Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

“Just, you know, lashing out. You know. I know you know.” She took my hand and offered me a pure, sweet smile, petting my palm, which might have felt better than any touch I’d ever experienced. On my left calf freak sighed suddenly.

“I hurt,” she squealed, and twirled out onto the street, spinning flamboyantly, her head back, her arms outstretched like a swan. “I love it!” she screamed.

I realized I was imagining me and Marian. She, escaped from her hospital bed, asleep next to me. The hot purring sounds she made as she curled into my belly. I’d have to sneak her back to her room before my mother woke in the morning.

light glaring from the top of the hill. “She doesn’t like you,” Amma ventured. “No, she doesn’t.” “Well, she doesn’t like me either. Just in a different way.”

“You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?” “Mmm.”

“What if it’s the opposite?” Amma whispered. “What if you hurt because it feels so good? Like you have a tingling, like someone left a switch on in your body. And nothing can turn the switch off except hurting? What does that mean?”

Camille. Open up. The image of my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, a spoonful of sour-smelling syrup hovering over me. Her medicine always made me feel sicker than before. Weak stomach. Not as bad as Marian’s, but still weak.

I remember being a kid, rejecting all those tablets and medicines, and losing her by doing so.

It was happening again. Just like Marian. I could feel the bile in the back of my throat, the tightening. I began weeping again, stood up, sat back down. My stomach was churning. I put my head in my hands. Amma and I were sick just like Marian. It had to be made that obvious to me before I finally understood—nearly twenty years too late. I wanted to scream in shame.

Needless to say, your momma was sick all the time. She was always having tubes and needles and such stuck in her.”

close to her. Don’t play games with me, Camille. That exhausts me. If you thought your momma was a nice person, you wouldn’t be over here with her best friend asking whether she’s nice.”

“I mean leave Wind Gap. It’s not safe for you here.”

Had my mother truly been sick? And Marian? Amma and me? Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom.

Would Marian be dead if she hadn’t had Adora for a mother?

I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

“You were never such a good girl when you were little,” she said. “You were always so willful. Maybe your spirit has gotten a bit more broken. In a good way. A necessary way.”

The child exhibits signs of illness after spending time alone with the Mother, even on days when she has felt well up until maternal visits. Mother

“I’m sorry, Camille.” “God, I’m so angry.” Tears spilled down my cheeks and I rubbed them away with the back of my hand until Beverly gave me a tissue pack. “That it ever happened. That it took this long for me to figure it out.”

“By that same logic, I should die, because my sister is dead and I’m ruined,” I said. Chewed another kernel. Amma studied me.

“Why are you telling me this?” “When a child knows that young that her mother doesn’t care for her, bad things happen.”

“I wanted to love you, Camille. But you were so hard. Marian, she was so easy.”

“I needed you all along, Momma. In a real way. Not a need you created so you could turn it on and off. And I can’t ever forgive you for Marian. She was a baby.”

I’ve decided today to stop caring for Camille and focus on Marian. Camille has never become a good patient—being sick only makes her angry and spiteful. She doesn’t like me to touch her. I’ve never heard of such a thing. She has Joya’s spite. I hate her. Marian is such a doll when she’s ill, she dotes on me terribly and wants me with her all the time. I love wiping away her tears.

Marian is dead. I couldn’t stop. I’ve lost 12 pounds and am skin and bones. Everyone’s been incredibly kind. People can be so wonderful.

swept out the contents of the dollhouse room by room, smashing my little four-poster bed, Amma’s day bed, the lemon yellow love seat. Once I’d flung out my mother’s big brass canopy and destroyed her vanity table, either Amma or I screamed. Maybe both of us did. The floor of my mother’s room. The beautiful ivory tiles. Made of human teeth. Fifty-six tiny teeth, cleaned and bleached and shining from the floor.

Amma will remain locked up until her eighteenth birthday, and likely longer. Visitors are allowed twice a month. I went once, sat with her in a cheerful playground area surrounded by barbed wire.

coughs. As for the teeth, she took the teeth only because she needed them. The dollhouse had to be perfect, just like everything else Amma loved.

Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them. Amma controlled Adora by letting Adora sicken her. In return, she demanded uncontested love and loyalty. No other little girls allowed. For the same reasons she murdered Lily Burke. Because, Amma suspected, I liked her better.

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

Was I good at caring for Amma because of kindness? Or did I like caring for Amma because I have Adora’s sickness? I waver between the two, especially at night, when my skin begins to pulse. Lately, I’ve been leaning toward kindness.