The summer you started menstruating, your mother started menopause. That July unfolded like a memory, the edges blurred, the light thick enough to drown in. You would be 12 by Halloween.

You turned sideways on impulse each time you passed a mirror. You attended flute lessons every Wednesday and never practiced in between. You discovered desire in the combined smell of sweat and too much cologne worn by an older boy in the neighborhood. On particularly sticky days you took a perverse pleasure in craning your head between your knees to catch a whiff of the new invisible things that were stretching across your insides like a spiderweb and crawling out into the world. You went to slumber parties where you kissed your friends’ faces and scratched their backs and learned to tend to your lust alone, in darkened basements, your sleeping bag pulled over your face.

A foreign melancholy you would later know as angst had settled in your chest as you began to fear that the mundanity of these days you spent balancing on the precipice of adolescence would somehow come to define you; the stench of your city and all its narrow hallways, the brown lapdog you were given in place of a sibling barking in vacant corners and backing down from his own echo, the kitchen chair left empty by a father who worked late, the staccato humming of a mother who didn’t mind.

You were close to your mother in those days, in a way that you never had to think about. Instinct told you to stay near, to study her outline as to understand the shape your own existence would one day take. When she appeared in your bedroom doorway, her leather sandals slapping the hardwood like a penance, her earrings casting strange shadows across the walls, her thin arm extended towards you, you knew to grab on as tight as you could, while it was still yours to hold.

***

No one told you how dark it would be. You sat on the toilet holding your once baby blue underwear stretched beneath your chin like string twisted in a back-of-the-classroom game of cat’s cradle, but fixed your gaze to the upper right corner where the green wallpaper was starting to peel and coil around itself. When you called your mother into the bathroom it was as though you were hearing the echo of some other girl’s trembling voice reach for the term ‘mommy’ for the first time in years,

“Oh no,” she exhaled before she’d even made it to the doorway.

That morning, you knelt to the carpet in front of her as she wound your copper curls, indistinguishable from her own, into two braids on either side of your flushed face while softly humming the tune to a lullabye neither of you knew the words to anymore. 

She left the pads she no longer needed on your dresser, wrapped in a silk scarf, tied into a bow. Like this, you inhabited the life that she was shedding. While you left cuts on your legs from hidden attempts at shaving with hesitant hands, she left hair to grow out of her chin and ears. She started cooking with the kitchen door propped open. When the heat rising through her stout frame grabbed hold of her throat, she would run to the threshold between in and out and close her eyes as if in prayer, waiting for the momentary relief of wind. During dinner you eagerly recalled every detail of your day, your mouth full of meat and sauce, while she stared at you blankly, without so much as making sounds of affirmation, as if just becoming acquainted with language, with being alive.

There were times it seemed to you she was becoming older and younger at once. One night you woke up to her hand over your mouth.

“I’m hot and hungry. Let’s get a treat,” she urged, and walked you towards the static fluorescents of the ice cream shop down the block. It was there that, through drunken girlish giggles, she revealed her bygone proclivities for marijuana and shoplifting. She told you that a year before meeting your father she fell into a brief engagement with a mustached banker two decades her senior. She told you that her former fiancee, now bald and fat, had recently found her on facebook where he messaged her to say she was more beautiful than ever. She told you she responded by deactivating her account, though you watched the reflection of her palm-sized feed expand across her bifocals as her thumb repeatedly swiped upwards the next morning. You bit your nails until your fingers were flushed and torn.

She started speaking to your dad in a way you had never heard before. There was an edge to her voice, a sharp indifference. She stopped wearing makeup and started ordering her steak rare. When she played tug-of-war with the dog she would growl back and bear her teeth. You knew then that something was about to change. Something already had. 

***

In August, a sliver of a girl from the suburbs who rode her bike everywhere and always wore her red hair in pigtails started coming over for dinner a few times a week. Your moms were on the PTA together.

“Mr. and Mrs. Willhite are… experiencing some difficulties,” your mother told you in a drawn hush the first time you looked up from the living room door frame to see blue eyes spread as far apart as a moth’s open wings staring back at you from the sofa where Maura discussed her time away at some summer camp in Maine with your father, like some uncanny replacement of you. 

You didn’t mind Maura’s company, but you didn’t indulge in it either. Most of the time she was meek enough that her presence was as perceptible to you as the dust churning through the air that seemed to fall, fall, and never settle. She would sink into the edge of your bed while you visited various tabs on the internet and occasionally murmur something like “I only feel like myself when I’m blue,” and you’d respond something like “I only feel like myself when I’m hungry,” and the silence that followed was so earned and earnest that neither of you ever seemed to mind sitting on opposite sides of it.

One day she showed up with swollen eyes and splotches of red spreading beneath her freckles, and when she closed the door to your bedroom she started to weep with such grief and fervor you had to fight the urge to giggle at the surreality of the scene. You knew how to cry like this, and often did, but only ever in practice for sadness rather than the presence of it. Whatever Maura was feeling raged deep in her being, kicking and clawing at her insides like a distressed fetus.

It had finally happened. Her mom signed a lease on an apartment a few towns over.

“I’ll only be back on the weekends, when my dad gets me,” Maura said through sobs.

“But junior high’s a month away. Who am I supposed to talk to now?” You heard yourself ask and immediately felt a slippery rush of guilt about the ease with which you could turn Maura’s pain into a spotlight for your own.

“I’ll ask for the landline number, okay? You can call me whenever.”

“Why do you have to go at all? I mean, why does he get the house?”

“I guess… I guess because he’s the one who bought it,” she resigned.

“What a dick!” the word fell out of your mouth sounding just as contrived as it was.

She laughed, but shook her head, and said “No, he’s not. He’s just a dad.”

“I got my period,” you blurted without knowing why, only that she had offered a type of vulnerability you had never received before and felt obligated to respond in kind. She looked at you with a wayward expression, but then squeezed your shoulder twice as your foreheads gently fell towards each other. This was all it took to imbue your forced companionship with depth. Though you shared very few concrete similarities, from that day on your closeness was sustained by a nameless force that all of your future relationships would approach but never quite catch.

Every weekend after that, your sleepovers went like this: you held onto your mom’s waist and avoided eye contact with strangers for the whole train ride to the suburbs where Maura’s dad would invite her to stay for a glass of red. You and Maura would change into your swimsuits, yours a black and white checkered one-piece with an attached skirt that your mother said looked flattering, and Maura’s an indigo bikini with ties resting on either side of the bony hips she said made her look like a boy. Maura would tell you about the latest tenant who winked at her in the elevator of her mom’s apartment building and while you pretended not to be jealous of the newfound attention her part-time home had brought with it, she pretended not to hate it. Your mom would wave goodbye from the driveway and go home. Maura’s dad would get drunk and go to bed. As you waded through the evening, you and Maura would grow progressively high off of one another’s presence until your bodies called you back to them with a shiver and a heave. 

Maura always fell asleep first, beside you on the living room floor, beneath a too-small blanket, her open mouth breathing into your ear as though perpetually whispering a secret, the back of her hand falling where your right tit would soon sprout. 

***

A week before your first day of junior high, your mother hung a yellow quilt to dry over the second floor railing, sending the scent of bleach and artificial citrus to echo through your cramped foyer. It was the hottest day of summer yet, and all the colors of your life were bleeding into one blinding shade of nothing. 

You had just laid your sticky body spread across the oak of your bedroom floor when your mother came raging through the door, yelling about the dirty handprints you left all over her expensive blanket.

“You had it on the railing,” you said, as if she had done so by accident.

“When will someone in this house think about anyone other than themselves?” she cried, throwing her arms out so quickly that she knocked a small bottle of floral perfume off of your dresser and onto the floor where it shattered, a piece of its acidic glass nicking your left ear.

You sat up and looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to run to you and cradle your head and tell you how sorry she was for everything that had ever gone wrong in your life, but she didn’t move at all. When you touched your ear and extended the red, wet tip of your finger forward, you could have sworn the corners of her mouth dimpled as they inched upwards.

***

On the last weekend of summer, Maura’s parents hosted a party in their backyard. They had put their separation on hold and were trying to make up for a summer spent at odds. 

“You must be pretty happy about all this, huh?” you asked Maura from her windowsill where the falling sunlight burned the sterile scent of chlorine into your swimsuits permanently.

“I’ve kind of stopped caring,” she sighed, and you almost believed her. 

You watched the adults below like they were dolls. There was your father, miming a golf swing to a group of polo shirts and khakis. There was Maura’s mom flitting around, filling every empty glass and pause in conversation, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny, even at jokes that were at her expense. Maura’s dad had taken refuge in his study hours ago. Your mother was nowhere to be found.

“Let’s get some beers,” Maura declared, a devilish glow in her eyes. 

“What’s the rush, Mo?”.

“We could split one. Just to see.” 

When you looked at her then, you felt beautiful just by proximity. Maura, with wispy cherry bangs and well-arranged freckles and a big house with a pool in the yard. You didn’t know what she was really getting at with the beers, but you didn’t care. Your body moved faster than your mind did. 

Downstairs, you rifled through the fridge on Maura’s instruction, looking for cans, not bottles. Once you had one wrapped in your sweatshirt and were starting to make your escape back to the bedroom, a noise you had never heard before halted you. 

An animal was trapped, you thought. It had to be that. You shuffled towards the sound, towards Maura’s father’s study, the door to which had never loomed so large. As you did, what you heard grew louder and more frenetic. A passing shadow caught your eye as it interrupted the bar of light coming from under the door. When you looked down, just for a moment, you could see the illuminated outline of your mother’s leather sandals, perfectly parallel.

When you handed Maura the beer, she finished it seemingly in one gulp, and you spent the rest of the party in a smog, watching her mouth form strange shapes without being able to make meaning of the words coming out of it. 

While she murmured nonsense in her sleep beside you that night, your stomach convulsed and fear crept up your throat. You called your father and, in feverish whispers, asked him to pick you up.

“Don’t tell mom!” you insisted, but she was awake and pacing through the house when you walked in, the ghostly swell of her nightgown making it look like she could lift off the ground at any moment.

Without a word passing between you, she tucked you into bed and kissed your eyelids shut. You wrapped your arms around her neck and tugged her tightly towards the tender give of your young body, not to keep her close as much as to keep her from drifting away.

Alone in the suffocating stillness of your bedroom, the dog curled by your feet, you pressed your thumb against the back of your front teeth and soothed yourself with fantasies of a future in which you were a totally different type of girl.

Once the house had grown settled and silent and sad, you watched your mother’s shadow steadily emerge in the hallway and grow impossibly large as she descended to the ground floor. You sat up,  the reluctant surveyor you had become, into an angled ray of moonlight that bore through your curtains as though hungry for you. 

You tightened your jaw and listened to the front door creak open as your mother stepped out into the ripe night, where for every breath of air she let into the depths of her, an even deeper howl followed.


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