Nicki

Nicki is the manin character in a novel I'm working on called Swallow.  This is a scene that happens near the end of the book (although I haven't even written the middle of the book yet!).  It might end up being the prologue.  Who knows.  As usual, I don't know where my Outsider Girls will end up.  I just let them speak.

Nicki:  I know this place.  I know the woods we’re entering. 

I know them in spring, when white flowers bloom in clusters among yellow-green leaves.  I know the woods in summer, when the foliage is lush and thick, and you have to know these woods like I do to navigate them.  In spring and summer, these trees -- this woods -- means a private picnic… a time to rest from the sun, lie on the cool moss and be peaceful and alone. It's a happy place.
In the fall I've scooped leaves fallen from these trees.  Penny and I have rolled down this hill.  I've laughed here, in the fall.

I’ve also been at this edge of the woods in winter a thousand times at least, climbing the hill I’m being made to climb right now.  Every winter when I was a kid, I climbed this hill, trudging up the snowy slope, dragging my inner tube or sled or toboggan or whatever came for Christmas that year.

I’ve seen these trees so many times I know the way one tree grows at an angle, toward the right, oddly away from the sun – the little sun that remains on this bitter afternoon.

     The trees I know so well are bare.  Gray stalks with spidery branches.  Familiar.  
     Focusing on the trees calms me down enough so that I can breathe.  I’m scared, but not so scared to death like I was in the car, because I know this place.  It has always been friendly to me.

     Stumbling, I land hard on the frozen ground.

     Lisa grabs me and pulls me up, and her fingernails dig into my arm, but I can’t feel it because I’m too cold.

     “Why are you doing this to me?” I want to know.  I sound like a baby, but who cares?

     “Just keep moving, bitch,” Lisa says.  

Jayla

Jayla:  The story spread.

My story!

I found out after I got my lunch of a bagel with nothing on it and a bottle of water.  As I passed the jock table on my way to the theater table, this guy, this jerk-off, he got in front of me and mimed unzipping his you-know-what.  He mimed holding out something huge, when his is probably all shrunken and small, pinky-sized, not zuchinni –sized like he was pretending.

I only noticed because I was trying not to.

Then the cheerleaders, well not all of them, they’re not all evil, but a bunch of them, they started pretending to suck dick.

Swallowing back my tears, I hope they don’t see me gulp, but it’s too late.

“Swallow!  Swallow!”  they chant. 

Turning red, I don’t even have to swallow my own spit, my mouth is so dry.  I hurry past.  When I get to my table, not really my table, but the theater-geek table I’ve adopted… I find a place at the end, across from my friend Lauren.  She looks at me with sad eyes.

So, she knows too.

They all know, I swallow.  I suck dick, and I swallow.  That’s what they’re going to call me for the next four years, right?  Right?  Swallow.

Because it’s not like I’m smart and get all A’s, even in honors math and English, it’s not like I’m the youngest reporter for the school paper, and it’s not like I got this cute haircut that cost me a week of babysitting money, and at home I take care of ‘lissa and Mikey, and I bake fresh cheddar cheese bread which I slather with butter and toast in a pan – making the best Goddamned grilled cheese sandwiches in the whole fucking world.  It’s not like I wasn’t Miss Petite Westie, then L’il Miss Westie, and finally, last year, Miss Westie, riding in my own float in the Memorial Day parade and again this year, in the Labor Day parade.

It’s not like I’m all that, not to them.

To these kids I’m mostly meeting for the first time, I’m only my reputation as a girl who swallows.