Living Dead Girl (3 page)

Then she was alone.

The man sighed. "Fine, I'll show you. Come with me."

The girl knew she wasn't supposed to go anywhere with strangers, but the man had on a blue shirt like everyone who worked at the aquarium, and he was crabby like the lady who'd told them welcome and to be quiet in the same sentence. He was just an annoying, boring grown-up, not like the strangers she was warned about, who spoke sweetly creepy, things like oh little girl, come sit on my lap, or offered rides or candy or secrets.

The man took her outside, because her class was in the other building, the new one. She'd seen it as she came in,
and had wondered why they'd put in a movie theater but not dolphins.

Before they went outside, before they even left the penguins (who were still just standing there, doing nothing, like they were watching them), he gave her a baseball cap.

"Everyone got one," he said. "Yours is the only one left, though, so it's too big. Better tuck your hair up under it. Maybe that way it'll stay on."

So the girl mashed her hair up under the hat so the hat wouldn't fall off and went outside. When she did, the man stayed behind to say something to the woman at the door. Grown-ups and all their boring talk.

"
A
LL RIGHT, ALICE," THE WOMAN RIPPING off my flesh says. "You can get up now. We're done."

T
HE GIRL WENT OUTSIDE AND THE man caught up to her in three easy steps. She heard him coming--one step, two step, three--and sighed, eager to get back to her friends.

"This way," he said, and she followed.

"Sorry I had to stop for a second there," he said as they walked. "I had to ask the lady by the door where the gift shop was. She thought you were my little boy. Isn't that funny? You don't look like a boy at all."

O
NCE UPON A TIME, THAT MOMENT was when a little girl's world ended.

"
H
AVE A GREAT DAY, ALICE," THE woman tells me as I am leaving, waving without looking at me. It is only three steps to leave her behind, the door to her little room with its light and wax and hot pain.

Ray says it's sad how women try so hard to be young, to pretend they are something they have forgotten.

"You can never remember the best part of yourself when you grow up, Alice," he tells me. "My mother told me that, and it's true. So what do you do?"

N
EVER GROW UP.

Like something out of a story, maybe.

Try saying it while a hot, heavy hand pinches, testing to make sure you're still child enough.

Try saying it when you can't grow, when you're forever trapped where someone else wants you to be.

G
ET UP.

Those were the first words I ever heard.

Open my eyes, see a girl, black and blue all over, dried blood along her thighs. Red brown stains smeared across the hairless juncture between.

"Get up and take a bath, Alice," the man in the blue shirt said, and Alice did.

I did.

That's how I was born. Naked, hairless, covered in blood like all babies.

Named, bathed, and then taken out into the world.

I
PAY FOR MY WAXING AND WAIT FOR my receipt. The woman who prints it out asks if I want to leave a tip.

"I gave her five dollars already," I say. "Can you put that on the bill?"

The woman frowns but types something into her computer and then prints out another receipt.

I leave and walk to the bus stop.

Along the way, I stop at a convenience store and buy five dollars' worth of hot dogs and candy. Two hot dogs, with cheese, and three candy bars, on sale. Bright orange stickers below the candy saying
SPECIAL! VALUE!
I eat
everything before the bus comes, even the candy bars, their chocolate gone old, spiderwebbed with gray, and throw all the wrappers away.

Here's a tip: leave no evidence behind.

O
NCE UPON A TIME, A LITTLE GIRL who lived at 623 Daisy Lane disappeared. The police questioned everyone, even a woman who remembered talking to a man whose little boy had already gone out into the parking lot. She remembered because he asked where the gift shop was and said thank you after she told him.

"No one says thank you anymore," she told the police. "No one's ever grateful for anything."

Ray let me watch her say that on TV, and then turned it off and smiled at me.

I
GET HOME AT FIVE, WHICH IS AFTER Ray gets home. He works 7-4 every day, with an hour for lunch, loading trucks at a warehouse that ships boxes of ready-to-assemble furniture, the kind that comes with picture instructions and lots of little screws. All our furniture is from there, and all of it leans to one side, manufacturer seconds.

Errors.

My hands are shaking as I close the door behind me.

"What happened?" Ray says. He's still eating his apple. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

"Bus broke down. We had to wait." I sit down at the kitchen table to be judged.

"What bus?"

"75."

He calls the bus company. I watch him throw his apple away. There is still some flesh left, white around the tiny core. I am too nervous to imagine eating it. Also, for once, I am not hungry.

I have not brushed my teeth. I will smell like food.

And Ray will smell it on me.

I look at the knife on the kitchen counter and picture it in my chest. I don't think it would take long for my heart to stop beating.

"All right, thank you," Ray says, and hangs up the phone. He looks at me. "I'm glad you didn't lie to me about the bus, Alice."

I nod. Look right at him.

Does he know about the food?

"Do you have a receipt?"

I fish it out of my pocket and hand it to him. He looks at it, and then throws it in the trash. "Hungry?"

I nod.

Does he know about the food?

He opens the refrigerator. It is the loudest thing in our apartment, makes odd wheezing noises, like it is struggling to stay cold. "You know what will happen if you ever do lie to me, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Good," he says, and slides me a fun-sized container of yogurt. The top promises it's the perfect lunch for children. "Because I would hate to take time off work to drive all the way to 623 Daisy Lane and wait for everyone to come home and ... take care of things. Helen and Glenn both have new jobs. Did you know that? Do you want to know where they work?"

I shake my head. I open my yogurt. Ray doesn't give me a spoon so I scoop some out with my fingers. My breath will smell okay now.

"I'd hate for them to come home and find me there, waiting for them," he says. "I'd hate for your parents to die because of you."

"I didn't lie to you about the bus," I say.

"I know, silly girl. My girl," he says, and stands up, unbuckles his belt. Opens his pants. "Come over here. Give me a kiss hello."

I get up and walk over to him. He frowns and I hunch over so I barely come up to his shoulder.

"Alice, my baby," he says, kissing my cheek.

Then he shoves me to my knees.

When he's finished, he throws the rest of my yogurt away.

"It spoils so easily," he says. "I wouldn't want you to get sick. Let's go watch TV."

We do. He drinks beer and orders a pizza and puts me
on his lap during the sitcom he hates. I am hungry again now, think of food; hot dogs, candy bars, the pizza crusts inside the box on the floor.

Ray likes how smooth I am, how raw my skin is. It burns by the time he's done touching it.

"No breakfast tomorrow," he says afterward. "I think you might be over 100 pounds. That's not acceptable."

At bedtime, he rumples his sheets--we have a two-bedroom apartment, because we are father and daughter and he wants to take care of me, wants me to have my own room like other little girls--and then crawls into my tiny bed with me. My sheets have pictures of cartoon princesses on them, with pink trim and a matching pink comforter.

"Love you," he says before he falls asleep. I am so hungry my head hurts with it, making me slow, and he pinches my thigh, hard.

"Love you too," I say, but it is too late and he holds me down, breathing hard and fast.

"Show me," he says. "Show me."

So I do.

R
AY GETS UP AT 6, SHOWERS AND dresses. He whistles while he shaves, and I listen for the clanking hum of the refrigerator, count out its wheezing rhythm. 1, 2, 3 . . . . . . 4. 1, 2, 3 . . . . . . 4.

Ray tried to teach me how to whistle once, in one of his better moods, but I could never pick it up. He said he still loved me anyway.

Lucky me.

"No breakfast, remember?" he says, sitting down next to me on the bed, one paternal hand on my forehead while the other gropes below. He keeps it up until he starts to sweat, little beads of moisture gathering at his temples, and then gets up.

Every Sunday we go to Freedom Church. Ray believes in God, and in looking at all the little girls in their Sunday best, ribbons and bows and tiny socks with lace on them.

The day I got too tall to wear the white dress with short, puffy sleeves and little tucks along the chest, he filled the kitchen sink with water and shoved my head into it.

I was thirteen then, and when I tried to stay down after he'd held me there, lungs burning, inside of my head going dark, he hauled me out and slapped me so hard the right side of my face grew a hand-shaped bruise, jaw to forehead. I couldn't go outside for a week.

No one missed me.

Two days later, when my face was still swollen hot, he came home with a lock of my mother's hair. He wouldn't tell me how he got it, even when I cried and crawled onto his lap to beg the way he likes best.

He just said, "I decide everything. Remember that."

God and monster all in one, and mine to worship.

I tell him to have a good day before he leaves my room, and he turns back to grin, proud.

"I look good today, don't I?"

I nod. He looks like Ray. There are no words for what he looks like to me.

He whistles again as he leaves.

I close my eyes.

There are several women at Freedom Church who
think Ray is attractive, with his full head of hair and carefully pressed clothes. They like that he is so strict with me, they say when they talk to him, his hand resting on my shoulder (remember what I will do if you ever try to leave me, remember who you belong to). Their eyes gleam with hope. They want to be taken care of, and they think Ray could do that for them.

He laughs at them on the way home, laughs at how old and sad they are. "Not like me," he says, and then rests one hand on my knee. "Not like you."

E
VENTUALLY I GET OUT OF BED AND walk to the bathroom. We don't have a tub, just a shower, but I ignore it and brush my teeth, swallowing the toothpaste instead of spitting it out. I hear it can be poisonous, but I guess it's only if you're really young.

I am 15 now, and I keep waiting for Ray to tire of me. I am no longer short with dimpled knees and frightened eyes. I am almost as tall as he is, and his license says he is 5'7''. He likes the picture. He says no one ever takes a good driver's license picture except him.

I am 15 and stretched out, no more than 100 pounds. I can never weigh more than that. It keeps my breasts
tiny, my hips narrow, my thighs the size Ray likes.

I am 15 and worn out, tired of everything.

I am 15, and I figure soon he will let me go.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER ALICE BEFORE me. Ray let her go when she turned 15.

He drove her all the way back to where she used to live, to where she was when she was another girl, back to her before.

Her body was found in a river, floating downstream just a mile from the house she grew up in.

Ray used to tell me this story a lot, pulling me close and saying, "But I'll make sure that doesn't happen to you. I'll keep you safe. All you have to do is be good. Be my little girl forever. You can do that, can't you?"

I am 15, and I figure soon Ray will kill me.

I could run, but he would find me. He would take me
back to 623 Daisy Lane and make everyone who lives there pay.

He would make everyone there pay even if he didn't find me. I belong to him. I'm his little girl.

All I have to do is be good.

T
HIS IS MY DAY:

After I chew on some toothpaste, I go into the living room and turn on the television. Morning television is boring, all bad news and infomercials, but at nine the talk shows start. I lie on the sofa and look at the ceiling.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, if the soaps aren't any good, I'll watch movies about angry, scared women who fight back or teenage girls who suffer but then overcome. There are always shower scenes in them, shots of the women scrubbing their abuse or grief away.

I don't understand this. You can't make yourself clean like that, and fresh-scrubbed skin only invites attention.
Ray makes me shower once a week, and I hate coming out of the bathroom. I hate knowing he's waiting for me, that he will rub his hands and himself all over me and whisper things. His hands used to make me cry, but now I'm used to them.

The thing is, you can get used to anything. You think you can't, you want to die, but you don't. You won't. You just are.

Today I smell like Ray, which is normal, and a little like yesterday's wax. My head itches, and I scratch it until the undersides of my fingernails are bright red. I flick the blood and dead bits of my head onto the floor, and get up to take my pills.