Angelique

Angelique:  It’s raining.  Oh great.

Cupping my hands around the tip of my cigarette, I press my thumb on the flint wheel of my lighter.  The wind blows the tiny flame out before I even take my thumb off the gas.  I huddle tighter.

Someone in a hurry bumps me.  I don’t even look up.

Finally, the flare of light catches the cigarette paper, and I’m lit up and puffing furiously.

It’s three am.  She got me up at two, my phone ringing an electronic version of “We R Who We R” – ringtone muzak of Ke$ha.  I should change that – you can’t even tell what the song is when it plays.  But what’s the dif, when no one ever calls me, except my mother, when she wants something, like to be picked up from the hospital at two am.

A Mom and her kid come out through the big, sliding, automated hospital doors, and hurry past me.  The kid looks at me smoking and holds her nose with her fingers, scowls.

Really.

I didn’t even know my mother had left.  I was sleeping when she decided she had to come to the ER for an enema or some shit, to get, well, some shit.  

First, she tells me on the phone that she needs surgery.  So will I come?

Of course, I believe her.  She’s a pathological liar, and I know that, but I believe her.  I’m here, aren’t I?

But of course when I get here at two-thirty, pajama bottoms under a big, black sweater, I find her in an examinating room waiting for test results, and then the doc comes in to tell her they haven’t found anything wrong that a stool softener won’t cure in a day, but she tells him, “Ooooh Doctor, but it huuurts,” so now she’s getting dressed and waiting for her Demerol prescription, or Dilaudid if they’ll give it to her.

“I guess I’m no longer needed here,” I said.

“But you have to drive me home!” she cried.

“You got here yourself, now get yourself home!”

Honestly, Dilaudid for constipation?  I am so done.

Tossing my cigarette -- throwing it down hard -- I tuck my head down against the wind and rain, and head into the parking lot.  I don’t even have my license yet, all I have is a permit.  I could get arrested.  This is ridiculous.  I bark a short laugh at the insanity.

Ke$ha blares from my phone.  It’s her.

“I’m coming out now,” she says.

“Fine,” I say with an exaggerated sigh.  “I’ll be in the car.”

Candace

Candace:  My mother in downstairs in her studio, painting.  She knows I'm home, of course, but I'm supposed to be sick.  In my body, I mean. 

Well, I am sick.  But it's deeper than my mother thinks.

My mother paints oceans.  Literally, oceans.  Fishermen on a wharf, lines dropped into the ocean.  A whale spouting ocean water out of its blowhole.  A mermaid on a rock in the ocean.  Ocean waves, crashing on the beach.

She paints oceans, I believe, because of the oceans of ideas that crash and tumble, flow freely and crest in her brain.  Ideas that lead her to the studio to paint, or to her desk to write, or even down to the beach, to walk and take pictures.

Where are my oceans? I cry to myself.

Barely a trickle moves in me.

Oh, I do fine in school, usually -- or at least I've been known to do well, although lately, maybe not so well.  My mother doesn't know this yet.

My mother's oceans bring us food -- food for thought, and food on the table.  She's quite famous, perhaps you've heard of her?  Of course you have.

But no one's heard of me, and no one will. 

No one knows me, and no one will.

I'm quiet, and I'm still inside.  No ideas rushing through me to crash upon the shore.  No photographs, paintings, stories, sculptures, novels, symphonies or jingles.  

At best, I am an abandoned well.  

Deep and dark inside.

Just enough water to make it damp and uncomfortable to be in here.

Alone.

Just enough water to sustain me, for a little while, and then I claim sickness of my body, and lie in bed, crying dry tears, wishing to feel something other than this deep, dark hole, this deep darkness inside.

Lucy

Lucy returns home with her stepfather, who, as she’d predicted, beats the shit out of her, and all the bravery she felt earlier gets kicked away…

Lucy:  I can’t can’t

He’s hurting me.  He kicks my shin like a little girl, only he has on steel-toed boots, and I collapse.  Now he kicks my in the stomach.  If I throw up, he’ll make me eat it for all I know.  If I throw up, he’ll definitely beat the shit out of me.

He’s already

Holding my knees to my chest, biting my lip so I don’t scream, I wonder how far it is to my backpack, and can I make it, and if I do can I pull out the scissors I stole from the school nurse, and can I stab him and stop him from ever beating me again?

Can I can I

I can’t can’t

Have to

Be strong

Not wimp

Out

Can’t

Can.

Caroline

Caroline is eleven and a half – a tween, and that feels like the worst age to be, the worst way to be ever, no matter how much everyone thinks her feelings aren’t real, or at least aren’t really important.

Caroline:  These are just feelings, that’s what my mother said.

She doesn’t know, or understand, or probably even care what feelings I’m having, but she says not to worry, not to get so worked up and anxious because they’re just feelings.

Like, feeling left out.

Or feeling like I can’t do anything right.

Feeling like everyone’s mad at me all the time.

Feeling like crying now, then, here, there and everywhere.

Seriously.  Just feelings, she says. 

Feelings aren’t facts.

So here’s how it started, I think:

First, the funeral for my Grandma Caroline, whom I’m named after, except she pronounced it Caro-line, and I pronounce it Caro-leen, which everyone used to think was me being creative when I was six and seven and eight, but now everyone seems to think I’m just being difficult.

My Aunt Lisa said, “Caroline is such a lovely name, why would you want to change it?” 

Then she started crying, and I felt like it was my fault, like I ought to be carrying on my grandmother’s name.

And then, I couldn’t muster up any tears at the funeral and my mother said sometimes she worries because I’m so cold and so wrapped up in only myself, except whenever I do cry she starts to cry because she says all she ever does is try to make me happy and…

Anyway, feelings aren’t facts, right?

So the facts are, I never really knew my Grandma Caroline, not like my cousins did, so I wasn’t sorry she was dead – not that I wanted her dead, just that I didn’t know her and I didn’t care that much. 

Fact:  I didn’t cry at the funeral.

Fact:  When they took out the food, the chicken wings were like slimy and undercooked and didn’t look like real buffalo wings, and the dip had spinach in it and when I started to cry then, my mother said to everyone that I just had low blood sugar, and she told me to eat something, and I said I wasn’t hungry, and she said to have a piece of pie at least, so I did, but it was lemon merangue, so it was all slimy, and I didn’t understand how I could be so hungry and there could be two tables of food out and still there was nothing I could eat.

Fact:  My mother told me to go to my room until I got a hold of myself.

First I can’t cry at the right time, then I can’t stop at the right time – or was it the wrong time, I don’t even know.

Fact:  As I half-stomped, half-slinked upstairs to my room, I heard my mother telling my Aunt Lisa that she (my Mom) didn’t know what to make of me, and my Aunt Lisa said, “She’s just at that age, where she doesn’t know if she wants to be a kid or an adult,” and my mother said, “I hear it only gets worse,” and she and my aunt laughed in a way that was like they didn’t really think I was funny, they thought I was horrible.  They thought I was too much trouble already, and how could I get any worse?

Will I?

Will I feel worse than this?

Hopeless, confused, abandoned, sorry, lonely, mad, sad.

These are only my feelings, but they sure feel like facts.

Lucy

Lucy is back, and the marks left behind by her abusive stepfather are getting noticed.

Lucy:  Stupid Natalie, told Ms. Green that if I was going to wear sunglasses in school, then so was she, and then she put on these gi-normous glam glasses with rhinestones studded around big, darkened, owl eyes.  Ms. Green had no choice but to make us both take off our sunglasses, even though mine were small, just big enough to cover the black eye Keith gave me which I think Ms. Green might’ve guessed about because I’m always hiding something, or I’m really clumsy, neither of which excuses she buys.

So then, I have to go to the nurse, who of course calls my house and of course Mom is at work, but sweet, kind, generous (not) Keith, my very favorite stepdad, of course he’s home.  And he doesn’t act mean, he doesn’t say, “Leave the little bitch in school, what’s her black eye got to do with me?

He doesn’t say that. 

He says something sugary-sweet, like so sweet it rots inside you (me), he says he’s worried about me, and he’s coming to get me and to take me to the doctor, and he’s such a liar, and I don’t want to go, I can’t go!

But I have to.

He’s my “father”.

He has rights.

Like, the right to kick my ass!

The right to kill me if he wants.

I’m sure it will be all my fault.

Cherry (not her real name)

Cherry (not my real name): 

Secrets (rough draft)

I wear big earrings so people don’t think I’m a boy.  I throw up all the time, just because I’m anxious, I guess.  I’m not stuck-up, I’m just scared.  People scare me.  I don’t talk a lot, but it’s not because I don’t like you. I don’t really love my boyfriend, but I do have sex with him.  The boy I love is in college now, and I wrote him a letter saying I was so sorry he broke up with his girlfriend, but I’m not.  I pretend to like Kaylee Johnson, but I don’t, because she was his girlfriend.  I have never stuffed my bra with tissues or socks, but I wanted to.  I didn’t do it because I was hoping someone would touch me there, would want to touch me, and what if he only touched a sock imitation and not the real me?  Sometimes – no always – it feels like my boyfriend isn’t touching the real me.

To be continued…

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.