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What a sad thing, to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. God, how I hate the sound of it. Good girl, thinks Rachel, is mountains and mountains worse than good boy. All a good boy has to do to be good is put on a clean shirt. Nobody wants to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. There can’t be a single girl in here who wants to be just fine. ◆
I wouldn’t mind being a dog, said Izzy. If you’re a dog then you get older faster. Dogs are never really teenagers. They’re just babies for a few months, and then adults for the rest of their lives until they get put to sleep. It seems civil, said Izzy, to not have to be a half thing, a half human, a.k.a. a teenager, for which things are so in-between for so long that it seems impossible to understand the way things really are. ◆
As Izzy neared the water she began to see that the ocean was violent. In her ears she heard the waves crashing, and as she ran closer, she realized that the waves were giant. Huge rock islands rose out of the water in the distance. They were sharp and serrated and white-tipped. The edges of the beach were equally sharp and jagged. The cove itself looked violent, like half of it had tipped over and spilled directly into the ocean, and like this other half might do the same at any time. The beaches of Douglas, Michigan, were nothing like this. The beaches of Douglas, Michigan, looked like
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Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller are not hand clapping. They are boxing. But there is a collaboration in the way that they stand.
The referee is less than a person. The referee and the coaches and the judges, they are all so deeply separate. They think they are involved with this game, that they have power, but Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller have hoarded all the power for themselves. What is going on between Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller has nothing to do with the judges. The referees and the coaches are like the teachers who supervise their breaks between classes. They exist only to tell one the rules of recess. They are never involved in the politics, in the colossal dramas that unfold in the minutes between classes. ◆
It can be intoxicating to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent’s eyes. Tanya Maw wonders, while staring into the eyes of Rose Mueller, if this is why she is interested in both boxing and acting. There are so few activities that allow the intimacy of staring.
The invisible network through which young American girls learn hand-clapping games is fueled by older sisters. The best older sisters from which to learn hand-clapping games are the ones who have recently departed from girlhood to driving. If one does not have an older sister, one must access an older sister through a friend. While it is from older sisters that the games are originally learned, once a game has been introduced to a group of girls it spreads among them like a sickness. If there is rumor of a new hand-clapping game, one must learn it as quickly as possible. If the new game
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A life taken over can be wonderful. But it can also be sappy and stupid and dramatic. A play directed by God is many people’s stage of choice.
Rose Mueller has honed the art of looking away as one of her key weapons.
Eye contact is the most subtle, the most effective form of manipulation that a fighter can possess. By looking at the ceiling Rose Mueller gives Tanya Maw nothing.
The parents, and the coaches, and the piecemeal off-white, ramshackle chorus of men that the Daughters of America tournament has designated as judges, all of them are dull around the edges in a way that glares compared with the searing radiance of these girl fighters.
The judges’ armpit sweat stains look so earthly and sick, the clear mark of a human in decay, which is an aura that is completely absent from these girl fighters. These girl fighters are the opposite of humans in decay. They are accelerating away from death with speed and precision. Immortality wafts off of them. Even the dullest of the judges can feel that the girls are not quite human.
In the game, you stuff the insides of your cheeks with as many s’mores-sized marshmallows as you can. The person who is able to get the most marshmallows in their mouth, and still say the tongue twister “chubby bunny,” wins.
Like all games, there is an inherently wasteful aspect to Chubby Bunny. After the game is finished, the players spit everything out. A pile of saliva-soaked, bile-lined marshmallows makes a gooey white mound.
The spitting out of the marshmallows is one of the most fun parts of the game. The spitting is accompanied by incessant giggling. When the marshmallows leave the girls’ mouths it looks like the girls are vomiting up soft, Renaissance fresco clouds.
Praying in public is like draping oneself in a sheet. It is an activity that makes one absent. Inside absent activities it is possible to look more closely at one’s environment.
