My brother spends afternoons declaring his target. Princess Peach: how he would love to pull her hair, remove that golden crown, climb into the flounces of her dress like a pleasure petticoat. He just wants to see what’s underneath all that pink. Sometimes he looks over at me and says, must be more pink, winks. I play her anyway. That, or Jigglypuff who is arguably a girl. Her abilities are Cute and Charm. Princess Peach originated in Mario Kart and not Pokémon, so no one names her abilities. People in chat rooms and message boards assume that Mario and Luigi are at least thirty, by look, and Peach is in her early twenties.
Men in chat rooms can be forty-five or fourteen and I wouldn’t know any better. Some of them send their junk through early internet dial up and I have to click an away message window open quick enough that my mom doesn’t look towards the desktop screen during the nightly news. I am limited to two hours. In chat rooms, I make my photo a cropped version of my Dollz Mania character. She looks like Cher from Clueless in a latex deep red crop top with butterfly clips in her hair. Her bell bottoms flare even when she crosses her legs, which she’s always doing. If you zoom in too far, you can see all her pixels. I ask the chat room men questions about Super Smash in hopes that on Saturdays, when my brother babysits me, I can beat him. He’s better at guitar and tactile games, his Nightmare Before Christmas figurines are organized in specific alphabetical order while my Barbies are dumped into a Tupperware bin that, until I hit my growth spurt, whenever that is, I can fit inside. He takes me to church league basketball games, father daughter dances, and shows me how to beat the bosses.
King Bob-omb is a bomb with a mustache. He has no wick for flame. He guards the power star. Super Mario 64. Not our oldest game. We play a lot of Sonic and Oregon Trail, and by myself, when my brother returns to delivering pizzas and his apartment away from me, I remove Carmen Sandiego and her henchmen from a flat map of Europe all alone. He is fifteen years older than me and knows the world at large, has totaled three cars, has quit and returned to community college, is in a band that could tour Europe potentially. We share a mom. Mickey calls my biological dad The Devil. My dad married my mom when Mickey was eleven. They have me when my dad is fifty-two, and my mom thirty-two. Mickey is an only child until me. He never calls me half--
To beat King Bob-omb, the player has to throw him three times in a row, from behind. If you’re playing as Mario, Bomb can’t know you’re coming any of the three times. My brother tells me bad things always come in threes. The internet tells me to move behind Bob-omb from the right first, and then the left. Not to wind-up behind him when he’s thrown or the character will take damage, that it’s better to play as Mario so that Bob-omb makes comments about our dual mustaches. I already NAIR the black hair above my lips and sometimes I leave it on too long and the skin burns taffy. It hurts when I make a fish face into the mirror, into the new Kodak. I don’t do it when my brother’s around because he makes fun of my duck lips, and my NAIR rash. King Bob-omb is a gentleman, a king, and when I beat him he rains down compliments. Sometimes he shares tips about Bowser like the men on the internet, but only every few times like his makers have him set to speak on routine. I beat him easy eventually, I beat him without my brother there to watch. I enter high school.
Super Mario feels old with the new internet. One week, my friends convince me to post a beach bikini photo on HotorNot.com to see what happens. Cameron likes it. I don’t know if that’s his real name, or just what he goes by on the website. I like him from his only photo. He holds up a largemouth bass by its hook and smiles underneath a loose baseball cap. It proves he’s good with his hands, some evolutionary alarm goes off in me. He’s a form of survival. Three shrill pool whistles for thunder. I give him my instant messenger name, which is, before him, OompaLumpa76, but I realize there’s no sexy in that name, so I change it to StwaBeriShotCake. I am a redhead with freckles, innocent as a seed. When Ashley asks me about the new handle in our shared notebook, I tell her about Cameron’s abs. We pass the pages back and forth between ninth grade biology and civics & economics. He’s a wrestler, I say. She writes back, maybe he’ll pin you and I draw a big, uneven, heart around it that doesn’t connect at the bottom point.
My brother refuses to help me beat Crazy Hand. Crazy Hand is left-handed. He is supposed to be the weaker of the two hands. He is a mime, but erratic. He is uncooperative, impulsive, destructive. He takes me weeks to dissect until I can beat him myself. Sometimes it takes too long to clear a level and I don’t reach him. When I do, he drops rocks on top of Peach, damaging her to the brink of a death, but I fight back and they poof into darkness. On his game release, his creators say he is “consumed with that hollow feeling which comes from destroying your own creations.” The men in chat rooms like him best. I watch their cursor blink while I wait for them to type their answers to twenty questions. We play for my whole two hours.
Cameron wears a lot of camouflage. Even when he isn’t on hunts, his button-ups are covered in brown bramble underneath a Carhartt jacket. His mom works in a jewelry store and when she delivers him to our porch one Friday afternoon, we both swear we met at church camp and he recites the Our Father like it’s his own teeth falling out of his mouth, words he already owns. My mom looks displeased. My dad shakes his hand. From then on, our mothers deliver us halfway to one another in Burlington, on rotating weekends, switching cars at the JR Cigar Outlet. JR’s doesn’t just have cigars but is a medley of Southern memorabilia, a warehouse of guns, cigars, shoes, porcelain dolls, cheap perfume behind glass, and even kayaks. Before we leave for his mom’s apartment, we scope out the outlet’s warehouse. We walk the long aisles and all of it smells like a stale black and mild. My brother’s girlfriend smokes them on our back deck. Cameron asks the men behind glass counters right-enough questions so that they let us hold bullets in our palms fit to his gun. I try on diamonds. Miss Jones I say to anyone who asks. Mrs. Cameron Jones. He buys me a white gold promise ring a few months later that crisscrosses over the top in tiny diamonds. I wear it on the wedding finger. Treat myself like a trinket. Treat that hand as the master.
I think Master Hand is the final boss. And he is, in classic mode. The counterpart to Crazy Hand, he is the right, master of creation. He has OHKO potential, so even if I mash the keys, practice smashing the buttons in the same way my old seventh grade typing teacher coached, he doesn’t get easier. When I get better, he does too, and handling him is more difficult. My brother beats him again and again on first tries. Sometimes when I’m close, my damage not yet an imminent death, Mickey will yell at the screen but it sounds like he’s yelling at me and all the noise makes me incapable of a win. He always throws something. His shoes usually. We play downstairs on the communal television; I don’t get on the computer when he’s there.
A picture of Cameron and me appears on my mom’s fridge eventually. Several photos from junior prom. One where my hair is cut short and I’m wearing an Abercrombie shirt I bought with my first Harris Teeter paycheck. I’m sitting in Cameron’s lap, in his fake laugh. My brother eats a cold slice of Milton’s pizza from the box and looks at the guy in the photo. Who’s this redneck? He asks. His mouth is full of half-chewed crust and it’s open so I can see every bit of slice, tomato flecks his left canine tooth. That’s Cameron, I say. He’s sort of my boyfriend. My brother is engaged to Kim. She follows our family when we move from Florida and then she can’t take being away from her mom. What does sort of mean? When I’m old enough, fifteen as decided by my brother, he says she Forrest Gumped it and became a naked guitar singer on stage for men. When I follow him into the bathroom to grab a hair clip before he smells up the entire thing, calling the toilet his throne, never turning the fan on, he says, She’s a stripper. If you ever do anything like that I’ll kill you. And then his new girlfriend, Darcy, teaches me how to roller skate backwards in the middle of the street. There are no double yellow lines, so we make them.
Only he beats Giga Bowser. Half prehistoric, half bull-turtle, Giga Bowser is practically all powerful, but my brother is a god. Just in case, Mickey never plays with Peach. He lets me decide when and if I want to clear the dinosaur with the hottest character in the Super Smash universe. It’s a mercy. It doesn’t surprise me, based on the women Mickey dates, that he isn’t more into Zelda. She’s so slender, her clothes are all a few sizes too small. He dates pudgy girls, girls who own turtlenecks. I want to be like Zelda, but my mom keeps telling me that boys like girls like Peach, girls with morals and coverage.
I stay up late talking to Cameron. Frequently one of us falls asleep on the phone, but we never hang up. He has threatened Patrick, the boy across the street, for looking at me. His dad’s wall has a new hole from his fist. And then, one Friday night, a boy Cameron’s age throws open his dad’s door, pulls a gun out of his waistband, and points it at Brandon like a gangster, while the boy’s other hand holds up his jeans by the crotch. They both look like destruction to me. Cameron doesn’t even blink. The room of the suburban McMansion is so beige, how would it look with our guts? Perfectly power-washed circle driveway, fit to four cars, but then the red tendrils staining my underwear every month, I bury the dirties in our kitchen trash under empty cans of corn. Those blotches, but in thousands. So beige, and then bled-through. Cameron doesn’t let me get up from the couch when he opens the door. The boy behind the opening whispers and snarls. The boy eyes me, tells me to lick my lips or he’ll shoot. Tells me: trace your finger along the black plastic choker around your neck meant to look like a tattoo. Tells me to rub it harder like you’re cutting your own throat. To snap it. Cameron never looks away from the gun’s barrel. I have no idea why this boy or his gun exists. I know almost nothing about Cameron’s school days, only his constant switching between mom’s apartment and dad’s McMansion.
The choker makes a mark like a hickey, but the boy doesn’t tell me to stop so I keep going until Cameron’s dad pulls into the driveway. It’s the only sound I can concentrate on, like my brother flicking a guitar pick. I keep going until I’m plucking the choker in school. I crack my knuckles, and right after I sting the neck skin above my collarbone. I snap it so often that during presentations teachers have to tell me to stop, and Ashley explains to people about the odd bruises on my neck. The light purple ghost of each one mushrooms right where an Adam’s Apple might be if I were a boy. Ashley makes things up to cover for me. I become salacious. I like the way people talk as long as it’s my name in their mouth. I want fame, I want to be known. I am usually second best. My parents call me the spare, to Mickey’s heir. After a race, when I climb the stands during State Championships, my dad shakes his head and tells me the girl on the other team beat me by a millisecond, where is your killer instinct? Ashley, who always does her projects at the last minute, gets the same grade as me, even though I’ve been working on mine since the day the assignment was given. Sometimes the comments from other girls make me feel easy as a lie. I spend my evenings after swim practice, pretending to do homework, but instead lying on my bedroom carpet, underneath a disco lamp from Spencer’s, listening to “The Boy is Mine” on repeat, and crying.
Listen, I say to myself, you are a good girl. Listen, you don’t do drugs, you’ve never drank at parties, you spend hours in the pool concentrating on one nagging thought, turning it over and over with each flip turn. So, you regret some things you say, doesn’t everyone? Eventually, there aren’t as many chat rooms but on AIM, friends pretend to be other friends to excavate secrets, and boys open message conversations with wink emojis that go unanswered forming the silence on one end into a monologue of insults from the other. Sometimes I get so good at crying that I watch myself do it in the mirror attached to my own dresser. The whole set is passed down from my aunt, from her childhood, a chipped white. I don’t realize that I’m practicing in the mirror, crying becomes acting, and so sadness does too.
When Cameron and I have sex for the first time, I wear a black ribbon in the same spot on my neck. I should say, my first time. My friend Carly hangs out downstairs. She’s come to Myrtle Beach with my family for the holiday. Her dad punches her in the stomach so no one can see. I’ve done plenty of lying for her: traffic stops, sleepovers, fake school programs at night. We’ve traded shirts, and the one I’m taking off is covered in three large black ruffles. My bottoms are American Eagle jean shorts. I don’t remember the underwear, but I remember planning it. I can’t remember how we convince my parents to drop us off somewhere so that Cameron and his best friend Aaron can pick us up in Cameron’s sporty Honda. Before they come, I see this pair of Havaiana flip flops in the mall. We’re supposed to be hanging out in the arcade playing Dance Dance Revolution. I want the flip flops so badly because the popular girls have them back home, the Taryns and Kims, but my parents only give us twenty bucks for food court lunch.
Cameron pulls me up the stairs to a guest bedroom, his friends smoking and drinking downstairs. He orders my clothes off. Says, and the ribbon too, you look like a dog. I slip the first bow out easy as a shoelace. The knot I pulled tight that morning sticks. I can’t, I can’t get it. It’s not coming off. From his shorts crumpled on the ground like in any boy’s room, my brother’s dirty clothes pile the same, a pocket knife. It slices at the ribbon, but Cameron has to saw it along the edge. Once the ribbon loosens, thread by thread, he uses the toothpick in the Swiss Army to dig out a crumb from his molar. He licks the crumb from his finger afterwards. By that point I’m naked, and he takes a good look at me. I see myself in the big oval mirror attached to the dresser behind him. There is nothing obscuring the view like my dresser would: grandma’s jewelry box, collectible Barbies still in boxes donning wedding dresses, evening gowns, enclosed behind plastic. In this room it could be just me and my reflection. I wish I’m a blank slate, but there’s a mole over my shoulder that keeps me from wearing tank tops in case the boy that sits behind me in science notices, and is disgusted by the blemish. Eddie. I have loved him since I was five and he kissed me during a soccer game, pushing me against the goal post. I don’t see the mole from the mirror, but instead, the definition of my muscles from swimming year round. In the rest of my life, I’m everyone’s strong girl. I’m a swim captain. I’m in writing club. I have bit parts in the play. I’m well-rounded, my mom tells my brother when he remembers to ask about me on the phone. I can be that now. I can be proud of what’s about to happen when I tell every detail to Ashley. I’m proud because I don’t need permission from anyone else.
But I know Cameron is directing the scene, and I would have chosen each stage direction of blocking differently. I am a spoon that year in the school production of Beauty and the Beast. I audition for “the silly girls” hanging from French patisserie windows, drooling over Gaston, his dense hunter’s arms. The girls that get the three parts are all high sopranos. I don’t envy their costumes as I smear silver makeup across my entire face. It’s so easy for me to disguise myself. I’ve been a character every Saturday with my brother. I practice the other songs too, especially Be Our Guest, Tie your napkin 'round your neck, cherie / And we'll provide the rest. All Belle has to do is sit for the entire scene. Every silver bauble opened to reveal a seven course meal, all for her. In the rearview of my Explorer on the way to school, I focus on my mouth and making sure each vowel is perfectly articulated in my voice, as well as my face. I round out the letters, and hold my head in a way that the crowding of my bottom teeth isn’t visible from that angle. I hold my neck up. I’m always holding it up like the stigma of the enchanted rose. Stubborn with pride. Belle is humble, she comes from invention more genetically than Peach, but invented the same. I make myself into an invention, someone to please everyone: brother, chat room, parents, Cameron. I don’t know if I’m creating the girl, or they are. In the guest room’s wood-frame mirror, I look at myself and I nod, slow as a stage curtain on a golden pulley. My other ring says “True Love Waits,” in tarnished silver from all the chlorine, and I believe it while I look myself in the eyes. Is it true we always see ourselves backwards?
She looks down at her hands which aren’t white-gloved, or clawed, or taloned. She has no crown, no bouquet of hair. What Princess Peach must be beneath that dress. My brother is always wondering. But she isn’t Peach. Not Princess Toadstool, not cloaked in pink tulle or pink velvet, but pink skin. She’s the final boss, the only one left to defeat. The ribbon falls away to the side of the bed where her clothes are neatly folded in a pile. Always her mother’s daughter. Neither end is long enough to work as a necklace again. She sits on the edge of the crisp white bed, and then leans back until her shoulder blades meet the sheet. She fondles the new promise ring, this time a pearl center with two x’s made of tiny diamonds. A marked treasure. She lays there until the sheets wrinkle. He never removes his hat and everytime he towers over her, its shadow takes out the only sun coming in slits through the window blinds. The afternoon kind, the late afternoon kind.
He looks for blood on the bed afterward. For proof, he brings the sheets downstairs to wash anyway, to show off for his friends who all have cans of beer and look at her like a trophy struck by lightning, a token of the game. Normal plastic gold until it’s rubbed to a sheen. The transformation only lasts ten seconds, and then everyone goes back to goofing. There is a pool table. The cue breaking into racked snooker balls makes her flex her bent elbows tight against her waist. A perfect fit still, from years of streamline and breast stroke. Colleges have been writing letters to her based on her swim times. They want her too, for her body too. She fingers the cut ribbon in her back pocket, two pieces, one for each hand. Neither are first or second. No telling which is creation and which is destruction, but the chat room men tell her there’s no actual difference, it’s all levelling.
Men in chat rooms can be forty-five or fourteen and I wouldn’t know any better. Some of them send their junk through early internet dial up and I have to click an away message window open quick enough that my mom doesn’t look towards the desktop screen during the nightly news. I am limited to two hours. In chat rooms, I make my photo a cropped version of my Dollz Mania character. She looks like Cher from Clueless in a latex deep red crop top with butterfly clips in her hair. Her bell bottoms flare even when she crosses her legs, which she’s always doing. If you zoom in too far, you can see all her pixels. I ask the chat room men questions about Super Smash in hopes that on Saturdays, when my brother babysits me, I can beat him. He’s better at guitar and tactile games, his Nightmare Before Christmas figurines are organized in specific alphabetical order while my Barbies are dumped into a Tupperware bin that, until I hit my growth spurt, whenever that is, I can fit inside. He takes me to church league basketball games, father daughter dances, and shows me how to beat the bosses.
King Bob-omb is a bomb with a mustache. He has no wick for flame. He guards the power star. Super Mario 64. Not our oldest game. We play a lot of Sonic and Oregon Trail, and by myself, when my brother returns to delivering pizzas and his apartment away from me, I remove Carmen Sandiego and her henchmen from a flat map of Europe all alone. He is fifteen years older than me and knows the world at large, has totaled three cars, has quit and returned to community college, is in a band that could tour Europe potentially. We share a mom. Mickey calls my biological dad The Devil. My dad married my mom when Mickey was eleven. They have me when my dad is fifty-two, and my mom thirty-two. Mickey is an only child until me. He never calls me half--
To beat King Bob-omb, the player has to throw him three times in a row, from behind. If you’re playing as Mario, Bomb can’t know you’re coming any of the three times. My brother tells me bad things always come in threes. The internet tells me to move behind Bob-omb from the right first, and then the left. Not to wind-up behind him when he’s thrown or the character will take damage, that it’s better to play as Mario so that Bob-omb makes comments about our dual mustaches. I already NAIR the black hair above my lips and sometimes I leave it on too long and the skin burns taffy. It hurts when I make a fish face into the mirror, into the new Kodak. I don’t do it when my brother’s around because he makes fun of my duck lips, and my NAIR rash. King Bob-omb is a gentleman, a king, and when I beat him he rains down compliments. Sometimes he shares tips about Bowser like the men on the internet, but only every few times like his makers have him set to speak on routine. I beat him easy eventually, I beat him without my brother there to watch. I enter high school.
Super Mario feels old with the new internet. One week, my friends convince me to post a beach bikini photo on HotorNot.com to see what happens. Cameron likes it. I don’t know if that’s his real name, or just what he goes by on the website. I like him from his only photo. He holds up a largemouth bass by its hook and smiles underneath a loose baseball cap. It proves he’s good with his hands, some evolutionary alarm goes off in me. He’s a form of survival. Three shrill pool whistles for thunder. I give him my instant messenger name, which is, before him, OompaLumpa76, but I realize there’s no sexy in that name, so I change it to StwaBeriShotCake. I am a redhead with freckles, innocent as a seed. When Ashley asks me about the new handle in our shared notebook, I tell her about Cameron’s abs. We pass the pages back and forth between ninth grade biology and civics & economics. He’s a wrestler, I say. She writes back, maybe he’ll pin you and I draw a big, uneven, heart around it that doesn’t connect at the bottom point.
My brother refuses to help me beat Crazy Hand. Crazy Hand is left-handed. He is supposed to be the weaker of the two hands. He is a mime, but erratic. He is uncooperative, impulsive, destructive. He takes me weeks to dissect until I can beat him myself. Sometimes it takes too long to clear a level and I don’t reach him. When I do, he drops rocks on top of Peach, damaging her to the brink of a death, but I fight back and they poof into darkness. On his game release, his creators say he is “consumed with that hollow feeling which comes from destroying your own creations.” The men in chat rooms like him best. I watch their cursor blink while I wait for them to type their answers to twenty questions. We play for my whole two hours.
Cameron wears a lot of camouflage. Even when he isn’t on hunts, his button-ups are covered in brown bramble underneath a Carhartt jacket. His mom works in a jewelry store and when she delivers him to our porch one Friday afternoon, we both swear we met at church camp and he recites the Our Father like it’s his own teeth falling out of his mouth, words he already owns. My mom looks displeased. My dad shakes his hand. From then on, our mothers deliver us halfway to one another in Burlington, on rotating weekends, switching cars at the JR Cigar Outlet. JR’s doesn’t just have cigars but is a medley of Southern memorabilia, a warehouse of guns, cigars, shoes, porcelain dolls, cheap perfume behind glass, and even kayaks. Before we leave for his mom’s apartment, we scope out the outlet’s warehouse. We walk the long aisles and all of it smells like a stale black and mild. My brother’s girlfriend smokes them on our back deck. Cameron asks the men behind glass counters right-enough questions so that they let us hold bullets in our palms fit to his gun. I try on diamonds. Miss Jones I say to anyone who asks. Mrs. Cameron Jones. He buys me a white gold promise ring a few months later that crisscrosses over the top in tiny diamonds. I wear it on the wedding finger. Treat myself like a trinket. Treat that hand as the master.
I think Master Hand is the final boss. And he is, in classic mode. The counterpart to Crazy Hand, he is the right, master of creation. He has OHKO potential, so even if I mash the keys, practice smashing the buttons in the same way my old seventh grade typing teacher coached, he doesn’t get easier. When I get better, he does too, and handling him is more difficult. My brother beats him again and again on first tries. Sometimes when I’m close, my damage not yet an imminent death, Mickey will yell at the screen but it sounds like he’s yelling at me and all the noise makes me incapable of a win. He always throws something. His shoes usually. We play downstairs on the communal television; I don’t get on the computer when he’s there.
A picture of Cameron and me appears on my mom’s fridge eventually. Several photos from junior prom. One where my hair is cut short and I’m wearing an Abercrombie shirt I bought with my first Harris Teeter paycheck. I’m sitting in Cameron’s lap, in his fake laugh. My brother eats a cold slice of Milton’s pizza from the box and looks at the guy in the photo. Who’s this redneck? He asks. His mouth is full of half-chewed crust and it’s open so I can see every bit of slice, tomato flecks his left canine tooth. That’s Cameron, I say. He’s sort of my boyfriend. My brother is engaged to Kim. She follows our family when we move from Florida and then she can’t take being away from her mom. What does sort of mean? When I’m old enough, fifteen as decided by my brother, he says she Forrest Gumped it and became a naked guitar singer on stage for men. When I follow him into the bathroom to grab a hair clip before he smells up the entire thing, calling the toilet his throne, never turning the fan on, he says, She’s a stripper. If you ever do anything like that I’ll kill you. And then his new girlfriend, Darcy, teaches me how to roller skate backwards in the middle of the street. There are no double yellow lines, so we make them.
Only he beats Giga Bowser. Half prehistoric, half bull-turtle, Giga Bowser is practically all powerful, but my brother is a god. Just in case, Mickey never plays with Peach. He lets me decide when and if I want to clear the dinosaur with the hottest character in the Super Smash universe. It’s a mercy. It doesn’t surprise me, based on the women Mickey dates, that he isn’t more into Zelda. She’s so slender, her clothes are all a few sizes too small. He dates pudgy girls, girls who own turtlenecks. I want to be like Zelda, but my mom keeps telling me that boys like girls like Peach, girls with morals and coverage.
I stay up late talking to Cameron. Frequently one of us falls asleep on the phone, but we never hang up. He has threatened Patrick, the boy across the street, for looking at me. His dad’s wall has a new hole from his fist. And then, one Friday night, a boy Cameron’s age throws open his dad’s door, pulls a gun out of his waistband, and points it at Brandon like a gangster, while the boy’s other hand holds up his jeans by the crotch. They both look like destruction to me. Cameron doesn’t even blink. The room of the suburban McMansion is so beige, how would it look with our guts? Perfectly power-washed circle driveway, fit to four cars, but then the red tendrils staining my underwear every month, I bury the dirties in our kitchen trash under empty cans of corn. Those blotches, but in thousands. So beige, and then bled-through. Cameron doesn’t let me get up from the couch when he opens the door. The boy behind the opening whispers and snarls. The boy eyes me, tells me to lick my lips or he’ll shoot. Tells me: trace your finger along the black plastic choker around your neck meant to look like a tattoo. Tells me to rub it harder like you’re cutting your own throat. To snap it. Cameron never looks away from the gun’s barrel. I have no idea why this boy or his gun exists. I know almost nothing about Cameron’s school days, only his constant switching between mom’s apartment and dad’s McMansion.
The choker makes a mark like a hickey, but the boy doesn’t tell me to stop so I keep going until Cameron’s dad pulls into the driveway. It’s the only sound I can concentrate on, like my brother flicking a guitar pick. I keep going until I’m plucking the choker in school. I crack my knuckles, and right after I sting the neck skin above my collarbone. I snap it so often that during presentations teachers have to tell me to stop, and Ashley explains to people about the odd bruises on my neck. The light purple ghost of each one mushrooms right where an Adam’s Apple might be if I were a boy. Ashley makes things up to cover for me. I become salacious. I like the way people talk as long as it’s my name in their mouth. I want fame, I want to be known. I am usually second best. My parents call me the spare, to Mickey’s heir. After a race, when I climb the stands during State Championships, my dad shakes his head and tells me the girl on the other team beat me by a millisecond, where is your killer instinct? Ashley, who always does her projects at the last minute, gets the same grade as me, even though I’ve been working on mine since the day the assignment was given. Sometimes the comments from other girls make me feel easy as a lie. I spend my evenings after swim practice, pretending to do homework, but instead lying on my bedroom carpet, underneath a disco lamp from Spencer’s, listening to “The Boy is Mine” on repeat, and crying.
Listen, I say to myself, you are a good girl. Listen, you don’t do drugs, you’ve never drank at parties, you spend hours in the pool concentrating on one nagging thought, turning it over and over with each flip turn. So, you regret some things you say, doesn’t everyone? Eventually, there aren’t as many chat rooms but on AIM, friends pretend to be other friends to excavate secrets, and boys open message conversations with wink emojis that go unanswered forming the silence on one end into a monologue of insults from the other. Sometimes I get so good at crying that I watch myself do it in the mirror attached to my own dresser. The whole set is passed down from my aunt, from her childhood, a chipped white. I don’t realize that I’m practicing in the mirror, crying becomes acting, and so sadness does too.
When Cameron and I have sex for the first time, I wear a black ribbon in the same spot on my neck. I should say, my first time. My friend Carly hangs out downstairs. She’s come to Myrtle Beach with my family for the holiday. Her dad punches her in the stomach so no one can see. I’ve done plenty of lying for her: traffic stops, sleepovers, fake school programs at night. We’ve traded shirts, and the one I’m taking off is covered in three large black ruffles. My bottoms are American Eagle jean shorts. I don’t remember the underwear, but I remember planning it. I can’t remember how we convince my parents to drop us off somewhere so that Cameron and his best friend Aaron can pick us up in Cameron’s sporty Honda. Before they come, I see this pair of Havaiana flip flops in the mall. We’re supposed to be hanging out in the arcade playing Dance Dance Revolution. I want the flip flops so badly because the popular girls have them back home, the Taryns and Kims, but my parents only give us twenty bucks for food court lunch.
Cameron pulls me up the stairs to a guest bedroom, his friends smoking and drinking downstairs. He orders my clothes off. Says, and the ribbon too, you look like a dog. I slip the first bow out easy as a shoelace. The knot I pulled tight that morning sticks. I can’t, I can’t get it. It’s not coming off. From his shorts crumpled on the ground like in any boy’s room, my brother’s dirty clothes pile the same, a pocket knife. It slices at the ribbon, but Cameron has to saw it along the edge. Once the ribbon loosens, thread by thread, he uses the toothpick in the Swiss Army to dig out a crumb from his molar. He licks the crumb from his finger afterwards. By that point I’m naked, and he takes a good look at me. I see myself in the big oval mirror attached to the dresser behind him. There is nothing obscuring the view like my dresser would: grandma’s jewelry box, collectible Barbies still in boxes donning wedding dresses, evening gowns, enclosed behind plastic. In this room it could be just me and my reflection. I wish I’m a blank slate, but there’s a mole over my shoulder that keeps me from wearing tank tops in case the boy that sits behind me in science notices, and is disgusted by the blemish. Eddie. I have loved him since I was five and he kissed me during a soccer game, pushing me against the goal post. I don’t see the mole from the mirror, but instead, the definition of my muscles from swimming year round. In the rest of my life, I’m everyone’s strong girl. I’m a swim captain. I’m in writing club. I have bit parts in the play. I’m well-rounded, my mom tells my brother when he remembers to ask about me on the phone. I can be that now. I can be proud of what’s about to happen when I tell every detail to Ashley. I’m proud because I don’t need permission from anyone else.
But I know Cameron is directing the scene, and I would have chosen each stage direction of blocking differently. I am a spoon that year in the school production of Beauty and the Beast. I audition for “the silly girls” hanging from French patisserie windows, drooling over Gaston, his dense hunter’s arms. The girls that get the three parts are all high sopranos. I don’t envy their costumes as I smear silver makeup across my entire face. It’s so easy for me to disguise myself. I’ve been a character every Saturday with my brother. I practice the other songs too, especially Be Our Guest, Tie your napkin 'round your neck, cherie / And we'll provide the rest. All Belle has to do is sit for the entire scene. Every silver bauble opened to reveal a seven course meal, all for her. In the rearview of my Explorer on the way to school, I focus on my mouth and making sure each vowel is perfectly articulated in my voice, as well as my face. I round out the letters, and hold my head in a way that the crowding of my bottom teeth isn’t visible from that angle. I hold my neck up. I’m always holding it up like the stigma of the enchanted rose. Stubborn with pride. Belle is humble, she comes from invention more genetically than Peach, but invented the same. I make myself into an invention, someone to please everyone: brother, chat room, parents, Cameron. I don’t know if I’m creating the girl, or they are. In the guest room’s wood-frame mirror, I look at myself and I nod, slow as a stage curtain on a golden pulley. My other ring says “True Love Waits,” in tarnished silver from all the chlorine, and I believe it while I look myself in the eyes. Is it true we always see ourselves backwards?
She looks down at her hands which aren’t white-gloved, or clawed, or taloned. She has no crown, no bouquet of hair. What Princess Peach must be beneath that dress. My brother is always wondering. But she isn’t Peach. Not Princess Toadstool, not cloaked in pink tulle or pink velvet, but pink skin. She’s the final boss, the only one left to defeat. The ribbon falls away to the side of the bed where her clothes are neatly folded in a pile. Always her mother’s daughter. Neither end is long enough to work as a necklace again. She sits on the edge of the crisp white bed, and then leans back until her shoulder blades meet the sheet. She fondles the new promise ring, this time a pearl center with two x’s made of tiny diamonds. A marked treasure. She lays there until the sheets wrinkle. He never removes his hat and everytime he towers over her, its shadow takes out the only sun coming in slits through the window blinds. The afternoon kind, the late afternoon kind.
He looks for blood on the bed afterward. For proof, he brings the sheets downstairs to wash anyway, to show off for his friends who all have cans of beer and look at her like a trophy struck by lightning, a token of the game. Normal plastic gold until it’s rubbed to a sheen. The transformation only lasts ten seconds, and then everyone goes back to goofing. There is a pool table. The cue breaking into racked snooker balls makes her flex her bent elbows tight against her waist. A perfect fit still, from years of streamline and breast stroke. Colleges have been writing letters to her based on her swim times. They want her too, for her body too. She fingers the cut ribbon in her back pocket, two pieces, one for each hand. Neither are first or second. No telling which is creation and which is destruction, but the chat room men tell her there’s no actual difference, it’s all levelling.