The Girl Made of Dirt

The other girls laugh when she struggles to stand up in the ditch, her mouth edged with dirt. She braces for another blow, but they let her scramble away, and she wonders if her shoulder blades poke strangely from her T-shirt, another mark against her. She runs home, mother at work, to her bedroom tacked with Hello Kitty and Taylor Swift posters, and into the welcoming arms of online messages and quickly snapped photos, only she doesn’t know it’s not a sweet boy, not a good boy at the other end, a boy who’d slip a strand of her tangled hair behind her ear, or cup her damp face so gently she could cry, and whisper not to worry about the girls or the pain of days that follow her wherever she goes; a boy who’ll tell her everything will be all right. She doesn’t know the dark heart that hides behind the blue flicker of screen and murmurs show me your tits, babe, show me, if you love me, you’ll show me.

She’s used to being invisible, walking down school corridors, bumped by people named Tiffany and Brandon, kings and queens who reign the hallways, only the next day, everyone glances at the images on their phones and stares at her, and she knows then it’s over, that nothing can save her, that no one will cup her face and say everything will be all right, that she did it to herself, and if she scratches too hard, her skin will spill dirt. And so she drinks bleach and slices the tender flesh on her thighs with a pin and then a knife used to cut green apples to let the dirt out, always her thighs so her mother won’t see when she gets home at night, exhausted, and later on, she sits with white-haired men in offices who talk nonsense and can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be so young and so old at the same time, how difficult it is to search for love and find only hardness, how the pain swells inside her like a big black balloon, but balloons only stretch so far before they burst.