Mari

OF COURSE her mother wants an explanation. It’s no use denying it. It’s no use to start by denying it and when that doesn’t work, assure her, insist that it’s all over, and, in the end, beg. None of it is any use. Her mother wants to settle the matter. Mari is sitting on the living-room sofa. Her mother stands in front of her, walks back and forth, stands still again.

Mari has only one thing to say to her mother, a sentence mixed with tears, a desperate cry.

“You fucking shithead! My life is none of your business.”

“Sweetheart,” her mother says. “This is not a small thing.”

“I know it isn’t!” Mari yells. “It’s my life, and it’s none of your damn business.”

Her mother looks at her sadly. “Do you realize that laws have been broken here? I could report this to the police. Involvement with a minor would be punished with a fine, at the very least. He’d lose his job …”

“And you’ll fucking do it, too! But if you do, you’ll never see me again!”

Mari tries to muster some bravado in her voice but she can hear that her anger is nothing but a pitiful scramble to escape the inevitable crumbling. Her cheeks are hot. Her words turn viscous with tears. She’s never felt such pure hatred of her mother before. She isn’t my mother anymore, Mari thinks. Just the woman who gave birth to me.

Her mother looks at her with resignation. A look more tender than angry, Mari realizes. Why isn’t she angry? It would be easier to yell at her if she yelled back.

“You know that I don’t want something like that to happen. I don’t want a break between us,” her mother says.

“Well then, you know what to do.”

Her mother’s about to sit down, but she doesn’t sit down, can’t sit down, continues to pace back and forth in front of her. And then she says what Mari feared she would say.

“I went to see Julian.”

There it is. The exposure, the destruction.

Mari begins to cry, more forlorn than before.

It’s all over. She’ll be exposed now. The whole school will know. If she goes to school, they’ll laugh at her: there she is, the girl who stripped herself bare for the world. A stupid girl. Pitiful. A girl who thought she was important. And Julian — he’ll never speak to her again. He’ll hate her.

“No, Mom,” she says from behind the curtain of tears. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him what I thought of him.”

“Fuck. I hate you. Why are you torturing me? Why are you doing this to me?”

Her mother is sadder than before. “Because you’re my daughter and I have to protect you.”

Mari can barely speak anymore through the tears. Her mother doesn’t understand. No one does.

“But I love him,” she sputters.

“Sweetheart,” her mother says in her gentlest voice. “You’re sixteen years old. Try to understand.”

“Well, I don’t understand,” she answers.

Her mother raises her voice over the crying. “Did you know that it’s illegal?”

“Fuck.”

Her mother sighs again. Resigned. Humble. “Please don’t swear at me. This is a serious matter. I have to report this. I have to call the principal and the student counselor.”

“Don’t, Mom. I can’t go to school if you call. I can never go there again.”

Her mother sits down on the sofa facing her. “Maybe it would be best if you changed schools.”

“No, Mom! No,” she says, sobbing. “I’ll die if you call them.”

Her mother shakes her head. “I have to do it. It’s the only right way to handle this.”

“What will I have left then? I can’t go to school anymore. No one will want to be my friend. If you report it, what will I have left?”

Her question breaks through her tears. It isn’t really a question; it’s an acknowledgment of the hopelessness of the situation. She won’t have anything left, just emptiness.

Her mother doesn’t care if she begs.

“You can start over at another school in the fall.”

Mari sinks into despair. She has nothing left but a request: “Mom, let’s just let it drop,” she says, pleads.

It’s all she has left. Her mother can accept it, give in to her request, if she wants to. It hangs there between them, the only thread holding them together. A taut thread, thin, fraying.

She looks at Mari without answering.

“Mom, I’m begging you,” Mari says, more emphatic now. “Let’s just drop it.”

Her mother still doesn’t answer. Mari can see that she can’t answer. She’s left alone with her request. Her mother looks at her, her expression hard, no sign of mercy, no answer. She won’t give in.

Mari has nothing left. She’s finally lost everything.

Her expression hardens too: her lips tighten, she wipes away the tears. She turns her back on her mother and walks out of the room without saying a word.

AS SHE’S WALKING OUT the door, out of her mother’s sphere of influence, she invites a thought in, her own thought. She’s going to fly through the air again, spread her arms, open her wings, and jump.

Or maybe not.

Suddenly her old thoughts seem silly to her, childish, the flimsy imaginings of a daydream. No — the game is real now. In the real world, she can’t fly. There’s nothing so beautiful and light as that in reality. Reality is crueler, rougher, more violent. It will happen, that’s for certain, but in some other way.

When it does happen, it will happen all of a sudden, almost as if it were an accident. Girls like that, the kinds of girls who do it, think about it in secret. Maybe they don’t even think about it, maybe they talk to their mom in the morning about ordinary things — their homework, their plans for the weekend, some new shoes they saw in a store window, the blueberry pie they’re going to make tonight when they get home. But the blueberry pie never comes, not for them, not for the kinds of girls who do it. Girls like that get up from the table at breakfast, put their dishes on the counter and say thank you, put on their coat and shoes, and tell their mothers see you later. They say see you later, and then they open the front door and close it behind them like they have every day before, close the door and look at the trees in the yard and take the tram into town. Girls like that walk through town past the department store and see the shoes in the window, the ones they were talking about, walk past them as their own reflection shines from the surface of the glass, and they don’t go to school. They go to the river, they climb on the roof, they walk along the railroad tracks to a spot with a steep drop over the rails.

That’s how it happens.

See you later. No intention. No decision. The decision is just a whim that comes into their heads as their face is reflected in the shiny window of the department store. No shouts of passers-by. No flight tracing a beautiful arc across the blue fabric of the sky. Nothing beautiful. Reality is mute, random, and cruel. Violent. A mute thud, a voiceless shout that disappears in its own unimportance.

When the game becomes reality, that’s how it happens.

Mute. Unremarkable. Random. Real.