Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  She paused here, perhaps to let the fact of her drug abuse at such a tender age sink in. "A lot of people say cutting is like showing on the outside what someone with depression feels on the inside. It was never like that for me." A shrug. "Well, in the beginning, I guess. I just like how it makes me feel. I never felt ashamed about my scars, even, like they say some kids do. I'm proud of them. I know how random that sounds, like I'm fucked-up or something, but it's the truth. I would've cut where people could see them, I just didn't want to get in trouble, and I didn't want them to make me stop. It's just... it's draining." She nodded slightly, a twinkle of pleasure in her eyes. "Draining."

  Daria Walker scratched at her scars, absently. "I'm so full of these, like, secondhand emotions. I don't know if that make sense or not. Like I'm this giant magnet, and all the hate, the racism and like, homophobia, all the sadness and..." Her lower lip quivered. "...and pain. They're all iron fillings, and they stick to me, and I can't shake them off unless I bleed."

  She scratched her arm.

  Kenzie paused the video, peering again over her shoulder. "This is where it starts," she said grimly.

  Tara already knew when it started: first the left arm began to disappear, and then the right—it was always the same. She kept willing it to change, for it to be different, for the girl to be allowed to finish her monologue, for the video to end with tears of catharsis. But she knew it could never happen that way. When she'd been very young, her mother used to read her fairy tales; the most famous of them had always infuriated Tara. Why did Sleeping Beauty marry the man who'd impregnated her while she was unconscious? Why did the Little Mermaid kill herself over the Prince's betrayal? Her mother could never answer these questions to Tara's satisfaction. It was why she'd started writing in the first place, to change their not-so-happy endings. When she discovered she hadn't a talent for fiction, she'd moved on to journalism. Since she'd always been an inquisitive child, its "five Ws and one H" format had seemed a more natural fit.

  The video continued.

  "I feel like nobody cares about me," the girl said, "if I live or die, it wouldn't matter to anybody. My dad acts like I don't even exist. I don't know what I did wrong. My mom can't even tell when I'm sad. I go to school, and people laugh at me—not behind my back, either. To my face. They call me names. Like Belly Flop. Fall Down Girl. Humpty-Dumpy. That's the worst, because if it wasn't me, if they were calling somebody else that, I'd probably laugh, too. All because of that... fucking video. It won't go away. I keep finding links to it. I get one taken down, and another one pops up." A resigned sigh. "That's the worst thing about the internet. It's forever."

  "What's this video she's talking about?" Tara asked.

  Kenzie clicked pause, not looking back. She went back into the DARIA folder and brought up a video called Skanks in another window. The footage was shaky, pixelated and soft-focused, probably shot on a cell phone. Kids in winter coats shouted, whistled, cheered, gathered in a big group out front of the school. The shot rose above them, as the kid holding the phone had brought it up over his or her head, then moved jerkily into the crowd. There was Daria Walker, arms up to defend herself. A slimmer, taller girl, a blonde with cornrows, feinted back and forth like a boxer. "Come at me, bitch," Cornrows said. "Stupid-ass punk bitch slut. Come at me. Hit me, motherfucker, come on! Hit me, you stupid cunt bitch!"

  The cell phones came out: everyone was a reporter these days. Nobody had any real empathy anymore. Kids didn't participate in life so much as observe it. Those like Kenzie and Daria, who wore their emotions on their sleeves, risked being pulled kicking and screaming into situations like this... or worse.

  "I don't want to fight you, Courtney!" Daria shouted, on the verge of tears.

  "Why you hook up with my boyfriend, then, bitch?"

  The world had changed since Tara had been in school: back then, a fight was rare. Kids would chant "Beef! Beef! Beefaroni!" and one would invariably go off crying to the principal—and it was always boys, never girls. Powerful female role models, from kick-ass movie heroines to hip-hop divas, had normalized female aggression. As women took on more significant roles in the workplace, moving further from the wife-and-mother caricature of the 1950s, the incidents of them becoming perpetrators of violent crimes as opposed to victims grew exponentially. One only had to look at the statistics to see that equality, at least when it came to delinquency, was well on its way to a mission accomplished.

  We've come a long way, baby, she thought, shaking her head despondently.

  On the video, before Daria could respond one way or the other, the blonde girl threw a punch, and arms began to flail. Daria grabbed the bigger girl by the hair, instinctively. The girl swung out, hitting her in the face. Tara winced. If the video quality wasn't so bad, she thought she might have been able to see the lights going out in Daria's eyes. The girl's whole body suddenly crumpled, and she fell face forward into the grass.

  "Ohhhh, snap!" some boy genius said. Laughter erupted at the bon mot. Cell phones circled, vultures over a fresh kill. A shrill girl's voice barked: "Just like that! Just like that!"

  Kenzie clicked the window away. "For the record, Daria never hooked up with anyone. She's too shy for that." Her eyes went cold. "Was. And Courtney's boyfriend?" The girl made air-quotes around the word. "He didn't even know they were dating. That's how fucked-up this skank is. She had dibs, so when Angelo told his friends he thought about hooking up with Daria, probably as a joke or something, and then Courtney found out..." Kenzie shrugged. "So now they call her Humpty-Dumpy. Because she's short and not supermodel-thin, and she had a great fall. It's actually pretty clever for most of these troglodytes."

  Kenzie started the original video: "Forever," Daria repeated, utterly devoid of hope, and when she blinked, a tear tracked down her cheek.

  She scratched at the palm of her right hand, scowling slightly. She scratched again, growing furious, then examined her palm, the frown deepening. Her eyebrows rose, eyes widening in sudden dread. "What...?" When she brought the hand up for closer study, it looked like an optical illusion. There was her hand, clearly delineated, and behind it, through it, was the girl's face, eyes narrowed as she twisted it front to back, back to front.

  She was disappearing.

  Daria whipped around to look behind herself, straggly hair falling over her shoulders, perhaps sensing this was a trick—that, somehow, she could still be getting Punk'd.

  A moment later, the hand had entirely vanished.

  "It tingles..." she breathed, and her remaining hand went to her stomach. She scrabbled to lift the hoodie, revealing a pale, pudgy belly lined with the multicolored stripes of the other side of her sweater. Her whole body was disappearing, and when she looked up at the camera again, mingled with the horror in her eyes was something like awe.

  Kenzie turned and locked eyes with Tara, who simply shook her head.

  Daria let her sweater fall back over her stomach—already ghostly, barely there at all—clutching at her throat with the few remaining fingers of her left hand, and the stump of the right. Her eyes bugged out. Her mouth opened, wet tongue protruding, writhing like a salted slug. She was suffocating, choking to death because she had no air; her lungs had ceased to exist, had taken her breath with them.

  If anyone had ever really seen Daria Walker before—her parents, her grandparents, a cousin, a friend—they would never see her again. This video was her headstone and her epitaph. It was her legacy, whether she'd wanted one or not.

  Kenzie clicked the window away, looking sickly. "I can't watch any more than that."

  "No," Tara lied. "Me neither."

  "Where do you think she went?" Kenzie asked after a moment of silence, genuinely curious, hoping Tara held the answer.

  "Went?"

  "I mean, she had to go somewhere... don't you think?"

  Tara hadn't thought of that, but it stood to reason. "Maybe. I don't know."

  Kenzie nodded, clearly dissatisfied with the response.

  "B
ut if she went somewhere," Tara tried for a conciliatory tone, "I'd like to think it's a better place than this."

  "Yeah," Kenzie said. "Pleasant Valley's a real shithole."

  The admission surprised a laugh out of Tara. "I meant this world. It didn't seem to have a lot to offer Daria Walker."

  Kenzie thought this over. "No," she said. "It really didn't." Her eyes lighted. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Anything."

  "Is it true? Does it get better?" She seemed to notice Tara's confusion, and explained: "They always say it gets better when you're older. Celebrities say it all the time. There's all these commercials about it and everything. But does it really?"

  Tara only considered telling a lie for a moment. What good would that do? she thought. Give a kid false hope, false expectations—what good? She wished someone had just told her the truth when she was a kid. It would have saved her a lot of pain. "Sometimes," she said. "Mostly, you just learn how to deal with all the shit that life throws at you. I'm probably not the best person to ask."

  The girl shrugged. "You seem pretty cool to me."

  Tara smiled. "Thanks. You're pretty cool yourself."

  Kenzie blushed, and turned to the computer to hide her face. Then she said without turning, in a timid voice, "Ms. Maxwell?"

  "Mmn?"

  "What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?"

  The girl was full of surprises. Tara thought about telling her if she wasn't writing about a topic she believed in, she might fool a lot of people, but others would know. She wanted to say, Do just about anything else, for the sake of your sanity. She wanted to tell her it was still a man's world, and that they might let her climb the ladder, but they'd never let her into their precious clubhouse.

  Kenzie awaited her reply.

  "Just follow your dreams," Tara offered. She'd provided the girl with enough reality for one day.

  TARA STARTED WORK on the article that afternoon. Aside from the girl fight, Kenzie hadn't given her much fresh information to go with, but she had helped to humanize Daria. She'd also given Tara a hardcopy of the photo she had as her desktop, the one of Daria Walker in close-up, smiling in front of that big blue sky.

  First, though, Tara banged off her regular column, a junk-food appetizer before the big gourmet meal. The music column was easy. A little internet research, a few choice snide remarks (rarely a compliment these days), and it was done. Sometimes she had to listen to an album, and rarely were they good: a few tracks here and there, if anything—almost never wall-to-wall hits. There was no great challenge to the stories, and very little reward. They went in to Waterman at the end of each day, and the money went into her checking account every two weeks.

  With no motels in the area, she was staying at a B&B near the outskirts of Pleasant Valley. Nice, but a little frou-frou for her taste: doilies and dollies. The owners seemed very conservative, and eyed her with veiled suspicion. In her black leather jacket and tight jeans, she wasn't likely typical of the guests they were used to putting up. Probably not the type of woman they were used to, either. When she'd told them she was a journalist, the woman had seemed perplexed, as if she had never considered the possibility of a female writer, outside the likes of Charlotte Brontë or Jane fucking Austen.

  Tara took tea up to her room, a life-sized version of a bedroom from a dollhouse, and started clacking away. No Wi-Fi, of course, but she'd brought a 4G stick along, just in case. "Always be prepared: it's your ass on the line"—another of Waterman's catchphrases, one Tara happened to believe in.

  Well into the article, she suddenly realized she hadn't really thought about her own high school and college days in a very long time, aside from those brief, painful thoughts of the girl across the hall. She hadn't talked to anyone from high school in years, and the last university friend she'd kept in touch with had cut off communication abruptly about six months ago, after the birth of her twins. The price of ambition was leaving her friends behind. She felt isolated in the small room, desperately lonely in this small town where nobody knew her. There was no one to call to shake this feeling, aside from her mother, or Constable Daniels, and he'd likely just wonder why she would call so soon after he'd helped her, if she didn't want a booty call. Her mother would be happy to hear from her, but of course she'd ask if Tara was dating anyone, and Tara was not in the mood for a conversation about her non-existent love life.

  She flicked through Facebook, trying for names she only vaguely remembered, sifting through photos of people she hadn't seen in ages: their vacations, their lovers, spouses, children and pets. At last she typed in Hope's name, hesitantly... and of course there was no Hope, because she'd committed suicide during Tara's first year of university.

  No hope for any of us, she thought, sneering at the painfully obvious metaphor.

  Tara got up from the bed, snapping her laptop closed. The sun was a glowing peach at the horizon, seen through the frosted glass of the bedroom window. She'd asked the proprietors not to bother her for dinner, but now she was starving, and she headed downstairs to where Edwin and Mildred Snodgrass were washing up after supper. The kitchen smelled of roast beef and mashed potatoes. As their only guest, her presence always seemed to startle them. She asked if there was anything open where she could grab a bite.

  "There's the Country Manor, just off Highway 587," Mrs. Snodgrass said, toweling her soapy hands.

  "Closer to Pass Lake, really," Mr. Snodgrass added, putting an arm around his wife's ample waist.

  "Country Manor," Tara said. "I was actually thinking of something a little more... rustic? A booze and chicken wings kind of place."

  Mrs. Snodgrass flashed her husband a brief and indecipherable look. "Well, there's the Sow's Head Tap downtown," he said. "It gets a little rough this time of night, though."

  "Not very pleasant during the day, either, I'm afraid," Mrs. Snodgrass added.

  Tara smiled. "I'm a big girl. I'm sure I can handle it. Thanks for the advice."

  "We have leftovers," Mrs. Snodgrass offered, hoping to tempt her out of what she likely felt might lead to Tara's untimely demise.

  "It does smell delicious," Tara admitted. "But I'm right in the thick of my article, and I could really use a little libation to oil the wheels, if you get what I mean."

  "We've got sherry," Mr. Snodgrass suggested, not very enthusiastically. "Cooking sherry," he admitted with downcast eyes. Mrs. Snodgrass was still eyeing her with mild reproach.

  "As lovely as that sounds, Ed, I'm a scotch gal."

  Mr. Snodgrass nodded, eyes still on the floor as he hugged his wife closer to him.

  "Well, adios," Tara said, beating a hasty retreat.

  "Goodnight," Mrs. Snodgrass said with abrupt finality.

  THE SOW'S HEAD was a faux-Irish pub with slightly drunken clientele, playing darts, shooting pool and watching the Habs game, but mostly just drinking. It certainly wasn't the mecca of criminal activity Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass had made it out to be. Obviously, they'd never set foot in here. It was possible they knew some of the regulars, and avoided it on principle, or maybe—and this was more likely—they were just all around snobby people, and their Dickensian surname suited them well.

  Tara sat at the bar, ordered the best scotch they had (Famous Grouse, neat), and a plate of chicken wings with poutine on the side. While she waited, she drank. The heat of the alcohol felt good in her empty stomach, going to her head quickly—Tingly, she thought morbidly—and she ordered a second, this time with ice.

  A couple of burly guys shoved up to the bar while the waitress brought her food, ordering Canadian Club and cola, and cheap, strong beers. CC&C watched her eat a moment, and when she looked up at him, he smiled. Other than the missing canine, he looked like he just might do.

  "That's a lot of food for such a little lady," he said, still smiling as his friends shoved him and cheered at the game on the big screen above the bar.

  "Thanks for noticing," she said. His comment annoyed her, calling her a "lady," and the combin
ation of the alcohol and her resentment toward him made her want to show CC&C just how much of a lady she could be. "Watching the game, huh?"

  "Go Habs go," he said, irritating—and enticing—her further. Tara found there was something about a good hate fuck nothing could quite match. Constable Daniels had once been one, but they'd grown so comfortable with each other over the years, had gotten so used to each other's faults, that it was hard to feel much of anything for each other anymore, let alone hate. Just going through the motions now, fucking for the sake of it, not that there was anything wrong with the sex itself. He'd always employed adequate choking, and a good hard-to-slow ratio. He was decent at cunnilingus, kept clean and neatly manscaped. And he was strong. Constable Daniels could lift her up over his head to perform acrobatic sex moves that had been hot in the beginning but had lately become simply exhausting.

  This guy, CC&C, looked like he hadn't had a shower for a couple of days. He smelled like cheap drugstore cologne and cigarettes, and appeared doughy under his red and white Canadiens jersey with HENDERSON 00 stenciled on the back of it. She didn't know much about hockey, but she knew enough to assume the shirt was custom, and that Henderson was probably his name. Since she didn't care one way or another, she decided to continue referring to him by his drink of choice.

  "Can I buy you a drink?" he asked stupidly. The lucky idiot had no idea he'd already stumbled and stuttered halfway into her pants.

  "I've got this," she said, and sipped her scotch. "Tell you what, Mr. CC&C: I need to get another two or three of these into me before I head out into the night. When you're done with the game, why don't you swing by?"

  He looked astonished, and laughed excitedly, as if a woman had never picked him up before. "Wait... You're serious?"

  "Like an audit."

  This confused him, but when his friends cheered again, he came around. "You better save some room," he said with an awkward wink, trying for sexy and missing it by a country mile.