Fridays suck.
Fridays are the bridge to the weekend, when I’m hit with frying pans, croquet mallets, my mother’s favorite fish slice. I’m scorched with cigarettes.
Sometimes, they sever the soft skin between my toes and rub table salt in.
But not really. They could only do that stuff if they were home.
Mr. and Mrs. Cruise are never home on weekends.
So no one is there to beat me except me.
I had a job once in the kitchen boutique and that kept me busy, but then a guy came in one day and robbed us and I got shot, so now I sit in my panic room all weekend until my parents come home. The only friend I have in the world is my Doberman, Crunchy.
Except I don’t have a dog or a panic room and I never had a job.
I can’t stop myself.
I’m melting from the ennui of being the most normal girl in the world. If I had guts, I’d go to college parties and drink vodka, like China used to. She’s gutsy. She swallowed herself and now she’s a walking digestive tract. She digests on paper and we can see what she ate that day.
Usually she eats the past.
She’s especially afraid of the bomb dogs in school. They roam around with their trainers and they do their job. They sniff. They sniff for nothing because there is a difference between a threat and a bomb.
A bomb is something people make out of chemicals. A threat is something we all have, like snot or eye boogers or something. It’s a human body part.
Threat (n.) 1. part of a student that makes them so scared they spend all day in their room on the weekends. 2. part of a student that makes them tell lies so people will like them because somewhere else inside their body is a panic button that never stops getting pressed.
Our first intruder drill was last year. I was a junior. They told us to hide in closets. I did what they told me during the drills, knowing that if a real intruder came, I’d bail out the window before I’d trap myself in a closet. Didn’t they ever watch a horror movie?
I hate Fridays because weekends are boring. It’s exciting having bomb threats every day. It’s something better to do. It’s a distraction. It’s a party. We have made it a routine, and it’s a reason to get up in the morning.
I like seeing how people don’t care anymore. I like hearing the other students getting sarcastic. I wish they’d fuckin’ blow it up already. I hope today’s real, man; I didn’t do my chem homework.
Fridays suck because I lied about seeing Gustav’s helicopter.
I say I can see it, but I can’t.
I’ve tried every day of the week and I can’t see a thing.
I use facts I hear from China and Stanzi and I know it’s red and it’s almost finished, so I can fake it pretty well. Most of all I twiddle my hair and pretend like I like Gustav, but he’s not my type.
I’m looking for someone older.
Forty, at least. Someone who needs a good wife who knows how to do everything in a house. That’s all I want. Imagine if I said that out loud. They’d burn me as a witch.
But it’s true.
I want to be a wife, have babies, and make a man happy. And I want to be happy myself.
Until then, I live a lie and chop off a foot of hair a day so my stepmom doesn’t notice and say something bitchy like, “I hate how you get more beautiful and I just get saggier and uglier.”
I may be beautiful—if you believe in Barbie beauty—but I’m not like China, who can write down her feelings, or Stanzi, who can spit out logic like it’s some kind of scientific burp or something. I don’t have the bond they have. It’s impossible to have a best friend if you move every two years because you’re an irrational liar and people begin to hate you once they find out. All I have is Mr. and Mrs. Cruise, providers of a house and food in the refrigerator. Mrs. Cruise is not my mother.
My mother was two wives ago. Daddy likes them young.