Pretty Girl with Expiration Date
Seventeen, and I am dancing. Spinning, spiraling, suffocating. Seeing heaven when I’m hungry enough. Setting little fires around the neighborhood until each green lawn is singed with yellow. Dating a drug dealer with hard hands and lovely eyes. Coughing on residual smoke—pears and rotten cores.
Is this what love tastes like? Browned apples, ashes, hearts carved into bathroom stalls. We are leaving our mark. I hate my name except when he says it. Elliot is beautiful like roses in winter and men in the moon—makes you want to look twice. In the summer, we get in his car and drive out miles and miles until we can stick out our tongues and swallow vast mouthfuls of night. We kiss and laugh and I pretend my life is a Disney movie: Cinderella is skinny without trying and Prince Charming never leaves.
Among the grasses, Elliot plays classic rock and grabs my hands in his. Clutches me tighter, more metal than starlight, waltzing on a razor’s edge.
* * *
When he is away at college, I waste days crying over white dresses and chiffon. Private school graduation looks like a child marriage. After lunch, the sound of vomit splashing on hallway bathroom toilets. Spider limbs and ribs turning into blades.
Elliot picks me up on the last day of classes. He drives a stick shift. My girlfriends won’t speak to him because he got Simon hooked on LSD. I tell them Simon was a stoner anyway. They don’t believe me when I say Elliot is the gentlest creature I’ve ever touched. They point at the blue purple black stains on my legs where phantoms fucked me. Watercolor canvas: midnight meets the sea. They don’t know I’m making myself a thing of beauty, one breath at a time. Slicing my seams and drawing back because I’m afraid of blood. Starving to stop my periods. Hole in my stomach where a moon should wax and wane. Elliot says Come On You’re Going To Snap, and for once I feel sick and popsicle-stick thin, like his hands could break me in two. Like I’d turn him into a murderer if he loved me too much. A gruesome, storybook way to die, so ugly I can’t recognize it.
For a year I have been plagued by visions of the end. Drowning in the Ohio River. Flames swallowing my hair and my head. The truck on the highway. Metal stakes of the bridge. I am impaled, beaten, crushed. One thousand ways to go. The crunch of my bones beneath the tires; the iron tang of blood and loose teeth. Flash of light. And then nothing. What is it supposed to look like after nothing?
Elliot thinks there’s no such thing as an afterlife but wouldn’t everyone want to believe in a god if they saw what I’ve seen. Seize even the smallest bites of light we can find. And yet what of the sinners. Damnation only a beat away. Faces turning to devils before they look like my parents again. When I was four, five, six, I had a recurring dream that a witch was coming to take me away; I’d wake up screaming Stop, Stop, I’m Not Ready Yet. The school nurse said: unhealthy fascination with death. The type that makes little girls toy with matches or stick their heads under the bathwater for just too long.
Still, fate flies on fast feet. Hourglasses and windows. I run and run until the sky is made of bleach and kaleidoscopes, always a step behind but almost hollow enough. My girlfriends jog for miles and count the pounds around their thighs. In history class, we talk about how rich Englishwomen wore silk robes and didn’t eat so they could be closer to God. Light enough to be holy, and then at the gates of Heaven they were beloved.
* * *
As a girl I wanted to be a doctor: cut people open, sew them together again. My mother said Marry Rich so I wouldn’t have to be anything. Besides, I always cried at the sight of needles. I thought it wasn’t fair, I was good at everything. Now nothing except scraping my body clean, smaller, sharper, harder, but no millionaires will want a woman without soft places.
A year until freedom so my girlfriends and I put pins on a map to mark all the places we want to go. Red dots and little stars, winking until they disappear. Waiting to burn out. Supernova, the brightest we will ever be. Teenage dream: made only of hunger and affection. We are starving and starved for love, there are empty stomachs and boys on ecstasy and what more could we dare to want. But my girlfriends say Just Because You Like Broken Vases Doesn’t Mean You Should Keep Them in Your Home. Always counting the moles and freckles on my body like coordinates, connect-the-dots, a masterpiece and I must be the artist this time. Force my girl skin into a woman.
Elliot takes me to watch the meteors in July, middle of nowhere, stars tumbling from the sky. Throw my head back and burst into flames. He says I Know I’ve Said This Before but You Have Beautiful Hair. And I want to wrap my dark hair around us both and tie us together with a Gordian knot. Pretend my hair isn’t falling out in handfuls. Wish upon a star that I don’t have to be starving, I want to be strong when he pushes himself inside of me, I want to be on top for once, make him scream. Because there is something feral inside of me. Something with sharp claws trying to escape and he is getting better but I am still a mosaic of pieces.
This time when he touches me, I think I will shout: How Dare You put away your needles and your powders. How Dare You flush them and watch them disappear. How Dare You take college classes, find a real job, make new friends. I Hate You and I think I am the broken vase.
Instead we sit two feet apart, don’t even kiss, he talks about his neuroscience books and I wait for him to slice me open and say what he sees in my head. My mother doesn’t see he’s too smart for me, she calls him lazy but I think he’ll be rich one day, big house in Columbus and when he comes home from the office he’ll fuck me on the kitchen counter, wads of cash and pretty clothes for the PTA meetings. The way he looks at me now. Like he’s suddenly seeing twenty years in advance.
Sour tongue, shallow lungs. Liquid languor in my limbs. When I meet his gaze I see my father and I am afraid. Ken doll covered in wrinkles. What happens when I’m old and fat and crumpled like leaves on the lawn. When we’re bound by vinyl houses, sidewalks, picket fences. Suburbia is slow and stale and sheds itself in shades of brown and gray. Brick teeth around both our legs, fifty years to die properly.
No wonder pretty girls come with expiration dates and coffins made of glass. When I get home I draw pictures of my funeral and staple the images together so they know what to do with me after I go. Me with red lips and a white gown, my girlfriends in dresses like lilies of the valley; Persephone and her maidens. The climax: Elliot in a black suit, mixing what’s left of his pills with merlot, pouring it over the ridges of my bones. Then how will I be remembered? To make a spectacle of death is selfish. Worse—ugly.
But since when has the end not been a performance? On Sundays my parents pass the bread and the cup, the Wages of Sin Is Death, Take This and Eat It, for This Is My Body. So close to eternal life. My turn and I can’t swallow, the bread is dust between my fingers, how many sins are worthy of hell. Picture books said when little girls died, they turned into angels. Feathers and pale wings, bare feet. Hunting for a crown of thorns.
How much will it cost to live forever. Will I be beautiful then.
* * *
Seventeen, a countdown. Each year I am running out of skin. Tightening around myself until I’m made of vines and dark scars. Leaves bursting from the hinges of my bones. When Persephone disappeared, Demeter sent the whole world into winter. I stand outside and watch the snow. White flakes, cold hands, a life spent clutching planets. Ice sears bare skin and soft grass, green turns to white, ground untouched, unmarred by footprints. Except there is Elliot and he is carrying his books. Trekking a path. I call his name but he walks too quickly, suddenly I want him to carry me, I want to know where he’s going, I want to pick up my bones and run after him. I am always left behind. All the places my girlfriends marked on the map. Our destinations.
In the snow I see my shadow. Swaying and shaking and scared of snapping. Then I close my eyes from the sun and around me are my girlfriends in silk dresses, Elliot wine-drunk on gold bliss. Dancing feet in ice skates. Candlelight licking diamond rings. White dress, arches of evergreen. Moonlight on the field. His back in the snow and constellations overhead spelling our fates, the world has never been so devastating and so beautiful. Enough that when I open my eyes I can’t fathom leaving, as if it has ever been my choice to begin with.
J.H. (she/her) (@jenny41359340) is a Chinese-American high school senior from Cincinnati, OH. An alum of the Iowa Young Writers Studio and the Adroit Summer Mentorship, her work is forthcoming in or has been recognized by One Teen Story, Bayou Magazine, and the New York Times, among others.