Hidden Parts

Where her dad’s vintage Mustang moldered and the eucalyptus dripped onto a smooth concrete cul-de-sac, she sunbathed in Grevelia Street heatwaves. Where the basketball hoop stood at eight feet and the front house’s tenants replaced glass in their windows, she did away with definitions of God. Where her dog gained weight and her mother made multiple trips a day to the grocery store, she cut parallel lines into the hidden parts of her shoulders. Her homework sat completed and the garden hose splayed across the lawn and she ate as little as possible. 

It was survival, all of it, and it was monstrous. It was her eyes creeping us out like the ick scales of goldfish, symptoms my shrink mother discussed while grilling burgers at the stove. We stayed out later than we were allowed, carving the streets like skateboarders looking for latchkey kids to pester. Where open garages led to piñatas and rope swings, the wind dried us after we hopped out of the pool. We grew mustaches to buy forties, attempted to build small bombs from lawnmower parts and pawn shop gunpowder. 

Her violence was at a finer point, making boys fold in on themselves like men who had betrayed their wives. We’d seen what they looked like when they left after a fight, finding dinner in town at places by themselves they knew no one familiar would ever go.