All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner Page A

have to strip their beds and wash the sheets. Nervous mothers, wondering how babies grow up to be cowboys. Bewildered mothers, wondering how they didn’t notice. One, one of them, dared press her face to the moist spot on the sheet, a faded sheet dancing with purple Barneys, and inhaled. Then her heart pinwheeled with guilt and shame filled her mouth like sand.
    An elk calf came out of the scrub that Saturday at the edge of the barracks, angled across Sarcee Trail—horns bleeting, metal kissing metal, siren wail—and down the ravine, long front legs buckling, spraying scree. It ended up caught in the school field, chest ripped open against a ragged hole in the fence, tranquilizer dart in its quivering left haunch, deep in its meat. On Tuesday I would find a thread of its heart still dangling from the fence.
    How do I know it was the heart? I
know
. He filled up the tank of my car and then handed me my change. His fingernails were cut short and amazinglyclean. Later, I found out he went to the bathroom after each fill-up and scrubbed until his skin was almost raw.
    I counted the change slowly just to keep him there. He was new in town. He was going to Diefenbaker, my school.
    “Maybe you’ll be in my class.”
    “Yeah, maybe.” He shrugged. Green fruit. Motherless child.
    That evening it looked to be snowing. Ash falling from the sky.
    Boy #2 once told me this, as if he thought it was funny: “My mum would carve you up with a butcher knife if she knew.”
    “Would she,” I said, as if I couldn’t care less, barely looking up from what I was doing. “Oh, would she.”
    One other thing my own mama said: Always aim for effervescence.
    Only now does the thought occur to me: It was him thinking he could carve me up. Boys are always more dangerous in hindsight.
    Boy #2, though, he was a scary one.
    Jennifer Hermann. Teresa Kowalsky. Eddie Lau. I called out their names, making eye contact when necessary, ignoring the grunters, the slouchers, the dispossessed. One more year of school and they’d all be sprung on the world and there was nothing I could do about it. Sioux O’Hearn. Brittany-Jane Staples. Rajit Singh.
    Then the shock of his name in my mouth. I let itswell like a communion wafer and then pried it slowly off the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
    Just outside the classroom window a thread of essential organ meat hung from a wire fence, twisting in the breeze. Gopher shit littered the field, crunching underfoot like dry dog food. Just south of the foothills, militia men were shooting the wild horses.
    The Hershey-sponsored world map rolled up to the top of the blackboard with a violent snap.
    “Here,” he said.
    I cant remember exactly when the smell of men my own age began to be invasive. Like a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, like wet metal.
    Boy #1 asked: “When I get a real gig, will you come and watch me?”
    He was really a very unmusical boy. His mother encouraged him, though. The kind of bottom-dwelling burbot who thought it would be fun to have a rock star for a son. The father pushed a broom somewhere and left her fantasies unfulfilled. Mothers are so often unaware of the harm they do. At least that’s what I used to think.
    “Its not enough to want it,” I told him.
    Later, I saw him sometimes out of the corner of my eye, like one of those dark spots that appear after you’ve been out in the sun too long—slouching down the hall with his Walkman on, tapping on the lockers. Usually alone. After Kurt Cobain died, Boy #1 wore anoose around his neck for days, his hair in blueberry Kool-Aid-streaked dreadlocks down over his sorrowful eyes.
    It was all I could do not to laugh.
    That strand of elk heart from the fence? I took it home. Something to rub back and forth between my fingers. Something to do while I watched the changing weather.
    I always wanted them to tell me about their girlfriends. I
encouraged
them. Girls like stick insects. But instead, this is what they did. They talked about