Flynn, Gillian - Sharp_Objects

“Your sister is like us times three. And she has a major mean streak.”

“Mean streak how?”

Katie pulled a soft pack of cigarettes from the endtable drawer, lit one with a long fireplace match. Still a secret smoker.

“Oh, she and those three girls, those little blonde things with the tits already, they rule the school, and Amma rules them. Seriously, it’s bad. Sometimes funny, but mostly bad. They make this fat girl get them lunch every day, and before she leaves, they make her eat something without using her hands, just dig her face in there on the plate.” She scrunched up her nose but didn’t seem otherwise bothered. “Another little girl they cornered and made her lift up her shirt and show the boys. Because she was flat. They made her say dirty things while she was doing it. There’s a rumor going around that they took one of their old friends, girl named Ronna Deel they’d fallen out with, took her to a party, got her drunk and…kind of gave her as a present to some of the older boys. Stood guard outside the room till they were done with her.”

“They’re barely thirteen ,” I said. I thought of what I’d done at that age. For the first time I realized how offensively young it was.

“These are precocious little girls. We did some pretty wild things ourselves at not much older.” Katie’s voice got huskier with her smoke. She blew it up and watched it hover blue above us.

“We never did anything that cruel.”

“We came pretty damn close, Camille.” You did, I didn’t. We stared at each other, privately cataloguing our power plays.

“Anyway, Amma fucked with Ann and Natalie a lot,” Katie said. “It was nice your mom took so much interest in them.”

“My mom tutored Ann, I know.”

“Oh, she’d work with them during mother’s aide, have them over to your house, feed them after school. Sometimes she’d even come by during recess and you could see her outside the fence, watching them on the playground.”

A flash of my mother, fingers wrapped between the fence wire, hungrily looking in. A flash of my mother in white, glowing white, holding Natalie with one arm, and a finger up to her mouth to hush James Capisi.

“Are we done?” Katie asked. “I’m sort of tired of talking about all this.” She clicked the tape recorder off.

“So, I heard about you and the cute cop,” Katie smiled. A wisp of hair came unhooked from her ponytail, and I could remember her, head bent over her feet, painting her toenails and asking about me and one of the basketball players she’d wanted for herself. I tried not to wince at the mention of Richard.

“Oh, rumors, rumors.” I smiled. “Single guy, single girl…my life isn’t nearly that interesting.”

“John Keene might say different.” She plucked another cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled while fixing me with those china blue eyes. No smile this time. I knew this could go two ways. I could give her a few tidbits, make her happy. If the story had already reached Katie at ten, the rest of Wind Gap would hear by noon. Or I could deny, risk her anger, lose her cooperation. I already had the interview, and I certainly didn’t care about staying in her good graces.

“Ah. More rumors. People need to get some better hobbies around here.”

“Really? Sounded pretty typical to me. You were always open to a good time.”

I stood up, more than ready to leave. Katie followed me out, chewing the inside of her cheek.

“Thanks for your time, Katie. It was good seeing you.”

“You too, Camille. Enjoy the rest of your stay here.” I was out the door and on the steps when she called back to me.

“Camille?” I turned around, saw Katie with her left leg bent inward like a little girl’s, a gesture she had even in high school. “Friendly advice: Get home and wash yourself. You stink.”

Idid go home. My brain was stumbling from image to image of my mother, all ominous. Omen. The word beat again on my skin. Flash of thin, wild-haired Joya with the long nails, peeling skin from my mother. Flash of my mother and her pills and potions, sawing through my hair. Flash of Marian, now bones in a coffin, a white satin ribbon wrapped around dried blonde curls, like some bouquet gone stale. My mother tending to those violent little girls. Or trying to. Natalie and Ann weren’t likely to suffer much of that. Adora hated little girls who didn’t capitulate to her peculiar strain of mothering. Had she painted Natalie’s fingernails before she strangled her? After?

You’re crazy to think what you’re thinking. You’re crazy to not think it.

Chapter Fifteen

Three little pink bikes were lined up on the porch, bedecked with white wicker baskets, ribbons streaming off the handlebars. I peeked in one of the baskets and saw an oversized stick of lipgloss and a joint in a sandwich bag.

I slipped in a side door and padded up the steps. The girls were in Amma’s room giggling loudly, shrieking with delight. I opened the door without knocking. Rude, but I couldn’t bear the idea of that secret shuffle, that rush to pose innocently for the grown-up. The three blondes were standing in a circle around Amma, short shorts and miniskirts bearing their shaved stick legs. Amma was on the floor fiddling with her dollhouse, a tube of super glue beside her, her hair piled on top of her head and tied with a big blue ribbon. They shrieked again when I said hello, flashing outraged, exhilarated smiles, like startled birds.

“Hey, Mille,” blurted Amma, no longer bandaged, but looking tweaked and feverish. “We’re just playing dolls. Don’t I have the most beautiful dollhouse?” Her voice was syrupy, modeled after a child on a 1950s family show. Hard to reconcile this Amma with the one who gave me drugs just two nights before. My sister who supposedly pimped out her friends to older boys for laughs.

“Yeah, Camille, don’t you love Amma’s dollhouse?” echoed the brassy blonde in a husky voice. Jodes was the only one not looking at me. Instead she was staring into the dollhouse as if she could will herself inside.

“You feel better, Amma?”

“Oh, indeed I do, sister dear,” she whinnied. “I hope you feel well also.”

The girls giggled again, like a shudder. I shut the door, annoyed with a game I didn’t understand. “Maybe you should take Jodes with you,” one of them called from behind the closed door. Jodes wasn’t long for the group.

I ran a warm bath despite the heat—even the porcelain of the tub was rosy—and sat in it, naked, chin on my knees as the water slowly snaked up around me. The room smelled of minty soap and the sweet, spittoon scent of female sex. I was raw and thoroughly used and it felt good. I closed my eyes, slumped down into the water and let it flow into my ears. Alone. I wished I’d carved that into my skin, suddenly surprised that the word didn’t grace my body. The bare circle of scalp Adora had left me pricked with goosebumps, as if volunteering for the assignment. My face cooled, too, and I opened my eyes to see my mother hovering over the oval of the tub rim, her long blonde hair encircling her face.

I lurched up, covered my breasts, splashing some water on her pink gingham sundress.

“Sweetheart, where did you go? I was absolutely frantic. I’d have come looking for you myself but Amma had a bad night.”

“What was wrong with Amma?”

“Where were you last night?”

“What was wrong with Amma, Mother?”

She reached for my face and I flinched. She frowned and reached again, patted my cheek, smoothed my wet hair back. When she removed her hand, she looked stunned at the wetness, as if she’d ruined her skin.

“I had to take care of her,” she said simply. Goosebumps blossomed on my arms. “You cold, honey? Your nipples are hard.”

She had a glass of bluish milk in her hand, which she gave to me silently. Either the drink makes me sick and I know I’m not insane, or it doesn’t, and I know I’m a hateful creature. I drank the milk as my mother hummed and ran her tongue over her lower lip, a gesture so fervent it was nearly obscene.

“You were never such a good girl when you were little,” she said. “You were always so willful. Maybe your spirit has gotten a bit more broken. In a good way. A necessary way.”

She left and I waited in the bathtub for an hour for something to happen. Stomach rumblings, dizziness, a fever. I sat as still as I do on an airplane, when I worry one rash movement will send us into a tailspin. Nothing. Amma was in my bed when I opened the door.

“You are so gross,” she said, arms lazily crossed over her. “I cannot believe you fucked a babykiller. You are just as nasty as she said.”

“Don’t listen to Momma, Amma. She’s not a trustworthy person. And don’t…” What? Take anything from her? Say it if you think it, Camille. “Don’t turn on me, Amma. We hurt each other awfully quickly in this family.”

“Tell me about his dick, Camille. Was it nice?” Her voice was the same cloying, put-on she’d used with me earlier, but she wasn’t detached: She squirmed under my sheets, her eyes a bit wild, face flushed.

“Amma, I don’t want to talk about this with you.”

“You weren’t too grown up a few nights ago, sister. Are we not friends anymore?”

“Amma, I’ve got to lie down now.”

“Hard night, huh? Well, just wait—everything’s going to get worse.” She kissed me on the cheek and slid out of the bed, clattered down the hall in her big plastic sandals.

Twenty minutes later the vomiting began, wrenching, sweaty upheavals in which I pictured my stomach contracting and bursting like a heart attack. I sat on the floor next to the toilet between hacking, propped against the wall in only an ill-fitting T-shirt. Outside I could hear blue jays bickering. Inside, my mother called Gayla’s name. An hour later and I was still vomiting, off-green nauseous bile that came out of me like syrup, slow and sinewy.

I pulled on some clothes and brushed my teeth gingerly—inserting too much of the toothbrush in my mouth made me start gagging again.

Alan was sitting on the front porch reading a large, leather-bound book entitled only Horses. A bowl made of bumpy orange carnival glass perched on the armrest of his rocking chair, a lump of green pudding at its center. He was in a blue seersucker suit, a Panama hat atop his head. He was serene as a pond.

“Your mother know you’re leaving?”

“I’ll be back soon.”

“You’ve done much better with her lately, Camille, and for that I thank you. She seems quite improved. Even her dealings with…Amma are smoother.” He always seemed to pause before his own daughter’s name, as if it had a slightly dirty connotation.

“Good, Alan, good.”

“I hope you’re feeling better about yourself too, Camille. That’s an important thing, liking oneself. A good attitude infects just as easily as a bad one.”

“Enjoy the horses.”

“I always do.”

The drive to Woodberry was punctuated with lurching twists into the curb where I threw up more bile and a little blood. Three stops, one in which I vomited down the side of the car, unable to get the door open fast enough. I used my old warm cup of strawberry pop and vodka to wash it off.

St. Joseph’s Hospital in Woodberry was a huge cube of golden brick, cross-sectioned with amber-shaded windows. Marian had called it the waffle. It was a mellow place for the most part: If you lived farther west, you went to Poplar Bluff for your health; farther north, to Cape Girardeau. You only went to Woodberry if you were trapped in the Missouri boot heel.