The Girls

by Emma Cline

It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest.

They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park.

When I was that age, I was uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my performance and finding it lacking.

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.

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.

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.

I wasn’t pretty enough to get the grades I did, the scale not tipping heartily enough in the direction of looks or smarts.

A starry emptiness that felt, even as a child, something like death.

I’d always been aware of Peter, in the way I liked any older boy at that age, their mere existence demanding attention.

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.

I imagined Peter almost as a corrective to my own desires, whose compulsion sometimes frightened me.

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.

There were only so many girls, I understood, that could be marked for love.

At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.

Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots.

We recounted our disgust to each other in strident tones, but there was pride, too. Like the satisfied way Patricia Bell had once asked me after class whether I’d seen how Mr. Garrison had been staring at her, and didn’t I think it was weird?

He and Zav maintained a constant patter all through dinner, Sasha and I fading into a silence familiar from adolescence: the effort to break through Zav and Julian’s alliance wasn’t worth the return. It was simpler to watch them, to watch Sasha, who acted like just sitting there was enough.

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?