Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

And then Marian, always long-gone Marian.

We’re both laughing. She has her eyes wide open in surprise, I have mine scrunched shut. I’m squeezing her into me, her short skinny legs dangling over my knees. I can’t remember the occasion or what we were laughing about. Over the years it’s become a pleasant mystery. I think I like not knowing.

“Why else would you pull out a dead little girl’s teeth?” “He took her teeth?” “All but the back part of a baby molar.”

Wind Gap kids had found more interesting ways to kill summers. When I was a girl, we swam at a spot just downstream where huge table rocks made shallow pools. Crawdads would skitter around our feet and we’d jump for them, scream if we actually touched one.

Those kids, cocky and pissed and smelling of sweat, aggressively oblivious of our existence, always compelled me. There are different kinds of hunting, I know now.

When I was a child, I always walked the stairs up, ran the driveway down. I assumed the rail was on the left side going up because I’m left-handed, and someone thought I might like that. Odd to think I ever indulged in such presumptions.

She was like a girl’s very best doll, the kind you don’t play with.

She pulls at her eyelashes. Sometimes they come out. During some particularly difficult years when I was a child, she had no lashes at all, and her eyes were a constant gluey pink, vulnerable as a lab rabbit’s. In winter time, they leaked streaks of tears whenever she went outdoors. Which wasn’t often.

Amma was certainly not asleep, but I didn’t begrudge her avoiding me.

dreamt my mother was slicing an apple onto thick cuts of meat and feeding it to me, slowly and sweetly, because I was dying.

The whole time I was thinking about Natalie going to autopsy, and how I would like to sneak in and put a fresh Band-Aid on her knee.

remembered Marian being buried in a pale pink dress. This was no surprise. My mother and I generally differ on all things concerning my dead sister.

I slipped my notepad from my jacket pocket and began scribbling notes to one side until my mother slapped her hand on mine and hissed, “You are being disrespectful and embarrassing. Stop or I will make you leave.”

The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.

Then Marian got sick, really sick, and Adora had more important things to do than coaxing me into swallowing wheat-germ extract.

I retreated to my room, away from that horrible little girl, who was not like Marian at all.

Marian died on my thirteenth birthday. I woke up, padded down the hall to say hello—always the first thing I did—and found her, eyes open, blanket pulled up to her chin. I remember not being that surprised. She’d been dying for as long as I could remember.

always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me. Oh, yes, and one time she bought me lotion with vitamin E.

But in truth, I think she’s always had more problems with children than she’d ever admit. I think, in fact, she hates them. There’s a jealousy, a resentfulness that I can feel even now, in my memory.

I drove away from the stink and sound. And that child.

“I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters.”

It was the most I’d ever heard my mother say about my father. I wondered how many other salesladies had received such casual tidbits about him.

I bunched the cotton of the dress over my mouth and screamed.

He began to cry then, sitting back down, his head in his hands. “I didn’t mean that I was sorry I came here. I meant I’m sorry she came here, because now she’s dead. And we were trying to help. And she’s dead.” He let out a quiet wail, and Meredith wrapped her arms grudgingly around him. “Someone killed my sister.”

“Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to being a shallow person.”

I saw me, a despairing thirteen-year-old sobbing on the floor of my dead sister’s room, holding a small flowered shoe. Or Amma, thirteen herself, a woman-child with a gorgeous body and a gnawing desire to be the baby girl my mother mourned. My mother weeping over Marian.

“That’s good, I guess.” She wavered at the edge of my bed. “Camille, do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait?”

“Sometimes I can’t. But right now, I can. When everyone’s asleep and everything’s quiet, it’s easier.”

“Your sister is sick. She’s worried herself into a fever since you’ve been home,” Adora said, still pressing Amma’s hand in that circle. I pictured my mother’s teeth gnashing against each other inside her cheek.

A little girl with a hangover. Amma left my room last night and went down to drink a while in her own. That’s the way this house worked. I left them whispering to each other, favorite buzzing on my knee.

Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails. Mine was the day Marian died. The day I picked up that knife is a tight second.

This had been one of Marian’s favorite places to go when she could leave her bed. For an instant, I could feel the weight of her as a child on my back, her hot giggles in my ears, skinny arms wrapped tight around my shoulders.

“I think I finally realized why I don’t love you,” she said.

“You remind me of my mother. Joya. Cold and distant and so, so smug. My mother never loved me, either. And if you girls won’t love me, I won’t love you.”

“You were always so willful, never sweet. I remember when you were six or seven. I wanted to put your hair up in curlers for your school picture. Instead you cut it all off with my fabric shears.” I didn’t remember doing this. I remembered hearing about Ann doing this.

“They reminded me of you, running around town wild. Like little pretty animals. I thought if I could be close with them, I would understand you better. If I could like them, maybe I could like you. But I couldn’t.”

I thought you’d save me. I thought you’d love me. And then my mother would love me. That was a joke.” My mother’s voice swept high and raw, like a red scarf in a storm. “I was a baby.”

“And now you come back and all I can think of is ‘Why Marian and not her?’”

My mother lunged then, grabbed me by both arms. Then she reached behind me and, with one fingernail, circled the spot on my back that had no scars.

“Someday I’ll carve my name there.” She shook me once, released me, then left me on the stairs with the warm remains of our liquor.

Would I ever have the discipline to let the water cover my face, drown with my eyes open? Just refuse to lift yourself two inches, and it will be done.

“Camille,” he said, picking at a tail with a tiny fish fork, “you’re making your mother ill. I’m going to have to ask you to leave if conditions don’t improve.” “How am I making her ill?” “By tormenting her. By constantly bringing up Marian. You can’t speculate to the mother of a dead child how that child’s body might look in the ground right now. I don’t know if that’s something you can feel detached from, but Adora can’t.” A glob of fish tumbled down his front, leaving a row of greasy stains the size of buttons.

“Like you know that I said horrible things about Marian and the dead girls from Adora.” “Exactly,” he said, the syllables precisely cut. “Adora is a liar. If you don’t know that, you’re an idiot.” “Adora’s had a hard life.”

She called me Mille and she couldn’t keep her hands off me. I adored her. Drunk but still drinking,

I could see her so easily here, sitting cross-legged on that bed, small and sweat dotted, her eyes ringed with purple. Shuffling cards or combing her doll’s hair or coloring angrily. I could hear that sound: a crayon running in hard lines across a paper. Dark scribbles with the crayon pushed so hard it ripped the paper. She looked up at me, breathing hard and shallow. “I’m tired of dying.”

rear was bumping Kylie’s face. She shook a bottle of pills at me. “OxyContin. Makes you feel real good.” She stuck out her tongue and placed three in a row like white buttons, then chewed and swallowed with a gulp of vodka. “Try.” “No thanks, Amma.” OxyContin is good stuff. Doing it with your kid sister isn’t.

Which she was. I am doing drugs with my thirteen-year-old sister, I whispered to myself. But

Amma put her hand in mine. “What do you think of … Adora?” I felt my high wobble, then regain its spin. “I think she’s a very unhappy woman,” I said. “And troubled.”

I sit in my room before bed and I write down every single thing I did and said that day. Then I grade it, A for a perfect move, F for I should kill myself I’m such a loser.”

“Safer to be feared than loved,” I said.