Girl Factory by Karen Dietrich

Author:Karen Dietrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: skirt!
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Dogs Howling in the Dark of Night

It’s springtime, and sixth grade is almost over. Soon I will leave the elementary school and enter junior high, where I’ll put my books in a locker and be forced to take showers after gym class. (The creepy female gym teachers will stand in the locker room and watch and they’ll justify it by saying they have to make sure all the girls practice good hygiene.) I’ll learn how to make a pillow with a sewing machine in home ec and shred the tip of my right thumb on the jigsaw in wood shop. I want to get away from Heather Grain and I’m pretty sure I will. She’ll be in the middle-track classes and I’ll be in top tier, but her house is just a few blocks from ours, so I’ll have to see her on the bus twice a day.

One morning, a boy on the bus will have a magazine page he’s ripped from his dad’s Hustler. It will show a woman on her knees, naked, a triangle of ash-blond pubic hair between her legs. She will be straddling a man’s face, his mouth and nose inside of her. He’s eating her out, the boy will say, and I will laugh a small nervous laugh because I’ll like looking at the picture and hearing the boy talk about it and I’ll want him to talk about it some more.

But my laugh will make Heather Grain notice me and that will be a mistake. She will turn to me, her green eyes drilling holes into mine. “No one will ever eat you out because your pussy is so hairy even you can’t find it.” She’ll say this as if I’m invisible, not even there. She’ll say this as if she’s able to read my mind.

The summer before junior high I begin to feel a sense of doom washing over me, a river of doom perceptible only to me. I count everything I can get my hands on, repeat silent mantras in my head, wish on every eyelash, every North Star, every puff of dandelion seed I explode with my breath. The seeds break and hover in the air, tiny clouds of plant-based smoke.

I work to keep myself barely visible around the house. I don’t like to get in my mother’s way. She appears to be far far away, as if I’m looking at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, as if she exists in a little glass globe up high on a shelf. Linda is going to be in high school in the fall, and my mother has turned most of her energy to editing and critiquing Linda’s social life.

Mother doesn’t like Linda’s friends. Jenny Marcus is an airhead, Krista Clay is rude, Mary Margaret Pearson is too skinny and her family is cheap (a bunch of skinflints). Heather Ohler’s little brother has diabetes, which isn’t contagious, but still, my mother doesn’t want Linda spending the night at their house just in case.

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