PART THREE

Girl years are longer than boy years, our lives stretched out like taffy, like the bubblegum we chew, always trying to make the biggest sound when the bubble goes pop, explodes onto our lips. We are pink on the outside—ribbons and dresses and jelly bracelets and barrettes, and pink on the inside—our tongues, the smooth insides of our cheeks, the smooth insides between our legs. We are seas of pink floating inside seas of pink. We kiss and scream and jump and play “Ring Around the Rosie” until we all fall down, hoping the boys will catch up, knowing that eventually they will. And they’ll lay us down and peel off our clothes and tell us to close our eyes and open our mouths and shhhhh everything will be okay. That’s what a girl year is like—string enough of them together and you have something that looks like a life. It looks like love or obsession or lust or maybe something completely different, something we’re not able to name just yet. The boys run in larger circles around our smaller circles, waiting for the ones who break the chain, who let go of the hands of the girls on either side. And our families aren’t much help, the temperature around them somehow cooler than ours. They live in refrigerators, in wallets and mailboxes, in factories and banks and the glow of the television set during the eleven o’clock news. How will we find our way? We stare at the sky, watching for falling stars, watching the people we love, the people we want to love us back, our arms open, ready to catch something, anything. Surely there is life up there. Surely someday it will fall like drops of cream poured from the Little Dipper into our cupped hands.