Dead Girls and Other Stories by Emily Geminder

Author:Emily Geminder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Parties,” my father murmured as if from far away. “Good, good. That’s what you should be doing at this age.”

At dusk, a car appeared outside, Edie smoking in the passenger seat. I’d never seen the driver before, but when I climbed into the back, I saw he was holding Edie’s hand. Oh, I thought. He was Steve, said Edie. Damien sat in the back beside me.

It was October already, night coming sooner. Cold air flooded my face, and Edie’s cigarette embers streaked past like meteors. I’d never been in a car that wasn’t driven by someone’s parent. But then, I remembered, I’d also never been alive in a month my mother hadn’t.

I thought how strange it was to find Edie again, Edie who was quieter, her face blank, like her real face was being held captive behind it. Edie who was someone I did and didn’t recognize as the car hurtled toward the freeway. Bass from the radio trembled inside my chest. My hair flew wild as flames around my head. The feeling speeding down the ramp onto the freeway was like being plunged into the weightless shock of space.

Dave’s house was an old farmhouse, peeled paint like broken ribs. Its insides hit me like a wall of smoke: hazy limbs everywhere, tapestries billowing loosely from walls. Somebody somewhere strumming a guitar.

“Annie,” called a gray-bearded man. He emerged out of the haze as if to embrace me, and I stepped back, alarmed.

“Dave calls all girls Annie,” Edie told me, as though this explained it. In the car, I’d learned that Dave was an old hippie who’d lost his license, and Edie and Steve sometimes ferried him on errands around town.

“Annie like Anna,” nodded Dave. “It goes forwards, it goes backwards. You see?” He’d known a girl named Anna once, he said. Or maybe it was Annabel—it was a long time ago, in Tennessee. People believed all kinds of things in the South, he went on, though he himself wasn’t a believer, just a great pretender, which was sometimes the same thing. I couldn’t quite follow how he got from one thing to the next, but I nodded along. “People’d think I was some kind of prophet,” he concluded. “Which I’m not.”

All the people around us seemed to be nodding too, as though to distant music. When someone handed me a joint, I pretended to inhale, but even this made me feel loopy and sick.

I realized I didn’t know where Edie was when Damien motioned to the door. “Want to go outside?”

I glanced around for Edie. I wanted to tell her where I was going. But she’d vanished into the crowd.

Outside, Damien and I walked across the field toward a dark line of trees. For a while, my limbs felt loose and disjointed, but then I forgot them, forgot myself, and anyway, Damien seemed already to know everything about me. He knew my father’s name and where he worked. He knew about my mother. He knew how I’d stopped eating, how

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