Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

Frank Curry thinks I’m a soft touch. Might be because I’m a woman. Might be because I’m a soft touch.

At home that night, I slipped a finger under my panties and masturbated for the first time, panting and sick.

No one needs a third girl. But now she’s getting some attention.

Nine is too old to be stuck pedaling in circles around the same block. What happened to the bike?

I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it’s the only way to truly keep your child. Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.

I was already tired of talking, and I’d said very little.

I hated being in Wind Gap, but home held no comfort either.

a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. The latter was particularly strange, since I’d known little about Mrs. Roosevelt, except that she was good, which at the time I suppose was enough.

Every phrase had to be captured on paper or it wasn’t real, it slipped away.

I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

When you die, you become perfect. I’d be like Princess Diana. Everyone loves her now.”

They were sweet, beautiful little girls. Just beautiful.” “But you didn’t really know them.” “I did know them. I knew them well.”

It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.

I was lovely to look at, as long as I was fully clothed.

Outside, our section of Missouri sky was, as ever, electric blue. It made my eyes water to even think of it.

I remember finding two long blonde lashes stuck to the side of my foot, and I kept them for weeks next to my pillow. At night I tickled my cheeks and lips with them, until one day I woke to find them blown away.

but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.

Too many late-night thoughts about their shiny, warm points. Dirty girl, indeed.

I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I’d be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me.

When we got home, she’d trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I’d done to displease her.

Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.

I’ve always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication - a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head.

But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. Like watching a rape and saying nothing.

senior on the baseball team took me under his wing, then took me into the woods. He wouldn’t kiss me until I serviced him. Then he wouldn’t kiss me because of where my mouth had been. Young love.

“I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters.”

Because that means the day has ended. I like checking days off a calendar - 151 days crossed and nothing truly horrible has happened. 152 and the world isn’t ruined. 153 and I haven’t destroyed anyone. 154 and no one really hates me.

Since I’d been here, she’d played at being Joan of Arc and Bluebeard’s wife and Princess Diana - all martyrs, I realized. She’d find even unhealthier role models among the goddesses.

A little circle of jagged lines, and within, a ring of perfect skin.

People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence.

I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.

“I’m tired of dying.”

See, Curry, Detective Willis felt I was holding back some information and so he sulked off, like all men do when they don’t get their way with women they’ve fooled around with.

I thought being home might do you good, but . . . I forget sometimes parents aren’t always . . . good for their kids.”

I’d stopped wearing skirts. Makes my legs too accessible to someone prone to touching. If he was anymore.

OxyContin is good stuff. Doing it with your kid sister isn’t.

“Good girl.” She smiled. I was getting tired of that phrase today.

and they were all staring at me as if I might be a cop. No, but I fucked one this afternoon. I smiled

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,” Amma said, pulling another Blow Pop from her pocket. Cherry. “Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.”

A smart, fucked-up little girl. Sounded familiar.

I wanted to cry at the idea of being able to sleep next to someone without clothes, no worries about what word might slip out from under a sleeve or pantcuff.

Turns out I like that retching and weakness and spit. Predictable, I know, but true.

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom.

I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you, my mother used to say

Lately, I’ve been leaning toward kindness.