The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  Lucy removes the fake lips and puts them on the floor, where they grin up. Grotesque and swollen, they resemble her brother’s when he had been stung by a bee and gone into anaphylactic shock, eyes puffed shut, throat closing up, lips rubbery and bloated. Alex unrolls the bag from the tinfoil.

  “What is that?” Lucy asks, staring at the crumble of leaves and what looks like dirt. Alex doesn’t answer but walks out, leaving the bag where it is, junked in the drawer, open.

  Moments later, Alex’s father, sweatbanded in his tennis whites, stomps into the kitchen to stare briefly at the stuff on the floor.

  “Fuck,” he says, right in front of Lucy, and then exits.

  From her position, she can see him lighting logs and newspaper balls in the living room fireplace. Flames started, he runs for the kitchen, grabs the bag, and throws the whole thing in, plastic and all. Alex watches from the stairwell as the smoke billows out, then slinks upstairs.

  “This isn’t the first time,” Alex’s dad says to Lucy. Lucy wants to understand what this all means but doesn’t until late in high school, when Riley Tiverton, her crush of senior year, faded flannel shirt and skinny brown corduroys, leaves in her car a similar bag of weed, which Lucy’s mother finds and blames on her brother, Jacob, then in medical school, who takes the blame for his sister (and smokes the contents of the Baggie himself).

  A week later, after Lucy, her parents, Mark and Ginny, Jacob, and Alex have grilled burgers and eaten them hot with melted cheddar on English muffins, Alex plays Frisbee with Lucy’s brother. Shirtless on summer’s longest day, the boys run barefooted and briar-scratched into the woods or way back onto the gravel to make their catch, unflinching as the stones jut into their arches.

  Arms up into the darkening sky, Alex cheers for himself, his own exaggerated sports fan. Jacob, back from college until the Independence Day parade parties have passed, pretends to be a sportscaster, and Lucy slouches back into her chair to slap at the bugs, arms draped over her new breasts.

  Salted from sweat, Alex asks Lucy if she wants to play pool at his house. Her father overhears and looks at his watch as if that will determine his answer. Inside, Ginny flaps open a garbage bag for all the paper plates and melon rinds that lie, arched and bitten empty, on the patio.

  When they get back to the stable behind Alex’s house, his mother, Patti, puts the brush to Diamond, her horse, and grooms him in the unlighted stable.

  “Want the light on, Mom?” Alex asks.

  “No,” she says, quiet.

  While Alex gets milk from the fridge, Lucy watches Patti from the back porch as she stops brushing and lights a cigarette. Smoking, Patti traces the outline of white on Diamond’s brow and leans her lips onto his nose. Once, she’d showed Lucy how to feed a horse, palm flat and open, carrot or sugar cubes pressed up. Lucy remembers Diamond’s muzzle, soft-haired like fruit. Staring at Patti, Lucy finds her somewhat out of focus, as though draped in gauze, her whole being beautiful, boneless like a flower. Then she thinks of her own mother’s facial features, the corrected nose, the jut of jaw, the pressed hair, Ginny’s perfectly shaped ears.

  “Strawberry?” Alex asks, gesturing with the tin of Nestlé’s Quik.

  Lucy nods. She can see Patti drop the unfinished cigarette near the blooming rhododendron bush as she heads inside. Alex and Lucy can hear Patti’s clogs on the stairs and then the rush of water in the walled pipes as she readies for her postgrooming shower.

  Alex makes the milk too sweet, but Lucy drinks the pink of it anyway, too shy to say he’s fixed it incorrectly, and puts the glass in the sink before going to the living room. The hammock sags, empty, and she goes to it to figure out how best to get in without flipping herself upside down. She thinks about lying in here with Alex, of the tangle of arms and rope, of lips.

  Crying, holding a shiny black box, Alex holds it out half-open for Lucy to see before he goes upstairs. The contents—spoon, needle, purple drugstore lighter, vial—seem thrown together. Lucy follows him, but his door is closed. From the hall, she hears the click and tock of his cat clock and pictures the way the cat’s eyes roll one way and back with each second. Open, the master bedroom door reveals the king-sized bed, unpeopled, tropical print sheets that mesh with the wall-sized fish tank behind until Lucy is surrounded by water and palms.

  When Lucy turns back to the door, Patti is there, naked and wet, except for the sweep of white-blond hair. It’s all one length save the rough chop of thick fringe at the front, and she twists it up and coils it back onto itself until it’s knotted. Her pubic hair is just as light, the patch of it bright against her sun-browned skin.

  “You’re getting really tall, Luciana,” Patti says in a hush that makes Lucy feel as if Patti has reached over and touched her. She uses the full name when everyone else calls her Lucy. “Really lovely.”

  That year, Lucy would try to change her nickname to Luce at school, and the swap would be successful, though neither Alex nor Patti would know that. In the first turn of leaves, Lucy would move suddenly, away from the changing suburban landscape into Beacon Hill, where the sloped bricks and set window boxes of tasteful lamb’s ear and hydrangea seemed the same regardless of decade or year. Alex would board at that school in New Hampshire, where he’d be known as the Party Iguana, his father would develop malls in the suburbs, and, when Lucy was a junior in high school, Patti would overdose in Mustique.

  “She was always the most beautiful girl in any room,” Lucy’s mother would say to her as they read the photoless obituary together. “You know, she and I had been friends since we were kids.”

  Lucy would try to imagine her mother, girl-sized next to Patti, but the image would seem impossibly remote, a black-and-white haze of braids and ankle socks. She could think of summer, though, of the sun-pull of afternoons, the stick of melted things, the hiss and spit of July Fourth sparklers just before they burst.

  Animal Logic

  After winning the Hortence Tuttle third-grade spelling bee by spelling portentous, Andrea and Gabrielle—the first-place team—scraped the top of the Italian ice prize and slid the shavings into their mouths with tiny wooden spoons shaped like paddles. The ice wasn’t so much Italian, the girls knew, since it came from Jay-Tee’s processing plant near San Antonio, but they felt lucky just the same. As they ate it, Andrea’s mouth was green and Gabrielle’s bright as a broken strawberry. They pressed their cheeks together and damage-checked in Andrea’s pocket mirror. In the reflection, Andrea made her tongue pointed as a lizard’s, darting it out and back, searching for something.

  “Did you know iguanas actually breathe through their eyes?” Andrea said and let her lids close halfway as if she could hear a noise Gabrielle couldn’t. “Or maybe they just taste through their noses or something, I can’t remember.”

  Gabrielle felt her lips with her fingertips, expecting to find them swollen or chapped from the ice, but instead they were just sticky. Then she peeked again into the mirror and licked her mouth while Andrea took a wide-toothed comb from her back jeans pocket and put it through her brown waves. Folding in the sides of the Italian ice container so that the whole thing became a spout, Gabrielle put her tongue to the beak of it and sipped the melted ooze.

  Where the tarmac changed to dirt, the girls took off their sandals and held them over their shoulders, dangling them onto their backs like caught pheasants or laundry. Set back from the road, Andrea’s house was mailboxless, so twice a week she went with her mother to the post office in town to rifle through the mail marked “General Delivery.” Half-deaf, Andrea’s mother speak-signed everything. She had a provisional driver’s license that allowed her to travel to church or Mahoney’s Garden Center, where she bought discounted bulbs. Each week after Andrea had looked through the bulb bins and chosen the ones with the fewest shoots already poking through, she and her mother went into town and looked for letters and packages. Sometimes Andrea asked Gabrielle to write her a card and post it, just so there’d be something to pick up in town. Gabrielle used old
scalloped-edged cards she found at the Saturday jumble sales she went to with her grandpa on the town green for a nickel, pictures of resorts that had closed decades ago, taut-lawned schools she’d never heard of, dining cars photographed the long way so they seemed to nose into the other sides of the cards. Andrea Blu-Tacked the most recent postcard onto her desk and kept the others tied up as a parcel with a blue hair ribbon.

  “Careful not to step in the hole by the garage,” Andrea warned as they approached the wooden tumble of house, toolshed, and roofless silo that contained machinery parts and scrap metal instead of grain. The garage was a carport midway through its remodeling into a recreation room. To the left, near two baled stacks of drywall, there was a large hole that hadn’t been there the week before.

  A freestanding wet bar, an unused kitchen sectional, and a folding card table outfitted with a stereo were pushed up to the back wall, as if the space were in preparation for a dance party. Lining the tarp-walled side were metal lunch boxes and stray boots left by the construction crews that seemed to be there regularly, rebuilding something. Andrea turned to face Gabrielle, slipped her bare foot into a work boot, and pulled her sundress up, exposing her knees like an old-fashioned pinup girl.

  “Look, I’m like one of those ladies in a war ad,” Andrea said and brought her hands up to the back of her head so that her arms and elbows spread out like bat wings.

  “Now all you need is a kerchief,” Gabrielle said and hefted her book bag onto her right shoulder so she could spin Andrea around ballroom style.

  “Is your dance card full?” she asked in a high-pitched voice. Since Gabrielle wasn’t sure what a dance card was, she shook her head and feigned blushing, using her fingers like a fan over Gabrielle’s grin.

  Each Friday post-spelling bee was the same that spring and early summer. Whether the girls won for arrangement or persnickety or resemblance, and whether the reward was Italian ice or Charleston Chews, or a flaccid mustard-colored ribbon, they’d come back to Andrea’s house to find a wall knocked through or string tacked into the ground to outline where a new study would be built.

  There’d be a crew of construction guys, smoking Winstons, Pabst ring-tops discarded and stepped on, pressed into the exposed earth like seeds waiting to root. Or, with his tumbler of gin, Andrea’s dad would take to the outside wiring with pliers, grounding himself in a plastic bucket. Later he’d pull Gabrielle and Andrea by their hands and lead them around each new project as if they’d never been there before.

  “See here? The aluminum siding’ll be gone by week’s end. Shingles—that’s the way to go.”

  Sometimes the girls would get to the house to find it and the yard empty, and they’d bring Andrea’s yellow-and-orange crocheted blanket out onto the pebbly grass and lie flat, thinking how from above they might look like insects on a marigold, collecting pollen. Once, as they’d turned over to lie on their bellies, heels kicking skyward, they’d seen something wriggling by the chain fence and gone over to investigate. Tiny new rabbits curled in the shade. After they imagined keeping one as a pet, they saw that only one of the babies was alive—it lay there flanked on all sides by its fist-small, maggot-specked, and partly hollowed siblings. The mother, Gabrielle understood, wasn’t there. Andrea had reasoned that she could have hopped away, looking for food or help, but Gabrielle knew better. “I think she just took off.” Andrea and Gabrielle covered the dead bunnies with overgrown maple leaves, but the fanned greenery shifted in the wind when they’d left and gone inside.

  After Andrea shed the work boots, she and Gabrielle walked around to the other side of the house, into the shadeless yard where a radio sat on the lower of two diving boards near the in-ground pool. Ten feet up, one of Andrea’s brothers jackknifed into the water from the curved slide and surfaced holding a split flip-flop. He whipped it out of the pool so it hit another brother in the side of his head.

  “You’re fuckin’ dead, loser,” the thwacked one said and dove in, still shirted, for a water wrestle.

  There were four brothers total, but Gabrielle couldn’t tell one from the next long enough to have it matter. Each had a name that began with an A and seemed more suited to machinery or medicine than humans—Anderson, Alpern, Agrin, Arnoth. Loping across the lawn or emerging from the dark dank of the cellar doorway, one brother loomed taller than the next. Thick-armed from the free weights displayed like wine in the living room, they walked as if they held toddlers on both hips, wide-stepping and slightly out of breath.

  All the members of Andrea’s family had A names except her mother, Carin. Near their homeroom cubbies, Andrea had taught Gabrielle the sign language alphabet Carin had passed on and explained how sometimes you could use just the first letters of people’s names to refer to them. After she’d spent the day at Andrea’s, Gabrielle would leave in the wide quiet of her father’s Impala with images of the closed fist of the sign-language A being thrust in the air over and over, as Carin called out to her husband, Allan, or to the boys. On her bare legs, Gabrielle would make the empty arch of the C—the sign looked exactly like the letter it represented, and then put it to the window and look through it as Andrea’s house faded out of view.

  “Let’s go.” Andrea gestured to the pool and was already lifting her T-shirt up to slide her arms out when they reached the semi-privacy of her room. Between the dining room and den, there was a triangle of space that Carin had sealed into a room by hinging particleboard so that the front wall itself was one giant door. From the inside, you had to slide your fingers underneath the plank’s edge to close it, and even still, there were gaps that seeped pool light at night, and sometimes there’d be unidentifiable eyes on the other side that Andrea hardly noticed but that kept Gabrielle from changing in there.

  Gabrielle wore her bathing suit underneath her clothes on Fridays, knowing they’d end up in Andrea’s room, and as she stood up to spell words at the bee, she’d feel the rise of material under her shorts or shrug her shoulders, trying to ease the cut of the straps in the soft pocks of flesh between underarms and across her new breasts.

  “Oh, here she is everyone, Miss Tex-ass, Andrea Arginello,” one brother mock-announced from the top of the slide.

  Andrea ignored him, just as she paid no attention to the girls at school who called her Ag-jello, and took Gabrielle’s hand to lead her over to the shallow end, where they collected damp blue kickboards. In the water they tried to balance on them, sitting first and then attempting to kneel until the foam would suddenly burst from under them and pop right out of the pool. The brothers stayed mainly past the four-foot mark, diving and fountain-spraying chlorinated water from their mouths. Or they’d link their arms backward onto the rungs of the sun-hot ladder and do pull-ups half-submerged.

  Sometimes, Gabrielle would make the mistake of looking too long at one of them, and they’d take it as an invitation to come and dunk her. If she got to a corner in time, she could keep hold of the sides as she went under, but without anything to hold, she’d go right to the bottom. She’d feel the slots of the drain with her toes, and look for thrown change to keep from panicking. In the silent glint beneath the surface, Gabrielle could easily envision not coming up, just allowing the fluid to overtake her until she bloated there.

  Andrea often would intervene and sacrifice herself, knowing how much being held under the water scared her friend. Andrea played the game and came up sputtering and laughing as Anderson or Agrin palmed her small head, pretending to dribble her like a basketball. Gabrielle would press her back into the cragged pool edge, letting the jet spray go into her thighs as Andrea plummeted and resurfaced, never finding the right time to thank her.

  After the brothers and whatever friends they had over had emptied a case of Schlitz, they’d want to see the girls swim naked in the pool in the bug-cluttered dusk of late June. Sometimes Andrea agreed to it, or Mara, their friend who put tampons in before she’d ever gotten her period. From the kitchen window, Carin would watch, and if she thought the boys had gone too far, sh
e’d use her voice to call them in for a made-up errand, sounding like someone caught underwater.

  In the late-afternoon sun, the brothers hosed the slide so their legs wouldn’t stick on the way down. The lubricating mechanism had failed years before, and no one had been successful in fixing it. The girls watched one cannonball off, and when he came up bleeding from his head, no one said anything. He pressed a towel to it, tilted his half-drained beer back, and later came inside to where they sat having Cokes and eating smoked oysters from a tin on the table. The salted oil coated Gabrielle’s mouth and slicked Andrea’s lips so they looked glossed. She fake-pouted at Gabrielle, who mimed taking her friend’s photograph.

  Andrea’s mother alternated wiping the counter and turning the pages of her accountancy text with a licked finger.

  “Ma,” the bleeding brother said.

  He had to tap his mother on the shoulder so she could see he wanted her attention. When she spoke, her mouth wrapped around the words, making it sound as if her tongue was folded back on itself. Gabrielle had tried, in the privacy of her bedroom at home, to mimic the voice until she shamed herself into sleep. Carin looked at the cut and made the sign for stitches and hospital visits. Andrea looked at Gabrielle, knowing she’d have an opinion. Gabrielle’s father moonlighted the eight-to-eight shift in the Chestertown emergency room on Fridays, and she had a vague idea about what needed sutures and what gash might heal on its own.

  Andrea stood up and pulled on the brother’s arm so they could get a better view. He leaned onto the table as if he was about to do a push-up and lifted the bloodied towel off until Andrea nodded at him. Outside, the other brothers and their friends rolled out long blue sheets of plastic tarp and sliced them free with X-Acto knives. They squeezed dishwashing soap from a bottle shaped like a legless woman, their hands cupping the hip part, then sprayed water over the length of it and took turns running full tilt until they slipped and sped to the grassy end. The whole house seemed to Gabrielle on the verge of disaster.