The Quarry Girls

by Jess Lourey

I blinked, my mouth dry around the flashlight. I took it from between my teeth, light quivering with my hands. The Polaroids were photos of naked girls, all of them young looking, some younger than Maureen, so young they didn’t have hair between their legs. Many of the photos were just of bodies, their heads cut off by the camera angle. I turned each Polaroid over. Dates, no names, some going back as far as 1971. My eyes blurred. I realized I was crying. These weren’t police photos, at least not all of them, not the ones with Sheriff Nillson’s apple-green shag carpeting visible in them. Those poor girls, three dozen Maureens, talked into—forced into?—doing something they didn’t want to do. Like me taking off my blouse for Ant because I didn’t have a choice, not really, not if I didn’t want to be left behind. I felt sick.