All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner Page B

their mothers. Even him. Ghost woman who choked me in my sleep with her perfume, something he remembered came in a bottle shaped like a cat. Her fur collar still cold from outdoor air when she came into his room to kiss him goodnight. He always pretended to be asleep. He knew that it pleased her.
    All that energy boys use up trying to please their mamas. Could keep space junk in permanent orbit. Could.
    There is stuff up there you would not believe.
    The new science teacher was nothing if not persistent. Complimented me on my hair. The kind of crimson glow strontium nitrate gives pyrotechnics, he told me. (Originally from Minnesota, like most middle-Americans he had fireworks on the brain.) Before I could admit I found this moderately interesting, I moved quickly out of his airspace.
    Grown men and their sorry skins. Don’t they know?
    Boy #3 said: “I like these lines around your eyes.” And I hadn’t even noticed them myself.
    He was one smooth boy. He worked in a deli part-time and little stick insects came from miles just to hang around and watch him shave pastrami. I was sitting at the corner table one afternoon when a woman came in, much too elegant for the neighbourhood. She seemed to vibrate like a hydro line. Her hair was anchor-woman perfect. She made a big show of ordering, as if she wanted a sandwich as perfect as her hair. Boy #3 listed all the options, with or without this, with or without that. After she paid, she leaned over the deli counter—she was
that
tall—and kissed him on the cheek and told him not to be late for supper.
    I said: “So why didn’t you introduce me?”
    He rolled his eyes up into his head.
    I told him they’d stay stuck like that forever.
    A weekend in early October. The new boy (he,
him)
was coming around often by then. He didn’t talk much. Stood on the front steps of my condo and looked out towards the mountains. This was deeply satisfying. I’d had enough of restless boys, boys jittery with the future, boys who didn’t know when enough was enough. The sky was so clear that I could almost forget how the air had looked in early September. Along the windowsills, though, there was still a thin film of ash soft as mouse fur.
    I just wished he wouldn’t wash so often. Most of the time, he didn’t smell like anything at all.
    The mother, on the other hand, some nights she smoked me out of my own bed. Perfume in a cat-shaped bottle. Like hot stinking piss.
    The science teacher wouldn’t take no for an answer. Rang my classroom phone. Said, “Sr(NO 3)2. Say, it’s got a catchy beat!” One of the English teachers, the one with the limp and the pouchy smile, thought he was handsome in a second-hand, draft-dodger kind of way “You’re nuts,” she said in the lunchroom. “If it were
me”
Her breath leprous with want.
    She liked the way he made a poetry of science.
    I could smell his wet rot. Creosote flesh. Gave me flash headaches, like being trapped in abandoned cabins while shifting timbers sweated sap. Like pressing my nose to a telephone pole. I had to stand upwind of him just to have a conversation.
    Then there were the girls, the ones that leaned so close I could smell their smoky, minty breath as they explained why they couldn’t stay for the test. Their thin lies whistled through my ears like razor kites. Stick insects with their arms pressed to their sides, never meeting my eyes. Outside there was an engine idling, torn vinyl seats, The Prodigy blaring from six speakers, “Smack my bitch up!” They’re not the ones I had to watch out for, though. It was the huggers. The girls with naturally flushed cheeks. The Save the Planet girls with littleplatinum rings glinting in their navels. Curvy girls rampant with optimism.
    Girls are growing from the minute they leave the womb. And if it’s very quiet, you can hear it. A soft, continual
swish swish swish
. Like something cloaked in taffeta coming to get you in the night.
    Boys growing. Now that can wake the dead.
    He