Mia Nelson

The Un-Virgin Un-Suicides

After Jeffrey Eugenides

Hill bombing season again and we all had blood on our knees. Every summer has its end encased in its beginning, and June had us sacrificing skin to concrete. Lucy from taking her thrift store pink roller blades down the bridge all the grown-ups called “Last Chance.” Maggie from using her brother’s wobby-wheeled longboard down the street with the big houses. Flora from biking with her eyes closed. Priya from trying to cartwheel in skates. We all had scabs but we weren’t the kind of girls to scar and most of us had given up our mother’s dreams of us being beautiful. We were the daughters of nobody that summer, in the milky hot film of a season between selves. No longer seniors at Middleton high, not yet baristas or bartenders or misfit scholarship students at the university in Burlington. We were mid flowering. We were overheated. We cut each other's hair the afternoon of graduation, snippets of dirty blonde piling up. Caroline, our poet, called it the “Dirt of an Old Self.” She’s more sentimental than the  rest of us. Bea with her hydrangea smell and sweaty neck insisted on taking the scissors herself, slicing off so much hair we would have confused her for a boy had she not gone around in her baby blue roller skates singing Madonna early in the morning––belting “Like a Virgin” the way none of the boys in our world would have been brave enough to do. We started calling her kid, like our fathers called our brothers. “Good,” Bea said. That was the whole point of cutting our hair, besides eliminating hiding spots for ticks.

Farmers––the fat and sunburned kind who threw away pounds and pounds of sweet corn every year because the federal government subsidized more than anyone could stand to eat––were finding the bodies of women all over Vermont. Flora, who picked up her always-half-drunk-somewhere younger brother’s newspaper shifts lifted a copy every morning and the bodies kept piling up. In the evenings after all the part time jobs where our managers flirted with us, after we scrubbed the black eyeliner from our eyes, after we’d all showered or swam and smelled mostly good like cats in a barn, we would cram into Priya’s tree house and paper the walls with articles. Some had serious titles like “Woman Found Naked, Killed in Burlington Suburb,” which Lucy took ideological offense with, “It’s like,” she said, pulling once-pink gum out of her mouth with her middle finger, “the worst thing a woman can be is capital ‘N’ Naked, worse than being killed.” Hazel asked what it mattered how the newspaper wrote it if  the  woman was already dead. Lucy rolled her eyes. She was going to college next year and was the only one of us who ever thought to call herself a feminist. Some of the papers had misspelled titles––these were usually the local papers––like “More Ded Bodies Found In Abandoned Corn Fields.” We laughed, and when we walked home the next morning, shoes in hand and the concrete burning our soles to a flayed pink, we hoped the women were more alive for the error.  

On Saturdays, Flora lifeguarded at the local pool because she could swim two laps in the buggy  chlorine without touching the ground and because she had such perfect tits in her red one piece that day pass purchases increased ten to one during her shift. The boys  our age were our opposites, our mirrors, our rivals, our shadows. They’d come to watch Flora and called things to her about her long legs or sharp collarbone or small ass, which her manager more or less did not try to stop, everything they said being true. One day they’d be our husbands, those boys, but we couldn’t stand them enough to make them our boyfriends. So we all walked Flora home each night and Priya brought her two grey mutts, who were unneutered and therefore aggressive. We’d never had a problem with the boys; this, afterall, was a town with unlocked doors, with car keys tucked under the fourth tire while in the grocery mart. But this was a different summer and we were more afraid of what could happen than of the dogs, even on their fraying leashes with their hunched shoulders hungry, gnashing teeth. 

Even the earth hid behind her hands; a late may snowstorm had blighted the blinking green buds of spring. In history books, the summer could be called The Year of No Flowers, The Year of No Shade, The Year of the Missing Leaves, or The Year So Many Women Were Killed. 

We were dropping like flies, we all agreed. Under the first full moon of July, we cut little pricks into the pads of our fingers with Maggie’s razor since her mom was the only one who allowed such things. We squealed at whose blood was the reddest, and those of us who had never had sex swore to loose our virignities before we got murdered. A movie Caroline watched had two best friends who said I love you in case I die each time they parted. We co-opted it and said it as compulsively as prayers. That night, with hazy vanilla candles taken from Lucy’s mom’s gift shop, the girls who’d been kissed instructed us on our bodies. Flora took notes. Priya demonstrated how to prevent semen from getting in your hair during a blowjob. Bea told us the dirty phrases that boys like to hear, asking us to repeat after her: I want you inside of me, I want you to undress me, I’m not wearing any underwear, and You can do anything you want to me. When Lucy’s eyes started to fill up, Priya rubbed her back and said, “It will only hurt the first couple of times, and even then it doesn’t last long.” Caroline closed her eyes like they were tiny t.v. screens that lost power. We fell asleep in a heap that night, teeth unbrushed and socks still on. 

Maggie was the last one to wake up because her mom didn’t let her work any job that wasn’t babysitting and she almost always had nowhere to be. The tree house was still warm with the impressions of our bodies. She’d later try to explain how it felt, saying, “It was like the way gassed up cars burn through snow and leave belly shaped holes where they park in the winter.” We always understood what we each meant. It was like sharing a brain, it was like sharing a body, it was like inhabiting the same dream every day of our lives. Sometimes, we’ll admit, in the groggy early mornings, we’d forget our own names and swear we were Priya, when really we were Lucy. Or Hazel. Or Bea. 

Lucy was the most afraid, so we encouraged her to go first. Caroline was afraid to do it by herself, so we compromised and sent the two of them on a double date with Priya’s older twin brothers. Lucy said the kissing was the most horrible part, like waiting in the doctor’s office to get a shot. Caroline said she kept looking through the windows of the car into the car Lucy was in, but Priya’s brother kept pulling her back down to the warm strangeness of his penis. She said it was like drowning, but worse, because water is usually sweet. Flora simply walked into her manager’s office, chlorine dripping from her hair into the rough carpet beneath her painted toenails. It took no more than thirty seconds for the pizza-bellied man to wordlessly pull off the straps of her lifeguarding suit. We all thought he was disgusting, but since he was old enough to be our teacher or a deadbeat uncle, he had a certain charm. Flora was the only one who could explain what the rough beard of a man felt like when he was licking her between the legs. We were not jealous until she confessed that even though the manager was disgusting and smelled like vomit and bowling alleys, she thought of the feeling of his tongue inside of her almost constantly. So, alone in our beds that night, we grabbed our most scratchy blankets and rubbed them between our thighs. Sometimes we asked ourselves what percentage of girlhood could be called dreaming, and the answer was nearly everything. 

It rained more than any recorded summer on earth, or so the old men smoking outside the diner said to no one in particular. We always heard those little snippets meant for nobody, because we were Nobody. In another life, we might have been journalists. In this one, we were just snoops. Tender hearted gossips––once one of us heard something, we all knew it instantly. Hazel heard the police chief telling his second in command they were pretty sure the suspect was from around here. Too many local spots with bodies for it to be a stranger. Lucy saw her mom cradling their red landline like a baby to her ear, talking to a sister three towns over as if the bodies were a virus slowly creeping up to us. We didn’t have to be doctors or honors biology students to nod soberly at the barren tree branches above our heads. Everything was either alive or not alive. Somewhere, someone was watching us, probably. To everyone but ourselves we merely shadow. We went on like this until August almost spared us. This was years before anyone would walk into a highschool and shoot at random, before it would be a truth universally acknowledged that people our age were being––for lack of a better word––hunted. We were rationally irrational, locking windows that had never been locked and calling over our shoulders words like tossed salt, see you later, call me, I’ll miss you, I love you in case I die.

***

Bea’s ankles must have wobbled at the top of her very last hill. The morning dewed in front of her eyes; she was up early enough to see the grey fog that meant fall was creeping up behind us. She probably ate breakfast before she came out, cramming a crumbly granola bar into her mouth in the dark. She was, after all, the one of us who would rise in the night as if from the dead to eat artificial pink cereal from our various cabinets, hunched like she’d never eat again. We can almost see her small body in a ratty black tank top dress, the ends swirling around her as she faced down The Big Hill. Her hair was probably greasy, parts of it stuck to her temples from an air conditioner-less night in her dad’s apartment complex. I hope she felt beautiful and alive on her wheels under the barely legible sky. Almost no one knows the exact moment when, suddenly, the past stretches so much farther than the present. 

When the man came for Bea, we don’t know, maybe will never know, if she recognized him. If he was our teacher,  our father, our brother, or just some guy we’d nodded at across the room at a party. Some of us hope it was a stranger, so we can feel safe at night, knowing he has taken our one sacrifice. Some of us hope it was someone from around here, so at least there is someone who knows Bea’s whole story––the beginning which is ours, and the ending which is his alone. We hope she kicked him and bit him and that one day, when they have the technology for it, one of his stupid cells is found between her molars. We hope everything interstitial about him rots and that he never closes his eyes without hearing her last words. I hope they were Madonna. I hope they were curses. I hope they were I love you in case I die.

***

We felt it before we knew. We heard the absence of her blue roller skates, we missed her body loudening down the street; we woke up with our arms asleep and numb––our bodies knowing we lost something. Our mothers broke the news to us in our bedroom doorways, dull light canonizing their tired faces. They wore robes and looked like they hadn’t slept since the day we were born. Some of them came over to the bed and tucked strands of our hair behind our soft, lamby ears. Our fathers shifted uncomfortably at the kitchen table. They left their scrambled eggs untouched. They felt culpable and couldn’t understand why. They’d done nothing but love us. 

We pilgrimaged to our treehouse that night, because there was no excuse big enough for missing morning shifts. Our mouths tasted hot and metallic. What did we think about then? Things were changing. Our hair had grown back. We looked like women, we wouldn't recognize  ourselves in the mirror. Our lips still trembled, but we had done it: we had grown irreversibly up. Death does that, Caroline said, it makes everyone around the dead person live twice as fast to account for the loss.

 It was our last teenager summer, maybe it was the last teenager summer ever. 

On the way to the tree house, we had looked around to lock eyes with anybody, but our gaze kept landing on ourselves. Our bodies resounded with loneliness. You could see right through us; it felt like everyone did. We listened to Madonna and burned all of our boards and rollerblades and skates. We took the blue yarn bracelets on our ankles that Bea had made us and tied them together into a necklace. We’d take turns wearing it all our lives––we swore to it. We held hands like we’d never let go and to me that was beautiful.

 But maybe it was just sad.

Mia Nelson is a ‘22 at Dartmouth College. Her poetry is published in The American Poetry Review. She is the winner of the 2021 Eleanor Frost Playwriting Contest and has been recognized by The Poetry Society London, Princeton University’s Playwriting Contest, Columbia College Chicago, and The Atlanta Review.