The Girls

by Emma Cline

Sometimes it didn’t feel like regret. It felt like a missing.

Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life.

I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.

The ailment was vague, but the cure was specific.

Part of me did feel all right, or I was confusing familiarity with happiness. Because that was there even when love wasn’t—the net of family, the purity of habit and home.

It was such an unfathomable amount of time that you spent at home, and maybe that’s the best you could get—that sense of endless enclosure, like picking for the lip of tape but never finding it.

Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.

But I was quiet, trying to imagine how that would feel: to be so known to someone that you had become almost the same person.

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.

That was part of being a girl—you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything.

I knew I should hate my father. But I only felt foolish. Embarrassed—not for him, but for my mother.

The most frightening thing: It was impossible to detect the source, the instant when things changed.

My mother flinched. “I try with you,” she said. “I’ve always tried, but you aren’t trying at all. Look at yourself. Doing nothing.” She shook her head, tightening her robe. “You’ll see. Life will come up on you so fast, and guess what, you’ll be stuck with the person you are. No ambition, no drive.

I heard it before I saw it: the black bus lumbering heavily up the road, dust rising behind the wheels. The windows were pocked and gray, the blurred shapes of people within. Painted on the hood was a crude heart, crowned with drippy lashes, like an eye.

The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus—casually, almost as an afterthought. “You ever hear anything about Russell?” The question didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I’d heard: about orgies, about frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I’d had friends besides Connie, I might’ve heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might’ve known to be wary. But I just shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything.

Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn’t be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you’d hoped.

Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.

All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time.

It was strange to hear drugs flattened to a matter of numbers, a knowable commodity instead of a mystic portal.

You wanted things and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?

They didn’t have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself.

Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains.

“Maybe I should write down my number for you,” Tom said. “It’s the hall phone, but you can just ask for me.”

AHHHHH MARRY TOM ALREADY U BITCH

Trying to campaign for her own existence, before finally giving up and lying back on the seat.

I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me.