Fam

My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin doesn’t know that she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time. Her mom showed up at her high school graduation, no one had seen her in eight years. Mothers like that never know how to dress, too much fake jewelry, fake hair, and a big-ass fake leather purse still too small for all her shame and addictions to everything else. My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin went to a costume party dressed as Selena or Madonna or Paula Abdul, just a thin layer of 1985 draped over her tits. She works out, a lot, a pic for the shoulder press, 78 likes, a pic for the dead lifts, 134 likes, don’t get me started on the squats. She doesn’t like when people take pictures when she isn’t looking, when her face is the one we see in the mornings when she can’t find her keys or when her phone is silent and black and asleep and dead and she has to wait fidgeting in that space so close to oblivion. They put titanium rods in her back when she was eleven to correct the scoliosis. She used to walk around like a Black Quasimodo: loved and gorgeous. The metal worked to undo the snaked spine, only a little pain and constipation from the meds to whip her back straight. Afterward, there came new opportunities, new clothes, new friends, new hobbies, one after another on a conveyor belt along with the chance to document it all. Her happiness was electric, blinking, a ding, ding, ding, ding. Disappointment is oily; it has hair and musk and cracked lipstick. Her mother never spoke at the graduation, just faded away into the crowd as per the court orders. They say scoliosis is common in obese girls, the weight on their birdlike skeletons is too much. My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin was popular. One hundred seventeen hearts for feeding ice cream to a puppy. There are never enough hearts. Of course the monsters came, the trolls, the online bullies with their emoji fangs shooting projectile venom of envy and disgust. We were afraid she would choke to death on the poison like the white girls on TV, hanging from closet doors, bleeding out into tubs, but my lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin never said even a fuck you, just kept on. When your own mother punches you in the chest for reasons too small to see with the naked eye, the rest of the world has a hard time hurting you more. Sixty-four lols for flipping off the president. Two hundred sixteen likes for a poolside bikini pose at sunset. She smiles into her phone where smiles are brightest, in the light, the wires, the electricity of us who have become everything to her because in the machine there is no blood, no bone, and no fat.