Kala

by Colin Walsh

Donna has her hair rowed into these knackery braids, and she’s wearing her I’m-sixteen-and-this-world’s-brutal puss face.

Even then I knew there was something depressing about the excitement of grown men.

Theresa was only happy because she was still ten. I was not happy about anything. I was fourteen.

Sometimes ye’d hear a particular tune, or see a scene in a particular movie, and ye’d look at each other and know that ye were both thinking the same thing. You only get one friend in life like that. And Mush was yours.

I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.

You felt how handsome he was to her.

You loved how girlfriend was something you could say and still be talking about your own life. Going to the cinema with your girlfriend. Making a mixtape at night for your girlfriend.

You loved how she could change her appearance like this. A different lipstick, or way of tying her hair, and she could be all these other girls – the goth girl, the magazine cover girl, the sexy witch girl, the straightforward glitter-on-the-cheeks girl. She held all these girls inside herself and all of them were yours.

Watching the words carve their way in. I thought of how a paper cut happens, the delay between the incision and the blood rising to the skin.

This was something I recognized as essential to girlhood: the endless act of getting ready, as though some inevitable something would deliver us into life.