Headshot

by Rita Bullwinkel

Get her, says Artemis Victor’s coach to her. Hit her, Andi Taylor’s coach says. Artemis and Andi, and all the girls of the Daughters of America tournament, wish their coaches weren’t here with them, that they were allowed to fight each other without these embarrassing, know-nothing attachments. The coaches really are useless, like stoned older brothers getting paid by their parents to chaperone a middle school dance.

Nobody can ever possibly know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it.

Andi thinks wearing lip gloss is stupid, the way it makes girls’ lips look sweaty and wet, and suddenly Andi is sure that Artemis has loads of lip gloss, a whole, sticky collection of lip gloss is definitely in Artemis Victor’s backpack. What a stupid thing to like slathering on your lips.

Rachel Doricko was one child of many siblings and had the firm belief that there was nothing she could do to be significant to the world and that, win or lose, time would roll forward marked by arbitrary increments, and that was the only real thing she knew mattered and that she knew for sure. Whereas, Kate Heffer looked at her life and what lay before her and she allowed time and events to circle her, things occurring for the sole purpose that she could walk through them, be a part of them, and then move on. For Kate, time was a thing that existed only to have her in it. Kate was a goal setter. She made detailed lists and kept highly organized folders. She will become an event planner, making twenty weddings happen a summer, delighted by the fact that she has bent time to her will, orchestrated the event, and then the event has taken place. Because of this, this match will be a series of events gone wrong for Kate, things she thought she could control but that get thrown back in her face. Rachel Doricko will take Kate Heffer’s movements, one hit at a time, and pull them into herself and then spit them back out, better articulated and better made.

She thinks of herself as an embodiment of the term bog-boned, as in, she thinks of herself as having bones the size of swamplands.

That’s the thing with children. So often what they do, or what they think they should do, or what they think they are good at is just some product of something someone told them that they would be good at. If you’re tall people say, Surely you’re magnificent at basketball. If you’re a girl shaped like a block without hips, people say swimming, boxing, the discus, and then one thinks, Am I good at these things? Surely if people say it, it must be true.

Andi’s in snooze city because sleeping is her all-time best coping mechanism.

The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

Kate Heffer will say to her parents, I never wanted to become the best in the world at boxing. And Kate Heffer’s mother will affirm this delusional statement, this clear contradiction of what Kate herself had voiced only days before, and say, Of course you didn’t, honey. Only vulgar girls become the best in the world at boxing. It is this ability of Kate Heffer’s to rewrite the reality of her own desires that will allow her to turn every narrative of her life into a self-fulfilling truth.

In girls’ hand-clapping games there are no winners. You may be chided for missing a beat, or for forgetting one of the lyrics, but there is no victory that lies ahead for just one of the participants. Hand-clapping games exist only in a state of play, or a state of rest. However, they are not free of competitiveness. There is a pressure exerted by young girls upon one another to continue to clap, to chant the tongue-tied lewd nursery rhymes for as long as possible. This competitiveness lies in the clapping pair’s desire for maximum endurance. The lyrics of girls’ hand-clapping games are endless. Their choruses always circle back on themselves so that the game is played on loop, begun again by the same lyric that signals the game’s end.

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 (Lemonade Crunchy Ice, for instance) appears during lunch on a Tuesday, it must be learned by lunch on Thursday. In this way, a repertoire is built and enacted. The older sisters, while invaluable to the transmission of hand-clapping games, are also responsible for all of the mistakes in the lyrics. Their memories are not perfect. This is how whole states of girls develop alternate, new versions.

It’s not that God is a bad thing to be obsessed with. It’s just that when a group of people who believe in the same god come together things tend to tilt in particular, at times hateful, ways. Rose Mueller is smart enough to sense this, though not smart enough to take up her own god-interest practice. It is difficult to send back a dinner after you have ordered it, especially in the suburbs of Dallas, and especially when you are a villager. In a village everyone knows everyone’s business. In a village it’s much, much easier to eat what you’ve been served.

The continental breakfast served at the motel where the girl boxers stay is a graveyard of hard-boiled eggs. The spread is laid out in the lobby over a counter with purple laminate. There is watered-down coffee and miniature cereal boxes and bread that is so white that it looks like plastic. There are also apples, but the apples taste like sand. Produce stickers adorn the apples’ too-red skins. The motel apples look like the apple Snow White ate before she fell asleep.

Grocery store employees are, in general, not upset by weird hats. Grocery store employees have seen it all. For grocery store employees, a weird hat can even be reassuring. At least the person at hand’s most freakish self has manifested itself into something as harmless as a piece of clothing. At least it’s just a hat and not a weapon.

There is a game that both Rose Mueller and Iggy Lang grew up playing where they did have food stuffed in their cheeks. 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.

To begin a game of Sardines, Sam remembers, one person hides, while a group of people close their eyes, and then the individuals of the group go in search of the person in hiding. It’s like hide-and-go-seek, but in reverse. One by one the seekers find, and then join, the hider. In the end of Sardines there is always one final person, alone, wandering around, looking for the group that began the game. The final person to find the group is technically the loser, but when the final person finds the group, all the players make a loud celebratory sound.

Girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever make. Tiny future fighters are nested inside the infant bodies of baby girls. Men are dead ends, but girls are infinite backwards and forwards.

Eventually, the sport of boxing will wane because war and drought have made it difficult for recreational sports to happen. Bob’s Boxing Palace, and the whole of Reno, will be abandoned. The tin walls of Bob’s gym will collapse. New nations will be formed. People will live on other planets.