Sometimes they had the feeling this was a story they’d heard already, that the fat girl had always been there, narrating in their ears.Ī story moving backward. They watched from someplace outside their bodies as dream air pinned them down. They swallowed pills, lied about their ages. The nights grew wide, and they wandered, sleepless. Sometimes the voice dared them: You could burn this house down, it said. At night, they became formless, fleshless. Each one used to sing to me in the night.Īt school, they never spoke of the fat girl. Doesn’t that sound lovely?Īnd I had a whole necklace full of pearls. Everywhere they went, the fat girl’s voice followed, sweet and terrible as a lullaby. They became insomniacs, sliding around all directions of the night. When they called again the next night and the next, the fat girl laughed. A story running backward till you’re nothing at all. Everything goes into you and nothing sticks. That’s the problem: it’s like floating around a black hole. The fat girl sighed like they couldn’t understand. I got to sit around all day on the waterbed, eat jelly from the jar. Hi, said the oldest, louder than she meant to. Yeah? The voice sounded tired, like they’d disturbed her from sleep. The others held their breath, leaned in close. That night, in the phone booth, it was the youngest who dialed, squinting at the numbers on her mother’s credit card. They looked at each other and gave slow nods. They endured the school day, then assembled wordlessly in the hall. When they finally drifted uneasily into sleep, it dripped like a leaky faucet through their dreams. They didn’t like to be reminded.īut that night, the voice pricked them each awake. It was like stumbling upon evidence of a self they’d long since disavowed. When she saw that it wasn’t, she stood still for a minute, transfixed by the glow of the open door as though waiting for a sign.Īt school the next day, the others stared at her blankly. She’d woken from a dream of eating everying inside the refrigerator, and she moved through the dark hall, panicked, to see if it was true. It was the youngest who heard it again, one night wandering sleepless through her house. They still threw themselves at each other’s older brothers, but only when no one was looking, only in the dark. Your credit card, that is.Įach time it was the same: they ran from the phone booth shrieking, gasping from laughter. It seemed to them that one day it just appeared-a line thrown across some unfathomable breach. No one could say where the number came from. They crowded into payphones, sweat-sticky and iridescent with sunscreen. They were ten, flat-chested in bathing suits. This was the summer they entered phone booths and ran out shrieking. She is a Provost’s Fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California. Emily Geminder is the recipient of a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. The following is from Emily Geminder’s collection, Dead Girls.
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