The Geography of Girlhood

the geography of girlhood

“P
erfectly captures
what being a
teenager is all about, from the smallest
insecurities to the biggest
heartbreaks.”

—Sarah Dessen
,
author of
The Truth About Forever

“Compelling,
evocative
, funny,
sensual
, and painfully real.”

—Ann Martin
,
author of Newbery Honor Book
A Corner of the Universe

“This is what it feels like to grow up, and
these are the poems that every teenage
girl, overwhelmed by
longing
,
jealousy
,
and
passion
, would love to write.”

—Leah Stewart
,
author of
The Myth of You and Me

“With
pithy
, evocative metaphors,
Smith’s free-verse poems capture the
fizzy
energies, soul-deadened malaises,
and ultra-confident poses that mark teen
girl experience.… Smith gets the climate
for her geography
just right
.”

—
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s
Books

“A
beautifully written
, remarkably
perceptive take on growing up. I only
wish this book had been around
when I was a teenager.”

—Julia Stiles

“
Funny,
sad, all too real, and a
thorough delight
to read.”

—Tom Perrotta
,
bestselling author of
Election

“
Lyrical
, gorgeous, and hard-hitting.
I couldn’t put it down.”

—Lauren Myracle
,
bestselling author of
ttyl

“Kirsten Smith’s verse is
spare
,
subtle
, and
tender
.”

—Deb Caletti
,
author of National Book Award finalist
Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“Alternately
caustic
and
vulnerable
,
above all, Smith’s writing is true.”

—E. Lockhart
, author of
The Boyfriend List

“Readers will be enormously
satisfied
.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Copyright

Copyright © 2006 by Kirsten Smith

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com

www.twitter.com/littlebrown

First eBook Edition: October 2009

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-08683-7

The text was set in Frutiger Light, and the display type is handlettered.

Contents

PRAISE FOR the geography of girlhood

Copyright

1 marine life

2 low tide

3 the lay of the land

4 Bodies of water

5 the river of sixteen

6 the Wrong road Out of town

7 the flanks of home

acknowledgments

To Mel and Katie Aline
and
In memory of Stan Pollard

1

Clam season is about to start

and ninth grade is almost over

and I have rowed myself

out to the middle of the bay so I can see the place I live:

everything is trees and water and rain

and smoky stink from the paper mill

and small town, small town.

One day, I’ll find my way away from here

and go somewhere real

and do something great

and be someone wonderful.

One day, I will be standing at the shore

of a completely different body of water

and it will be big and wild and dangerous

and it will be like this one

never even existed.

Fourteen is like rotten candy,

fourteen is a joke that no one gets.

When you’re fourteen,

you look good only once a week

and it’s never on the day of the dance.

When you’re fourteen,

you have a mouthful of metal

that no one wants to taste.

Fourteen is going to bed at night

and wishing you could wake up with a new face

or a new dad or better yet,

a new life

that doesn’t look anything

like this one.

I have been living in my sister’s room

for so long,

I begin to think that

her body is mine.

The long torso,

the breasts lodged high

like tea cakes

on her powdery skin.

In our room

I watch my sister dash around,

her lips like bruised plums

as she waits for Bobby

to gun up to the house.

I look at her

and memorize everything.

So when the time comes,

and the boy’s eye glitters like a crime,

I will know what to do.

I will peel off my crushed velvet shell

and stand before him,

tall and beautiful

and so white

he can barely breathe.

They say girls take after their mothers

and in the case of my sister, it’s true.

But in the case of me

I have my father’s eyes and my father’s toes

and scariest of all

my father’s nose.

My mother was pretty

but my father is not,

so that means whatever beauty there is,

that’s what my sister got.

Lips, limes, she had it all
.

That’s what I say about my mother,

a dreamboat that drifted away,

a flower on a live spit.

She had the beauty of a fire alarm:

loud and hard to ignore,

always too late to stop the house from burning down.

I don’t remember much about her

just that she was an expert at drinking too much

and falling down just a little,

and she always said glass could cut glass,

a diamond was nothing special.

The day she left, I was six and learning to swim,

coasting like a petal in the community pool

when she came to whisper her last how-to’s into
my ear:

How to hold the man gently over the flame

until he is golden as toast,

how to butter him,

how to almost gobble him whole,

when to stop

and call him
love
.

To him, we are piles of lingerie.

We are water-rings and dented fenders,

we are a trail of CDs littering the road to nowhere.

Because of us, he’s always on the prowl for chaos,

a man with a little box for this

and a little bag for that.

To him, we are the kinds of daughters that

make a man want to invent things

just so they can make their way along.

He tells us he hopes that when the time comes,

and with the help of all he’s given us—

the fishing-lure markers, the toolbox,

the lectures on which boys are trouble

and which boys are good-for-nothings—

we’ll be able to move gracefully

through the world.

We will be tidy and professional,

well organized and successful,

but what he doesn’t know is that

we will leave just enough of a trail—

a stain on the davenport or a chip in the paint—

so that he can recognize us

as his daughters,

so he can seek us out

and call us his own.

This morning, Tara catches me

sneaking into her closet and

when I ask to borrow one of her shirts

to wear to the dance this afternoon,

she tells me she’s not loaning me anything

and if I ever go in her closet again,

she will maim me

and then kill me.

I ask her what I should wear

and she says she doesn’t care

but whatever it is

it shouldn’t have stripes.

Dances are a dream come true

or a nightmare,

depending on who you are

or how you talk

or what you choose to wear that day.

I made the mistake of polka dots.