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Doll Crimes 13
13There’s nothing wrong with keeping some things to yourself. I know. But my mother holds details back like they’re black secrets with teeth, or monsters hovering in hidden places. Vicious things that can only come out when you look them in the eye. She leaves a lot of blanks for me to stare at. It’s not only about Auntie Clem—all those versions I’ve been told about how we got to stay with her, and later why we left. I don’t know the name of the place where I was born. I don’t know where we were when I took my first steps. I don’t know where we lived when I spoke my first word. I’m not even exactly sure how old I am. My mother lies about her age all the time. And if she won’t say hers, then I can’t know mine.I know who I am, but I don’t always know what. I’m a child. I’m a daughter. I’m both. I’m neither.Usually Mom says I’m twelve, maybe thirteen. People sometimes guess my age at sixteen, but only with the makeup and the clothes.
Doll Crimes 14
14There’s nothing special about Susie, no matter what he wants to think. There’s nothing unique about his house, his lifestyle, his stupid Star Wars jokes. Every time, every single one of them, they start to think they’re ahead of us. Some in small ways, some enough to make them think they’re untouchable—as the owner of our current beds, the master of our daily comforts. This isn’t always bad. Being underestimated only gives us more gaps. But if it is bad, it means things are about to shift over. That kind of change, it can’t always be stopped.Susie? There’s nothing special about him. He’s just another friend I’ve yet to figure out.These single guys we’ve known before.Mr. Big Car, Mr. Nice Shades, Mr. Trimmed Beard. Julian, Edward, Kyle. Max, Barney, Sam. The names they gave or the names we made up for them. Still so much the same.Unshaved cheeks and musty shirts. Dirty tiles, scattered socks. Dishes piled up in kitchen si
Doll Crimes 15
15Momma’s told me once or twice—and sometimes I remember—about the doll I had when I was really little. Samelsa. A name I made up myself. Mom says I wouldn’t stand for it when anyone dared mishear me and try to call her ‘Sam’. “Sam is a girl-name for hookers and strippers. Maybe waitresses,” she says. “I think you knew that, too. Even then. If people dared call your doll ‘Sam’ you’d give them the blackest evil eye. That look on your face! It was like a witchy old woman who’d just caught her neighbor’s dog peeing on her front porch.”It makes me giggle, the way she says this. Like I’m a shrunken hag underneath what people see, and they should really be afraid of me.Samelsa had a plastic face with painted freckles and big blue eyes that stayed stuck open. She was always staring. In my lap or under my arm or under the covers with me, she stared at Momma, she stared at the walls, she stared at the ceiling. When I turned her around and
Doll Crimes 16
16“Hey, we don’t have to go home if you don’t want to.”Home.We’re standing outside the train station in the late afternoon, the business rush and crush around us, overdressed people in uncomfortable shoes making queues and talking on phones and shouldering each other out the way. We stand to the side and watch the chaos. High above and over everyone’s heads, the notice boards switch information in neat, color-coded lines.Arrived.Departed.Delayed.Names of places I know and places I don’t. Wherever we go, or go back to, it’ll never be the same.“Yeah, I know, Mom,” I say, staring up.“It’s just, the thing is…”The way she won’t finish the thought, I know what she’s about to say.“I was so sure we’d be heading back with some cash today, I didn’t—you know—”“You didn’t take any extra?” It sounds like a question, but it shouldn’t be. She shrugs at me, guilty eyes. “We can try to sneak through?”We’ve done this before, but
Doll Crimes 17
17My mother would hate hearing this, but she wasn’t the only one who got hurt back in Carris. She wasn’t the only one who had stuff to cry over. I knew that same fist-round-the-ears feeling, the same helpless fear of a mismatched fight. Powerless. My mother’s unravelings were sporadic, sharp. Her mind a drawstring bag with a snapped cord, contents sliding out the mouth, slipping loose across the floor. A storm of tiny, shattered marbles. Funny how when she was hurting me, she thought she was the one really hurting.Those moments got closer together in the weeks before we left. She would hate hearing this, but they’re the reason I feel the same when she says we had to leave Carris.Not because of Clem, Momma. Because of you.I don’t remember where I was when I first recalled this, but I feel the sun beating down on me, tightening my damp skin. My hair is wet and whatever I’m wearing clings across my breasts, between my legs. My eyes
Doll Crimes 18
18My mom and me are both asleep on Susie’s surprisingly clean queen-size when he gets back from work. We’re stripped down to panties and t-shirts, and it’s okay, I think, because so far I don’t see the need to sleep with jeans on in Susie’s house. And I’ve always loved to sleep close to my mother when I can. Her scent is different when she sleeps, something spicy in the warmth of her sweat. She holds me closer, too. I bury my face in her throat and she locks her elbows through my arms, and the only thing that’ll wake us is the pins and needles in our hands and fingers when our stopped blood rushes free.I’m lying with her in the darkness when I hear his key in the lock, the door squeak open, the scuffle of his feet, the door slam shut. Footsteps.The room darkens a touch.“Well, isn’t this nice,” he says in a loud voice, in a tone that pretends this isn’t nice at all. “Where am I supposed to sleep?”I’m used to this kind of stupid q
Doll Crimes 19
19Take a thick black marker and draw a line. Before Carris, after Carris. Hold the pen in place too long and watch the ink spread into a wide, bleeding dot. The point of hesitation before we launched off the edge.Those final days.I didn’t know my mother and Clem weren’t friends enough for me. This word Clem chose for me: Lonely. When Clem was gone, I didn’t know I wasn’t friend enough for my mother. The word my mother chose for herself: Isolated. When Clem was away, my mom and me spent our evenings and hours of our nights together, curled up with popcorn and salted crackers, watching dumb TV shows. We still do this now when we can, but it was different then because the house in Carris was home. Not ‘we can be anywhere we want to be’ home, but the home where our pillows smelled like our hair, there wasn’t a room that didn’t have signs of us in it, and we all knew the exact right way to jimmy the back door handle so it wouldn’t stic
Doll Crimes 20
20I don’t want to talk to Susie. What do Susie and me have to talk about, anyway?It’s morning again. Day again. At least for now we’re ‘rich’. I wonder if he even knows. About our money, I mean.I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I comb my hair out with my fingers. I dig through my mother’s shoulder-bag—the denim one with the hole in its lining—and scratch out her lipstick. The dark mulberry one she says is too old for me. I paint my mouth the way she does—watching the lines, following the dips and slopes. I leave my eyes naked.I’m this girl, I tell myself when I look again at my full reflection. If I had my way, this is the only makeup I’d ever wear. Enough me and enough not-me. The dark shade brightening my skin, lighting up my irises. My face nude but not unmarked. A child with a woman’s mouth. Only my eyes are entirely my own.I pull on my boots and grab my jacket. I ease the front door shut behind me so the deadbolt
Latest chapter
Doll Crimes Epilogue
EpilogueSusie and me, we’ve decided my real age is seventeen. No more plastic bead bracelets, no more pigtails. No more cherry-scented lip gloss or strawberry-flavored gum. My real age is seventeen, we’ve said, but if anyone asks we tell them I’m eighteen. It was like a scene from the movie, the way we drove out of town. I sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down, and it wasn’t so cold that I needed any arms around me. I wasn’t shivering so bad I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was better than a movie, because usually in real life nobody cares that much. All those close-ups on faces. Panic or tears in the eyes. The parents rushing to the child. The kids rallying around their friend. All those understanding expressions, those touching words and heroic promises. In a movie, the star gets to be everybody’s priority. But nobody makes another person more important than them. Nobody puts everything of theirs on hold like that, not f
Doll Crimes 40-41
40She used to call me Angel-Kid. She used to call me Doll.Look, I hardly knew the woman. At least, that’s what my mother said, but I think she tried to help me once. I think she tried to stop this thing.“Little girls don’t need more than two eyes.”I know she never said this. Still, it’s her voice that speaks.
Doll Crimes 39
39I drink coffee until it makes my heart beat too fast. The refills are free and the waitress doesn’t talk to me like I’m a kid. This is why I stay, I guess. The way it feels like I’m okay to be here. The way it feels safe. The seats around me fill up with singles and duos. Laptops and notebooks. Actual books, too. I don’t have anything to occupy my hands or my eyes except the cup in front of me. I test out white sugar versus brown sugar. Sweetener. Sweetener and white sugar. Sweetener and brown. Cup by cup. I don’t look at the people around me. Something about them seems too real. The things they’re frowning at, mouthing at, even as they sit alone and type stuff or write stuff or make their notes on printed pages. Like the thoughts they’re having might really be real.I only leave the coffee shop when my bladder fills up, my belly pressing too tight against my button-up jeans. I pay. I stand. Probably the coffee shop has its own restr
Doll Crimes 38
38None of this happened in any way I really know. I see it anyway. I don’t know how much of it is crazy kid-nonsense, tossed together like a junk pile of barbed wire and blunt razor blades. I feel it anyway. The rust, the scratch. The facts.Uncle Steve waited down at the gate in his car. The drive was long, and mostly through darkness. Backstreet twists and dirt-track roads. I rode up front in my mother’s lap, her arms wrapped so tight around me I didn’t need my winter jacket, not with her and the heater, and the glowing buzz of Uncle Steve’s voice. “You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. Over and over again. Talking to my mother, and not to me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll do great.”The cellphone he gave her was a Nokia, small and black. They don’t make those anymore.“There are people in this world who dream every damn minute of meeting a girl like you. Girls like the two of you.”“I don’t know if we can make it alone.”“You’d rat
Doll Crimes 37
37Susie drives me to the strip mall twenty minutes out of town. I sit easy in the passenger seat of his old Camry, my hands folded between my knees. The day is rising bright and blue.I would be afraid, except I’m with him.I should be afraid, but I’m not.The strip mall peels into view ahead. A long, flat building with sunshine sparkling white on its roof. “Go see a movie or something,” Susie says. “I’ll meet you out front at five. To fetch you, I mean. And bring you…home.”The last time I went to the movies, Momma and me sat in the back row. It was the middle of the day, but it was dark in there. Giant people loomed on the screen in wide-angle views and close-up shots. When they spoke, their voices came from all sides. The Uncle who sat next to me told me what to do. I heard his voice just fine, even across all the noise. I fell asleep right after. Mom didn’t wake me until the end.I don’t remember what the movie was about.“Y
Doll Crimes 36
36“It’s cold outside.”My mother said this, too. Zipping my jacket. Flipping the collar. Covering my feet. That last night in Carris. The night we left.She was shaking, but not from the chill. Something shooting through her in liquid pulses, stinging her from the inside.Momma’s scared.I don’t know where I was when this came back, but a voice is asking: Can she take those off?Who asks what? What ‘those’ are. I don’t know. I don’t know.“We have to get out of here, honey.” She was in her sheepskin jacket. Her mouth was very red. “Where’s Clem?” I said.And she started crying like she didn’t care I could see.When this memory came back to me, I was sitting cross-legged on Susie’s bed. My mother was fanning fresh Polaroids and I was imagining her and Susie having sex in the space where I sat. My mother’s thighs, the curve of his shoulders when they hunch. The lube my mother secrets up herself leaking past the sheets. She’d u
Doll Crimes 35
35This is your Uncle. This is my Friend.That slow, sick wave coming up my insides and sloping down my scalp. Those other things she’s said to me.Open your legs.Flash.“Fuck you, Susie.”I say this out loud, looking at my mother as she lies asleep across from me. Naked and weak on murky-white sheets. Passed out, wasted, drunk, drugged, or just very tired, or sexed-out, or whatever. I don’t know and I don’t care. Her breath catches in the back of her throat in half-snores. She won’t wake up. I guess this is rage, spitting through my nerves so my hands shake as I look through her jacket. Mock-zips, half-sized pockets. But of course she wouldn’t leave them there. I dig the blue bag out from under the bed. She’s already split the new pictures into their own envelopes. Three packs of three. It doesn’t matter which shots are inside. They’re all the same, even when they’re not. Behind me, Susie clears his throat. “I didn’t know Po
Doll Crimes 34
34Look, I hardly knew the woman. I mean, I barely remember her now.Clementine Elizabeth Bough. I once saw a man on a jet-ski shatter through a wave. That’s how thinking about her feels. Careening. Crash. I wondered how different it would be if the wave was a brick wall. How he would look on the other side. Remembering her is a lot like this.The man who came to visit that night, his name was Lance. Lawrence. Something. “Your momma’s friend Lance is coming by,” Momma said. She was smiling at herself in the spare bathroom mirror, her makeup bag opened up in the sink. Bottles and tubes and shiny plastic pencils. It was the bathroom with ‘the best light’ she said, softening the color of her cheeks and darkening her mouth. She couldn’t stop smiling, her hands trembling, smearing mascara on her cheek. She’d brought the radio in with her, and she was listening to something with acoustic guitars and high voices, a steady beat. Somethin
Doll Crimes 33
33I wake up to the sounds of mom and Susie fucking. Specifically, I wake to the sounds of Susie fucking. The sounds my mother makes are nothing compared. I lie still for a moment, stiff and uncomfortable on this filthy couch, in my too-tight jeans, my eyes swollen from sleep and my hair tangled around my throat. I’m nauseous and slow and scared to move. There’s revolt in my body, it’s rallying forces. Like the second I stand, I’m going to throw up. Like the moment I think clear, reality will kick me in the gut.I nestle down and doze again for a while. When I open my eyes a second time, Susie is walking past me in his boxer shorts. No shirt. His gut is taut and firm, tough fat over tougher muscle, softening his lines. Not the other kind of gut, the heavier slap-barrel type that traps you down at the hips and thighs and makes you feel like you’re caught in a compressor. Crushing you, pounding through and around in smothering shudders.
