set straight once and for all.

  Thursday at lunch, Gemma spoke with surprising urgency to Marisa Salerno, who convened with Poppy Shea and Carmen Roncevic, who was going with Sledge Davies, who was tight with both the baseball and brainy boys due to his left hook and right-hand-man ease with rotating solids around the Y axis. Sledge could swiftly find the boyman for the job.

  And so a plan was hatched: They would gather Friday evening at Carmen’s. A stroke before midnight (for more nick-of-time dramatic effect), Sulekha would cross the street and head uphill into the woodland cove that split Carmen and Gemma’s neighborhood from the middle-school sports field. This evergreen enclave was called the Saloon. By Sulk and Gem, that was. Rumor had it the football team had buried a galleon of whiskey bottles under the knottiest oak for deep forest forays with females; there were other F’s involved in that as well. So it was an apt place for Sulekha to meet the chosen boy and get the first, the French, deed done.

  As Carmen explained, Sulk fidgeted her booted foot in and out of the baby-blue hopscotch square. It all sounded complicated, but the Bees liked complicating things. They thrived on rites of passage. Personally, Sulekha wondered when these initiations would end, when where she was would be where she was trying to get to.

  Maybe after this midnight kiss, she thought, Gem’d be back in boots again.

  Gazing down at the array of girlfeet, Sulk saw her former Wild West pardner donned army green platform sneaks, the ones she’d gotten en masse with her employee discount. They’d gotten close with their part-time jobs, the Bees—Carmen in the drugstore (replenishing her condom stock), Marisa and Poppy steaming at Starbucks, and Gemma in shoes. And when their hours upped with summertime, this mall bonding could only intensify. Sulekha had wanted to join in on all the fun, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it.

  —Part-time job! her father nearly guffawed, patting his belly after a particularly large bowl of pista kulfi. —What are you needing part-time job for? You have a roof over your head.

  —People will begin to speak, her mother whispered, as if the world had been mute until then. —You need to focus on your studies, Baby, so you can go to a good university, earn a fine degree. . . .

  —And give it all up for a suitable CKP Indian boy, her sister, Reshem, who was home for Thanksgiving, had interjected with her new higher-learning snort.

  And so the rest of the Bees had gone on to punch in and out and Sulekha not.

  Gemma was standing farther from Sulekha than usual today, leaning in with Carmen. A wistful view, but it afforded Sulk a glimpse she normally never had when they were all whispering ears and eyelock, fingertwined and braidmaking. Gemma afar was nearly as beautiful as she was up close. A lotus from a muddy bank, she was growing into her wildness with a savage grace: long, weedy tangles of dirty blond hair, the big beauty mark the blush of cinnamon under her left lower lid, and the cat-slant eyes, flecked yellow as if gold were there for the panning just below. Her faded jeans dragged too long on the ground, running under the backs of her squashy heels, and the knit violet halter dress barely covered her womanchest. But that was the point, wasn’t it?

  —We’ve gotta take care of this pronto, she was saying. Her back was decked in freckles, an arched map of Little Dippers, stolen sun, and wish-upons.

  Sulekha knew the inflections in Gemma’s voice as if she’d lain in them till they molded her own body. All her voices: her mother-on-the-phone-from-L.A. monotone, father-may-I sing-sing, dog-ate-my-homework sugarcoat, can-I-help-you brisk beat, mmm-like-what-I-see meadowy melt. But this was a new voice. A We voice, not as in she and Gemma, but as in Us— and then there’s You.

  Sulk sucked in the dip of her upper lip. She hovered with one foot sinking in the pliant spring grass, the other on the edge, where it abruptly capitulated to concrete. Forever on the edge of things, it seemed. Of this conversation, for example. Her family was always going on about borders, the ones they’d traversed and the generations before: Pakistan and India, village to city. America for them marked the end of this perpetual crossing over. But what no one had told Sulekha was there were just as many invisible frontiers once you got there.

  Take sixteen. Sixteen itself was a borderline: neither here nor there yet everywhere. The age of the kiss, of the never-been-kissed. If you didn’t have your period, you were late, as the doctor had informed Sulk, alarming her mother by diagnosing stress as serenely as possible. And if you were getting it, you prayed to gods you wouldn’t be late, as Carmen had been, despite all the rounds of rosaries. Legal for some things, illegal for others; just barely consensual. The driver’s permit, which Sulekha would be eligible for soon, summed it up: You had the basics, a beginning ability to take on new roads, but you didn’t have the grace yet, the map yet, and if you did, the keys were someone else’s. You couldn’t be you without surveillance.

  At sixteen, everyone was watching you—especially you. And the boys were watching, too, sometimes looking right through you, sometimes not getting past the skin of you.

  —Well, Sulekha said now. She couldn’t feel the sunstuck tar through her sturdy sole. —Who will it be, then?

  —Could be anyone, couldn’t it? Poppy mused into a tangerine-sheen bubble of Bazooka.

  —Danny Kinsley, Marisa offered kindly.

  —Joel Macero, Poppy counterpopped.

  —Sledge Davies, Carmen suggested, smiling mischievously. (She wouldn’t!)

  They began to rattle off the Wanted Alive list, more for their own pleasure. They were in the part of the parking lot where the burnout girls leaned on wine-colored car hoods smoking reds and letting rocker boys slip sure hands under their low-rider waistbands. The Honors girls (minus Sulekha) collected in beige cropped chinos in the mottled shade, simmering strands of sunshine filtering through leaf and lighting them up like a group of laptopped angels. Gemma had been Sulk’s way in to this group of in-betweens, these Bees; they hung about on the chalky lines of four-squares that were still around from when this school had been for kids. But recently this in-between had begun to seem like a somewhere.

  The Bees efficiently used the twenty-minute break to digest iceberg lettuce and update one another on the expanding constellations of fingerprints on their flesh. As such, Gemma’s affair with a much older boyman, a manboy, in fact, had been her ticket to hive entry. Sulk had nil to add, though her own hands had taken on an astronomical tendency to chart out new ports of call on her own body of late.
There were terms for this pastime, the more technical M-word sounding like a medical condition, and “jerking off” making you seem like the jerk. Sulk thought of it more as a melting pot, a clay unmaking—the reverse rendering of an earthen bowl whirring into being on a potter’s wheel. It was the only moment when no words pressed against the inner screen of her forehead.

  But other than boymen brushing inadvertently against her in the crammed corridors, or the brief thrill of knucklebrush while passing a lunch tray, no Big, no Little Dippers could be found on Sulekha’s own unfreckled skin. She envied the Bees, especially rosy-cheeked, licorice-locked Carmen, who took an exuberant, almost malicious joy in the power of her swooshingly blossoming body, wielded it like a tool to navigate the uncharted territory that lay ahead. That they were already in.

  —We’ll arrange it all for you, Suzy, Carmen assured her now. That’s what they called her, a taste their tongues knew. Carmen wore a stick-on bindi from one of the many fashion magazines she subscribed to. It was last year’s issue but it’d been a good one—complete with a foldout of Justin Timber-lake, creasing him cleanly, excruciatingly down the crotch.

  —We’ll choose the boy. You’ll see him when the time is right—when the stars are in place and all that. That’s how it works for you people, anyways, no?

  Sulk hadn’t been “you people” before. But she was glad Carmen was at least talking to her.

  —Oh right, that arranged-marriage business, said Poppy. —I read an article on that in Radolescence. About how all these Indian women are suppressed and have no choices in life.

  —But they’ve had so many Miss Universes, Marisa sighed dreamily. —That doesn’t sound so oppressed. . . .