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They Watched Her Then, They Watch Her Still

by Candace Hartsuyker 

High school girls commit suicide all the time. They drive their cars off cliffs, or they hang themselves in bathrooms, their sneakers slapping against the bathroom mirror, or they slit their wrists in bathtubs. Candlelight vigils are held, flowers are planted to memorialize that girl who has been lost. Lost, they say, like the girl isn’t dead and only needs to be found.

At sixth grade camp, a counselor will get fired after she tells a story about a man who tried to dig himself out of his own grave. His friends found him in the middle of winter, fingers bloodied and broken from clawing through wood. He died while they tried to pull him out, his frozen bones snapping against the warmth of their human hands.

That night, the girls will sleep with their windows open, the gauzy curtains fluttering in the breeze. They will be afraid of ghosts, afraid of nightmares. The mean girl will not fear any of those things. Secretly, she will laugh at those girls. Later, she will think that she should have been more frightened. Not afraid of the story, but of them.

The mean girl will learn that monsters are real, disguised under the shape of girls. Girls with slick, lipstick smiles who turn love into a weapon, jealousy into a cage. The mean girl will learn that it is surprisingly easy to fool everybody: the teachers, the school nurse, her mother. They don’t want to accept the truth, so it’s just easier for them to pretend it is something else, even though it isn’t that at all. A cut. A scrape. A bruise.

They’ll look concerned, say, honey, when did that happen?

The mean girl will answer: I was tired; I fell. They’ll believe her. They won’t notice, or they’ll just choose to ignore the throbbing left vein near her temple, her right eye that twitches when she’s nervous.

She will admire boys with letter jackets and crew cuts, boys who carelessly swing her over their shoulders like she is a pack of beer. One of those boys will become her boyfriend.

They’re in the bed of his truck, on Lover’s Ridge. It’s where everyone goes on Friday night. Students turn on the radio in their cars, drink cheap cans of beer, make out. His fingers press against her thigh. Her body clenches, then relaxes. The pads of his fingers leave a chain-link pattern of bruises on the insides of legs, claiming her as his.

Sometimes it hurts so much, a small tear will fall from her eye. She’ll bite her lip and taste the metallic tang of blood. But there will be pleasure in the pain. After playing a sport: thighs trembling from exhaustion. After him: the same. The mean girl will only date him for 4 months, 3 weeks and 17 days and this is the present he will leave her with: checkerboard, plaid, zigzags and lines.

The mean girl will tell someone—her best friend, another boyfriend— I’m nobody’s fool. Her mascaraed eyes wide and unblinking. But no one will listen to what she has to say. The mean girl will make up a story about a man—a neighbor or a teacher. A story about him taking her to his house or a hotel, laying her down in a bed with cheap, scratchy sheets. They won’t believe her. They never do.

The bathroom is the mean girl’s sanctuary. She sticks her fingers down her throat, and out comes yearbooks, the teacher she hated, love notes passed in class. There is a sharp toothed creature bucking and kicking inside her and she has to get rid of it, has to get rid of it all. She purges and heaves, scrapes the slick hollow of her throat with one jagged fingernail until there is nothing left. Until her body is empty. That’s what she wants. But sometimes she takes it too far. Sometimes she forgets so much that even the good memories go away.

She goes to the boring parties because she is the mean girl, she is somebody, and this is what is expected of her. She could miss one party or three, and it would be like a time warp, a moment frozen. The parties never change. Everyone gets rearranged like furniture in a dollhouse. Upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside.

Someone will get drunk, someone will puke, someone will walk in on someone else having sex and will beat the shit out of them or slink away, embarrassed. Someone will pee in a bush. Someone will cry. Someone will be left behind.

***

The mean girl remembers the mean girls who came before her. Before she becomes the mean girl, the school is one hot throbbing wound. Three queens rule the school. There are always three, here. They share the same name. They are so similar that one might question whether they are different people or the same person—one girl cut into thirds. Call them the E’s. E for evil. If you’d like, give them a popular girl name that starts with E: Emma, Elizabeth, Emily, Elle.

The mean girl’s mom will invite everyone in her eighth-grade class for a sleepover. Only the E’s will come. Once the girls are snuggled up in their sleeping bags and the room is dark, one of the E’s will prop herself up on her elbow and pass around a flask. The mean girl will choke on the burning sweetness, craving more. Tongues will loosen, secrets will be passed around.

Like, no one knows this except the mean girl, but E. Sawyer is the only true blonde. E. Halpern’s hair is ash blond and E. Gray’s hair is strawberry blonde. Did you know we dye our hair the same color?

The mean girl will say how she loves collecting unusual words, the texture of a new word like a marble balanced on her tongue.

Then will come the dreaded question. One of the E’s jabbing her in the side with her elbow. Her voice casual but with an edge of malice. So, who do you like? 

The mean girl will not see what others see: that she is a girl of shimmering, sparkling rage. She will obsess over her limp, greasy ponytail, her A cup breasts. She will not understand that the E’s are jealous of her until it is too late.

***

When she is in eighth grade, she receives an invitation to join their club. Or rather, the E’s demand that she write her name in blood.

E. Sawyer pinches the sleeve of her jacket in the library, says, sit with us at lunch.

The mean girl doesn’t even bother turning her head. No thanks, she says.

Do you even know who you’re talking to? E. Halpern says. She stands in the middle. E. Sawyer looms on the right. E. Gray stands at attention on the left.

Yep, she says and goes back to reading her book.

You’ll be sorry, E. Gray. says, right before one of the others hisses, shut up. 
The mean girl knows they’ll be pissed, will do something to her and then get bored, move on to their next victim. At lunch, they throw food at her head. In the bathroom, they splash water on the floor so she slips. In between classes, they put sticky notes on her backpack, on the back of her jacket, anywhere they can reach. The notes are not very original. The mean girl will marvel at how each girl’s handwriting is so similar: perfectly manufactured and bubbly. They only write two words: Kill Me. Later, the mean girl will write those same words to some other girl, marvel at the way her wrist jerks across the page, her handwriting morphing into theirs.

***

She can’t breathe. High school is a noose; it is wrapping itself around her, tightening its grip. The mean girl doesn’t want to care about high school, her flat chest, how many friends she has. But she does care, in a way. That’s the hardest part: the caring.

It’s the small things that bother her the most: the gum on her lock that she scrapes off with a pen. Pulling sticky strands with her fingernails, so she can open her locker. The notes written in smeary gel pen that say I wish you would die.

She imagines the death of one of the E’s. Opening her locker and finding nothing but glittery dust, a black hole where she used to be. The slitted mouth of the locker door swinging open, like the opened mouth of a girl, her silent scream.

Before lights out at camp, all the girls are invited to the rec room to watch a movie, a chick flick. Everyone sits on the floor. The E’s squish together so there is a wide space between them and the mean girl.  Whenever the mean girl leans to one side, they move away.

The mean girl sits apart, legs tucked under her, staring straight ahead. The only thing that gives her away are her arms, hanging stiffly at her sides. Night after night, this continues. The counselors don’t notice. They never do.

The mean girl will hang out with Owen. Pine needles crunching under their feet, he will take her for a boat ride across the lake, the water dark and glassy. The only sounds they’ll hear are his canoe paddle swishing in the water, crickets chirping, a bull frog calling. They will tie the canoe against the dock and then fall asleep tangled in each other’s arms. In the morning, the counselors will yank them out, admonish them for their shocking behavior. They’ll grin at each other. The mean girl will think it was worth it, even if she has the worst sunburn of her life, even if her arms are covered in mosquito bites, even with mud squelching beneath her feet.

In detention, they sit there. The counselors do not give them a book to read, a piece of notebook paper or a pen. Their phones are confiscated, so they stare at a ticking clock mounted on the wall. They are allowed to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water, to buy a snack from the snack machine but that is all. Owen finds a stretched-out paperclip under his desk. He stabs his finger and smears the desk with bloody letters. The mean girl thinks she will never forget those words as long as she lives: Owen <3 Riley.

After detention, Owen is the one who stops it from happening. He blocks her body with his arm, steps in front of her so only a sprinkle of cold water soaks the toe of her sneaker. The mean girl thinks about how much work it must have took: how they had to buy ice from the store and rip open the bag, dumping it into a bucket then keeping it in someone’s truck all day. The heaviness of a bucket slick with condensation. Someone having to hide in the hallways and carry it, guessing she would pass by her locker and grab her books.

The next day at school, the mean girl tucks a pen behind her ear. It gets stuck and Owen untangles it from her hair. She pretends she didn’t do this on purpose, though actually, she did.

Owen won’t stop tapping his feet. During lunch he decides he’ll run on top of the school buildings, leap from rooftop to rooftop. He asks her if she’ll come with him. She’s afraid of heights, but she goes. He holds her hand, lets go, runs again. They’re both breathing hard. She laughs. She forgets she is afraid of heights. She slips. It’s only a scraped knee and a sprained ankle but she should know. She has been warned: this boy is bad news.

The mean girl is beginning to distrust Owen. She can’t explain why. She just has this feeling. She has this image of him: a quick flash, some girl’s underwear draped on his bed.

The world she lives in feels like a comic book. Bright colors contrasting with thick, dark lines. When Owen talks to her, instead of words coming out of his mouth, she sees air bubbles above his head, floating. She brings a paper bag lunch even though no one does this anymore. She tries to ignore the amorphous shapes of cafeteria food, the burgers runny with juice, a congealed mass that must have once been mashed potatoes but is now a grayish puddle. Her skin tingles like someone is breathing down the back of her neck, but when she turns around, no one is there.

***

The mean girl remembers almost everything that happened to her in high school. Old pranks get recycled years later to become something new. She sticks notes on lockers, humiliates girls whose bodies quiver like squares of Jell-O at the sound of her voice. She has to frighten people, even if it makes her stomach hurt, even if it means she doesn’t really have any true friends. Because if no one fears her, she will be nothing. She will be as meaningless as a glob of gum stuck to the bottom of some little kid’s shoe.

The first time the mean girl kisses Owen, she tastes blood. She realizes she accidentally nipped his lip. He says he doesn’t mind.  When she is seventeen, the mean girl will suck a guy’s dick because she is bored. Her knees will rub against the cold tile of someone’s bathroom floor. Once he’s gone, she’ll lock the bathroom door and spit the taste of him out of her mouth. She’ll brush her teeth with someone else’s toothbrush, not even caring about germs. She’ll scrub until she tastes blood. She’ll think: I deserved that.

She’ll wish she had a real boyfriend, one who would get mad at the guy whose dick she sucked. Who would get in a fight with this guy. His shirt torn, she’d kiss his bloody knuckles like a benediction or a prayer.

The mean girl will tell Owen about the girls she hates. She’ll tell him about playing softball, P.E the other day, the feeling she had, the cracking noise the bat made, jolting her arm, her whole body. The power she’d felt from the impact of the force she had made. She’ll say, I would have liked to do that to them. But that will be the wrong thing to say, because Owen will back away; he will tell her he has to go. The next week, she will see him arm in arm with a nice girl and he will never talk to her again.

***

It has started to get dark. The E’s slither out of the girl’s bathroom and follow the mean girl as she trudges up a hill. There is an old well at the campsite on the far corner of the school. The rumor is that it is 30 feet deep. The E’s tell her an old wives’ tale about looking at your reflection in the water. It usually works best on Halloween or during a full moon, but you can do it anytime. You close your eyes and spin around and when you open your eyes, you see your future boyfriend’s reflection staring back at you.

They pull the bucket up, arm muscles straining; the water is filled to the brim. The girls all spin around and then she does too. For once, she goes along with their games, glad to be included for once.

The girls giggle, share what they have seen. A boy with a stern mouth and curly red hair, a boy with straight brown hair, a boy with spiked hair and frosted tips.

The mean girl stays silent, mad at herself for playing along. It’s a stupid game. When the mean girl looked, she saw her reflection. Why did she think she would see anything different? She should have just left them.

Well? E. Sawyer says. Who’d you see? 

She knows they want her to say Owen. The whole school is still buzzing with the news that she and Owen were caught sleeping in a canoe together and got detention.

My ring, one of the E’s says, it fell. Can you get it?

The mean girl looks down at her feet. She is the only girl in sneakers. The other girls wear slippery sandals or torn, fuzzy slippers.

The mean girl knows that if she doesn’t do what they ask, they’ll keep bullying her. Even with the bucket pulled all the way up, she has to balance her knees on the lip of the well to reach it. She plunges her hand into the water; it is colder than it looks.

As she touches the ring, she thinks of throwing it down the well instead, hearing the plink as it hits the bottom, a sound so faint it is hardly a sound at all.  The bucket is clipped to a rope and she thinks she should have just unclipped it instead of climbing up. She deposits the ring in E’s warm palm and that is when she feels herself slip. The rope is scratchy against her palm, like fake hair.

She hooks her sneaker over the edge. The sole is slimy with mud. Clouds shroud the moon. She doesn’t know if one hand pushed her or several, or if it is her own stupidity that makes her fall. Her hands reach out blindly. There is a clicking noise and she knows the bucket and the rope are gone. Her elbow scrapes hard against something and bleeds through her thin sweatshirt. Down, down, down. She can’t see their faces, can only hear their voices, their high-pitched laughter.

When she finally stops falling, she estimates she is in two feet of slimy, cold water. The well must be ten to twelve feet deep. Her ankle makes a crunching noise when she tries to move. Her body screams in pain. Her knee throbs. Her hands feel the cold, cylindric sides of the well. She screams until her voice grows hoarse. The world above her is silent. There are no crickets chirping. She can’t even hear the wind.

One of her shoes has disappeared. Her socks are soggy. The water sloshes. She is freezing in her thin sweatshirt. There is only darkness, and when she tilts her head back, she can’t even see the sky. The absence of anything to look at frightens her. She’s heard of things crawling into wells. What if a snake bites her? What if it rains hard like it does sometimes, water filling around her until she is trapped and drowns? What if it snows and she slowly freezes to death? She imagines a snowflake falling, dusting her hair. She faints when she feels something kiss her hair. Once she wakes, she sees it is only the thread from a spiderweb.

Her mouth is parched, and she is starving. Her phone is dead. She imagines she can hear the rumble of the bus, everyone leaving her behind. The campsite is only eight miles away from the school, but it feels much farther. The campsite, the school. Neither are places she likes to be. She strains her ears listening for voices until she gives herself a headache. They’ll come back for me, she thinks. They have to. But will they?

She sleeps dreamlessly, not knowing how long she’s slept, but when she wakes, she can see the sky. It is of an indeterminate color; she can’t tell if it is morning or night. A crowd of girls are next to her. Girls from the past, the present, the future. She doesn’t know how they all fit inside the well, but somehow, they do. A girl in a green jacket covered in a cat hair says that she threw up on the bus ride to camp and for the rest of the year everyone called her puke girl. A twist of fate: the suicide note she wrote got pushed so far back it got stuck behind a gap in the drywall. It was found years later, after everyone in her family had died, after a developer decided to bulldoze the house.

 A second girl with a pinched face and a cut across her neck says proudly, they all served jail time for what I did. One girl with red hair holds snails and slugs crushed against her palms. In her other hand, she carries a basket full of snickerdoodles. Her voice eerie, off key, she sings, girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.

The mean girl tries to forget the rest. The EMTs, the hospital. A thick blanket wrapped around her. Someone giving her a paper cup of something sweet to drink and a palmful of M&Ms. Afterward, there are nightmares. They don’t go away.

One of the E’s uses the sharp end of a bent-up paperclip to prick her finger. Once she’s drawn enough blood, she writes a name on the wall. The other E’s watch, transfixed. Their lips part in silent O’s. The mean girl knows she shouldn’t be in the room with them, watching like a coward, watching her name appear, but she can’t seem to look away.

There is a picture of her face taped to a dartboard, complete with a mustache and devil horns. It’s her latest school picture, scanned from the yearbook and blown up to size. Her smiling face is riddled with tiny holes, as if earlier someone had gotten mad and attacked the picture with a pencil, freshly sharpened. The girls sit on the floor in the garage.

 Now we make our wish, one of the E’s says.

The others bow their heads. There is a hum, an electric energy in the air. The girls link hands. Somehow, she is pushed into the circle with them. They don’t seem to notice that she is there. She knows that if she were to look in a mirror, her face will look like one of theirs.  

She feels her hand twitch, a sharp jolt of static. In the darkness, her t-shirt presses against her body.

One of the E’s lights a match.  Picture her face, she whispers, and let’s watch her disappear. She says it not only like it is a command or a wish but something real. Some of the girls have their eyes open. They watch the picture as if hypnotized, eyes shining with excitement, faces blushed pink.

The mean girl can’t move.

One of the E’s is digging her fingernails into the palm of her hand, and she can’t let go.  Her own face begins to warp and fold, dissolved by the flames. She feels a pain run from her hand all the way to her elbow. Their doll heads hang down with limp, broken looking necks. 

She is being erased. Suddenly all she wants to do is run, but she can’t. One of the girls cries out, separating from the circle of locked hands. She writhes on the floor. Her eyes are open, but it is like she is very far away.

I see her, she cries, she’s drowning or falling—she’s— Her index finger trembles wildly from wall to wall. Is she pointing at one of the E’s? To the mean girl who is part of the circle? Or to the dartboard where there used to be a face on the wall? The girls fall silent. Someone flicks on the garage light, plunging them out of darkness.

Her second nightmare plays out like this: everyone from school is asleep on the long, gummy tables in the science lab. The room feels dusty, cold like a tomb. The mean girl uses her hand like a knife, slices through them one by one. There is no blood. Their eyes stay closed. Some students explode like confetti or drops of rain. Others spill out textbooks, hall passes, inconsequential memories with friends.

When she gets to Owen she locks her knees around his thighs, doesn’t hesitate, just splits him open. His eyes flash open, and the pain is vulnerable, human. But he never says I love you and he never calls her name. His blood comes out sticky, like ropes of red licorice. She keeps pulling, searching. Instead of a heart, there is a cigarette case, and inside it, a sound like a bomb. A sound that goes tick, tick

The mean girl saves the E’s for last, because she wants to think of the most gruesome way for them to suffer. When she kills them, all three of the E’s chirp and explode like Jack N’ the Boxes with eerie smiles and unhinged jaws. Voices taunt her. You should kill yourself. She sits on the boxes, but they still won’t close.

You’re worthless. You should, you should. Finally, she smashes them with a mallet, but the music of her name goes on and on. Riley, they say, that’s a boy’s name. Those shoes, they say. You look like a boy. They do not try to disguise their laughter. And in between, Owen’s heart keeps going tick, tick. Tick, tick

What no one knows is that the E’s have nightmares too. During restless nights, they pour over articles on the internet, printing them out and taping them to their walls. The girl from Minnesota who was slut shamed. The one who hung herself, her feet thwacking against the opened door. They wonder what was more disturbing: the limp body before them or the swinging body reflected in the bathroom mirror?

***

The first and only time the mean girl tries to commit suicide is at camp. She knows that there are girls like her down there, down in that well, and if only she could reach the mushy bottom, she could set them free. If only. She is determined; she will hold those girls like ghosts forgotten in her hands, and she will tell them that she is here, that she has listened, that she understands.

***

The E’s will get married. Girls like them always do. Their daughters will look like them. The only difference is that they will be shorter, taller, younger. So beautiful you want to look away.

They will have successful careers. They will become teachers, lawyers, doctors. When they are 26 or 30 they will infiltrate a high school party. Drunk on cheap beer, in one voice that sounds like a little girl standing in an empty room, they will ask, was I good enough? Was I? They will wait their whole life for a voice to answer back: you were, you were.

What are they forgetting? That they never became any of those things. Their bodies slowly fading: first their ankles and toes, then their legs and torsos but never their faces. Their perfect faces, never growing old.

The school: a ghost town. It’s too late to stop it from happening; it’s already begun. Outside, a chopped tree. Branches curled in a pile like a tangle of bones.  The library. Books crowding the floor. Spines lying splayed like birds with broken wings. 

Painted walls peeling in strips. Flyers tacked to walls and lockers. Bathrooms doors swung open. A flyer mushy in her hand, soft and rotting, like a body decaying. The blackboard in classroom 2B chalked with graffiti.

The swimming pool sludgy with algae and filmed with a slick sheen of water, enough to dip your toes in, if you wanted. Rusty hooks like empty mouths where the lane lines used to be. Lockers scratched with ghostly letters from the faint scritch of a switchblade.

The bathroom littered with leaves. Vines latching onto shower heads, slithering through opened windows. The words they spray painted so long ago as a joke, the words still visible even though they’ve aged with time. We aren’t ghosts yet, but we will be. What a joke. The three furies. That’s what they thought they were.

The thoughts they had. They had never wanted to leave school, were having the time of their lives, were maybe the best they’d ever be. A group thick as blood. Cheerleader smiles and bouncy ponytails. Waving their pom poms, the boys carrying their football helmets under their arms, chucking stinky shoulder pads at each other in the steamy locker rooms.

***

The E’s think of her possible fate. Option A. Riley breaks up with Owen. Option B. Owen breaks up with Riley. Option C. Owen cheats on Riley with one of them. Option D. Riley transfers schools and is never seen or heard from again.

If this were a high school quiz, it would be so easy. What’s not so easy is that after her attempted suicide, Riley survived. The innocence of twirling the jump rope in second grade, chanting, stick and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. The apple juice and Oreos the teachers gave them during snack time. All comforts they will never have again.

At night, the E’s hover over a single cellphone, search for her name. Her Facebook page a time capsule of all the mistakes they’ve ever made. Sometimes they search for their own names. They study the placement of letters and feel strange, seeing a picture of some girl who is the same age as them and has the same name, yet isn’t them.

They sleep on top of the school buildings, the ones that are still standing and haven’t yet caved in. They try to make the best of it, twist toward each other, yawning. It’s The Dead Girl’s Slumber Party, a selective group of three.

But even with their eyes closed, one image burns like the ripple of a flame: a hand reaching to them and their bodies turning away.  She’s just a flicker, a girl-like shape stuck forever in the bottomless dark of a well. The moment frozen like a clock ticking, ticking. They watched her then. They watch her still.


Candace Hartsuyker is a third-year fiction student at McNeese State University and reads for PANK. She has been published in BULL: Men’s Fiction, Maudlin House and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter at C_Hartsuyker.

Twenty-Twenty

Lunulae