Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

Author:T Kira Madden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing


Josh likes to take us drag racing at night. The three of us are so drunk in the backseat, we barely ever look at his speedometer the way he would like us to. We are never impressed with Josh or his car, we just sit on each other’s laps, kissing, making jokes about dying together in a crash, till death do us part.

How ’bout I get you girls some Incredible Hulk? he says one night, when he’s tired of this. We usually drink Malibu with orange soda, and the sound of a new drink with a muscular name has us intrigued. Josh stops at a liquor store, picks up a bottle of Hennessy, and a mystical-looking bottle of milky-blue liquor. Rub it and a genie will come out, he says.

The next stop we make is at a 7-Eleven. Josh brings us three Big Gulp cups full of ice. He pours and mixes the two liquor bottles in the cups until we each have our own full bucket-sized cups of liquid. It’s a dirty swimming pool color; muddy. Careful, the Hulk’s vicious.

Do you even have a job? we ask. Do you go to college or something?

I go to the college of Hard Knocks, U.S.A., he says.

We drink the bitter-sweet through our straws. Harley and Nelle stick their monster-colored tongues out for Josh above the center console of the car—Please?—and he drops white pills of Xanax on them. Good girls.

I love bars, Harley says. You’re missing out, Kinky Chinky. Pills give you wings.

Josh drives us down to Miami. We have never seen it before, at night, lit up and strobing. We ask to stop in a pizza parlor to pee. Inside my stall, the walls begin to drip down around me. I’ve finished my Incredible Hulk, and my feet feel like they’re on a treadmill, rolling away. My hands reach for anything to hold on to so that I can stand up, or sit down, or keep my balance somewhere in between.

The green starts bursting out of me. I vomit on my bare legs, the floor, the toilet seat. I hear somebody else doing the same. A gagging chorus. The heels of our shoes slip through it, leaving squiggled trails of tile white. The three of us walk out of the parlor, onto the strip, goopy liquid running from our eyes, our mouths, down our chins. Josh is gone. I crawl down the sidewalk, spewing more green into the gutters. We stumble over one another and grip our shoes by the straps. The girls hold my hair.

I love you. I love you. I love you, too.

None of us can remember how we ever got home.



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