Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

by T Kira Madden

  You ever smoke before, Chinky? Harley asks me. The two of us are sitting on the love seat in her room. Why you always staring at her?

  I haven’t.

  Ugh, you are such a Martian.

  I’ll try, I say. I mean, I love the way they smell.

  It’s nice out—let’s go outside.

  The three of us sit on the wood planks of Harley’s deck, palm trees whistling. A streetlight glows close and our eyes are gold with it.

  We like cloves, says Nelle. Bali Hai’s. They taste like doped-out candy.

  Harley puts one between my lips. Suck, she says, lighting it.

  I hold the thick flavor in my mouth. I switch between trying to breathe through my mouth and my nose. I don’t know how to inhale, but it’s true, I do taste the bright sugar. Nelle and Harley exhale the smoke from their nostrils in teapot streams.

  Let it out of your nose, that’s how you know you’re doing it right.

  I listen to the paper crackle between my teeth. The sound is amplified in my head, and I pretend that each crackle is a strand of my brain dying out.

  Do you have parents? I ask Nelle. I mean, how do you come here every night?

  My mom’s always up my ass, she says, but Harley’s mom covers for me on the phone. Says we’re watching movies or doing math problems or something. My sister’s in college.

  And your parents let you—

  Her dad’s dead, says Harley, if that’s what you’re trying to ask.

  Nelle doesn’t look at either one of us when Harley says this. She takes a longer drag, snap-cracks her knuckles against her knees.

  Well, I’ve always wanted a sister, I say. So that’s cool.

  And what about you, shoe princess? Nelle says. Don’t you spend a lot of money on prep to be skipping every day?

  My dad moved to New York last year, I say. For the business. And my mom doesn’t give a shit about school.

  Isn’t your whole family in prison or something? Chillin’ with Martha Stewart?

  Harley jabs Nelle with an elbow—Rude.

  What! Nelle says. I mean, it’s on the frickin’ news.

  It’s cool, I say. The prison thing.

  What’d they do again?

  Different stuff. Mostly money.

  Do you miss them?

  Nah.

  Well, we’re your sisters now, says Harley. Nelle nods. Like blood.

  At the bonfire, the three of us sip Coronas and sway our hips to Biggie Smalls—bitches I like ’em brainless, guns I like ’em stainless—thumping out of a boom box. We’re in the middle of a parking lot behind a block of abandoned warehouses near a great stretch of trees, and the fire is piled high with tires and cardboard boxes fluttering inside a metal trash can. Groups of older kids laugh around the orange sparks, sucking on cigarettes, kissing. A senior from Nelle’s public school walks over to us and wraps his arms around her waist. Hey, Pimpstress, you smoking tonight?

  His name’s Monty, Harley whispers to me. He’s in love with Nelle and he’s always got green.

  Monty plucks a cigarette out from behind his ear. It looks like it’s been wrapped with a brown paper bag.

  That a joint? I ask. I don’t recognize this. The only joints I have ever seen are my mother’s, and those are always wrapped white.

  A blunt, says Monty. He chuckles at me. Where’d you find this girl?

  She’s our prep school tropical princess, says Harley. Ain’t she cute?

  Monty lights the blunt and takes it in, passing it over to Nelle, who passes it over to Harley.

  I’m assuming you’re a weed virgin, too? she asks.

  I nod.

  Open your mouth, she says. Harley sucks the blunt until the burning worm almost reaches her nails. Before I know what’s happening, she presses her mouth to mine, exhaling the smoke down my throat. I hold her by the back of her head—I hold her right there—I don’t want our faces to part.

  Relax, lez, she says, pulling away. Suck it in.

  We circle this blunt, and then another, several more times. My tongue feels like a pinecone. Everything I say ticks around my head like a film projector, and I can’t tell if the words are coming out now or if they came out fifteen minutes ago, or if I haven’t even said them yet.

  Look at Chinky’s eyes, says Nelle. Now you can actually tell she’s Asian!

  Why do you both say white girl shit like that? I say, surprising myself.

  Excuse me, I’m one-eighth Bolivian, says Harley.

  I laugh so hard at this that a long string of drool drips down to the gravel. The drool looks bedazzled to me with the bonfire behind it. Slow motion.

  I wonder if my mother feels like this all the time. If my father did, before rehab. In this moment, I think I understand drugs and booze and the big deal about them. I feel infinite here, with these girls, strong, like either one of them could choke me or yank out fistfuls of my hair and I would love it. It’d be the feel-good burn of a loose tooth you can’t stop tonguing, a thoroughbred pounding beneath you on a track, those flashes of life when your own body surprises you with no more ache, no more tenderness.

  I think, This is why they like it. Mom and Dad. This is why they don’t come back to themselves, and I feel connected to them in places I’ve never felt before. I’m their daughter.

  In what feels like seconds, or maybe hours, another man approaches us. He is tall, with high-spiked hair. For a moment, I wonder if he’s a talking tree.

  Go away, Paul, Nelle says, and the words tunnel out.

  And then another man. Short, bald. Granite eyes. His name, someone says, is Tonka.

  I hear more words in no particular order: Paul / No / My girl / Fucking kill you / Tonka / Jump him / Nelle / My girl / Paul / Fucked her / Chicken-head / When, before Monty and Paul and Tonka begin swinging their arms and smashing their glass bottles and Monty’s face is pressed against the asphalt, beneath a sneaker. I think, This is sexy.

  In what feels like seconds, or maybe minutes, the blue of sirens whirls in my eyes, and Nelle says Run, run, and the trees turn to coral, we’re all underwater, and my body is pulled into Harley’s sinking car before we speed off, looking for Monty. He limps out of the woods to the street, bloodied pulp of a body in Harley’s headlights. Nelle and I let him lie across our laps as we drive him to a hospital, Nelle kissing his forehead, smoothing his hair back with the wet black of his blood. Smashed ruby of a boy, all those cut-open places—it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  I have this problem, Harley screams from her bathroom toilet. I hate wiping my own ass.

  It’s true, Nelle says. Nelle’s flipping through a beauty magazine on Harley’s bed, peeling open the pockets of sample lipsticks and perfumes between the pages. She sniffs the spine.

  Are you shitting me? I ask, reaching for the joke.

  I just can’t, Harley says.

  I don’t understand.

  Chinky, can you come and wipe my ass for me? Please?

  I look at Nelle. Is she serious?

  She shrugs. The Lips beckon.

  In the bathroom, Harley extends her arm with a wad of toilet paper pinched between her nails, her toes pointed inward like a toddler on the aquamarine tiles.

  Be my best best best friend, will you?

  There’s a glittering viciousness to Harley Pelletier when she wants something. The slight cock of her face to the left, the bend of her pupils as they gaze up at you at just the right angle. A look that says, Love me? Even when I’m fucking with you? Even when I’m not? Prove it.

  But I’d do anything. That’s the problem with me. It still is.

  I never even pretend to hesitate.

  There are nights without parties sometimes. On these nights, we pull on sweatshirts and yank off the top of my father’s navy convertible, which we’ve decided to take as our own—Just until he comes back. We drive around until the sun bulges out of the sea, back and forth along A1A, Usher or Juvenile or Bubba Sparxxx on the speakers. The heat blasts in streams against the thick
wet cool of the Florida winter, and we call it hot-fudge-sundae-driving.

  I haven’t seen my father in several months. He flies down to northern Florida every weekend to visit my uncle in prison, but he does not make the full trip to see me. He says it’s because my mother is using, and seeing her high is triggering to him and his sobriety. When my father does not visit, my mother uses more. She says his not loving us is triggering to her and her sobriety.

  In my father’s car—that corrugated edge of fear and desire that I can’t stop touching. What if we all get found out? What if I get sent away to live in the system? Could the girls come with me? Would they?

  The music thumps in our stomachs and we never talk much, we just smoke and smoke until our throats burn our voices out. When this happens, Nelle and I plug one nostril with a finger and put the filter into the other nostril. We snort the cigarettes as hard as we can, until our vision curls and collapses like a wave.

  Long live our tribe of fatherless girls, Nelle says, wind-whip of hair stinging our faces, daybreak warbling from bird-blackened trees.

  Both girls like to kiss me with their tongue rings. They like the way guys look at us when they do this. When they take the new girl’s face in their hands and kiss me hard and sloppy, running their fingers through my hair, letting me tug at their barbells with my teeth.

  Have you met our Kinky Chinky?

  Fucking freaks, men say, in the best way possible.

  I love it when they kiss me, too. Especially Nelle. I position my face next to her face as often as possible, as close as I can, but none of this has to do with the men around us, or what they think.

  Pervs, we say, once we get home to Harley’s house in the mornings, peeling off our plaid miniskirts, our studded belts. Disgusting needle-dicked pervs. But we like pervs. We’re good with them. Pervs get us whatever we want if we wear the right clothes, if we act stupid enough. We pick up pervs in downtown Fort Lauderdale, on the strip, on the beach, outside the Primanti Brothers pizza shop, at lot-parties. The pervs must be old enough to buy us alcohol, and scary enough to make the whole experience worth it.

  One night, we meet a drug-dealer perv named Josh outside a downtown tattoo shop. He looks about thirty-five, with a chin-strap goatee and barely any hair on top. We decide that Josh will do anything for us, so long as we love up on one another. So long as we let him tell us what to do and follow his instructions. Josh likes me most because I’m the shy one, and because I’m a virgin. He wears a gold ring with his name on it, a little diamond inside the O. He cradles my face in his giant, jeweled hand and puts his tongue in my mouth. I’ll let you wear this ring as long as I own you, he says. As long as I can call you my little bitch.

  I wear his ring on my thumb with great pride, knowing that I belong to someone. At school, everybody stares at the ring, the glittering JOSH. There are several Joshes at school, but no one can place where this one came from—not a Goldberg or a Greenberg or a Rothblatt—this other kind of Josh.

  Josh likes to take us drag racing at night. The three of us are so drunk in the backseat, we barely ever look at his speedometer the way he would like us to. We are never impressed with Josh or his car, we just sit on each other’s laps, kissing, making jokes about dying together in a crash, till death do us part.

  How ’bout I get you girls some Incredible Hulk? he says one night, when he’s tired of this. We usually drink Malibu with orange soda, and the sound of a new drink with a muscular name has us intrigued. Josh stops at a liquor store, picks up a bottle of Hennessy, and a mystical-looking bottle of milky-blue liquor. Rub it and a genie will come out, he says.

  The next stop we make is at a 7-Eleven. Josh brings us three Big Gulp cups full of ice. He pours and mixes the two liquor bottles in the cups until we each have our own full bucket-sized cups of liquid. It’s a dirty swimming pool color; muddy. Careful, the Hulk’s vicious.

  Do you even have a job? we ask. Do you go to college or something?

  I go to the college of Hard Knocks, U.S.A., he says.

  We drink the bitter-sweet through our straws. Harley and Nelle stick their monster-colored tongues out for Josh above the center console of the car—Please?—and he drops white pills of Xanax on them. Good girls.

  I love bars, Harley says. You’re missing out, Kinky Chinky. Pills give you wings.

  Josh drives us down to Miami. We have never seen it before, at night, lit up and strobing. We ask to stop in a pizza parlor to pee. Inside my stall, the walls begin to drip down around me. I’ve finished my Incredible Hulk, and my feet feel like they’re on a treadmill, rolling away. My hands reach for anything to hold on to so that I can stand up, or sit down, or keep my balance somewhere in between.

  The green starts bursting out of me. I vomit on my bare legs, the floor, the toilet seat. I hear somebody else doing the same. A gagging chorus. The heels of our shoes slip through it, leaving squiggled trails of tile white. The three of us walk out of the parlor, onto the strip, goopy liquid running from our eyes, our mouths, down our chins. Josh is gone. I crawl down the sidewalk, spewing more green into the gutters. We stumble over one another and grip our shoes by the straps. The girls hold my hair.

  I love you. I love you. I love you, too.

  None of us can remember how we ever got home.

  It was suicide, Nelle tells me. Nelle’s father committed suicide two years ago. She was at a friend’s house watching a movie when it happened. Her mother was out shopping, buying Nelle’s older sister a prom dress. Her dad called the friend’s house line.

  Can I pick you up? he said to Nelle. Are you ready? I’ll come.

  I’m busy right now—we just got to the good part. Can’t you wait until later?

  He was found swinging in the garage—a strappy piece of workout equipment squeezed around his neck. His deep plum skin on a hospital gurney. Nelle knew it before it was declared.

  She talks about this only once, and then tells me to forget it.

  Doesn’t matter anymore, she says. That was then.

  But he was her father.

  We go back to Craig’s house for another party. Harley and I are lying belly down on Craig’s bed as a room full of people look at my new tat. Today I went to a tattoo parlor in East Boca and asked for a Hawaiian beach scene on my lower back. Something scenic, I said, or maybe Bob Marley lyrics—artist’s choice. What I got was a cartoon palm tree right above my crack, with some sway marks around it. Neon waves and a plumeria flower float around the tree, a few red clouds, the whole scene beaded with hardened blood.

  Did it hurt? they say. Did it tickle?

  Looks like a flaming meatball, says Craig.

  Wasn’t so bad, I say, even though I cried the whole hour that warm, vibrating needle thrummed through my skin, until the man with plugs in his face said, Check it out in the mirror, hula hula girl.

  Harley is kicking her legs, annoyed.

  It’s just a tat, she says. Big fucking whoop.

  Efraim shows up in his new Phantom Rolls-Royce—a birthday present. He stands in the doorway of Craig’s bedroom and spins the keys around his pointer finger. Anyone wanna go for a ride? Mink interior.

  How big’s your exhaust pipe? Or stick shift? Harley asks him.

  Big.

  Harley squeezes my hand, presses her lips to my ear—Watch this.

  That stick, she says. Want to watch us pull our skirts up and fuck it?

  My father doesn’t live out west, Harley tells me one day. He lives in Miami.

  The Bolivian? I ask. He’s fifteen minutes away?

  Yeah, she says. But that doesn’t mean I see any of him.

  What’s his name?

  Doesn’t matter.

  This confession comes the same week Harley’s mom and boyfriend argue in her living room all night. Harley’s mom began lighting matches, flicking them onto furniture, cushions, trying to burn the house down—fry, motherfucker—before the boyfriend dragged the hose inside. The fight was over which television show they would watch.

&
nbsp; We called the police and left in our pajamas before anybody got there.

  The girls don’t typically come to my house, but today, after school, I need to stop by and pick up more clothes. It’s my turn to contribute to our shared collection. We’ve all dropped down a couple of sizes since we met, since we don’t eat, and what I do eat are clenbuterol hydrochloride horse respiratory pills, the kind Calorie Valerie, a girl at my school, gets from her mother. We order the pills on the Internet using my parents’ credit cards.

  Inside, my own mother is sitting at the dining room table with all the lights off. She’s spilling candle wax onto a sheet of paper, and onto the surface of the table, and onto her hands.

  Look, she says, holding her palms out to us.

  She did dry out in North Carolina, years ago. She shook it out, let the fever take over. On the worst days, her body let out a slime that I wiped from her skin in a circular motion. I changed the sheets. Massaged her limbs. After that, we had a good span of time together, the three of us—Mom, Dad, and Child.

  But last summer, before school one morning, my mother slipped in the shower and shattered her teeth, her jaw. The doctor prescribed pills for the pain, for the surgeries and wires and caps. Soon after, more doctors. More scripts. When I think about my parents, these are still the days that ache most: Internet prescription mills calling our house. My father screaming into the phone, One more pill and I’ll fucking end you, slamming the receiver into the wall. Just last year, there had been so much hope. But then the scripts, the phone calls. The clicks of those locked bathroom doors.

  My uncle got caught soon after—that Wolf of Wall Street business. So did my father’s friends. My father didn’t go to prison—he went to New York instead. My mother stayed here, with me.

  Let’s go, I say.

  I collect my clothes in a plastic Walgreens bag and slam the door on our way out.