Heather(34)

Callie sets her phone down, rubs her temples. This is what she had wanted, but it feels different from how she thought it might. Out of her hands. Genetic genealogy is what got the Golden State Killer, and since then has led to the closing of hundreds of rape and murder cases that otherwise would never have been solved. This is a good thing, of course. But she’s heard of cases in which medical DNA was accessed without permission—DNA from a woman’s pap smear used to nab her father in an unsolved double homicide from before she was born. People using the internet to find relatives and build their family trees, only to have their DNA used to catch their favorite uncle for a thirty-year-old rape. Families torn apart over the revelation of a long-hidden love child.

No, she knows it isn’t as simple as Nixon makes it out to be. DNA as saving grace. The more honest take is that DNA is something that connects and destroys in equal measure, and you never know which way things are going to swing. Except for in her case. Still just a blank space on the family tree, where her father’s name should be.





ANNABELLE


Sabrina spends homeroom scribbling hard in a notebook you’ve never seen before. She says it is homework, but she never consults any books, just writes and writes, pausing to shake out her cramped fingers, her hand stained with smeared ink. Look at me, you will her, but you can only make out some of her features through the curtain of her hair. Even as the other girls hiss whispers about her, she doesn’t lift the tip of her pen from the page. She writes like her life depends on it, and you can practically feel it in your own skin. Her urgency, a burning in her chest, and the pain of biting down on her lip to keep her expression even. To contain all the hurt in that one small place. The girls in the corner have gotten bored with their whispers and have escalated their tactics. Now they have chants.

Annabelle the good, Sabrina the bad. She made her mother run away and now they’re both sad.

Annabelle the prude, Sabrina the slut. One spreads her legs and one keeps them shut.

Annabelle the wise, Sabrina the fool. Annabelle off to college, Sabrina will flunk school.



“Those are the stupidest rhymes I’ve ever heard,” you say, loud enough so Sabrina can’t help but hear you, so that the girls in the back hear too.

It takes all of your nerve to speak up against them and you know Sabrina knows this. You expect her to look at you sheepish with gratitude. Instead she spits at you.

“Fuck you, Annabelle. And you know you are getting fat, right?”

The girls howl. Sabrina leaves in a huff, two spots of color high on her cheeks, with her notebook tucked under her arm while Mr. Pierce, the homeroom teacher, uselessly calls after her, telling her he will have to write her up if she doesn’t return to her seat.

You look down at your middle, prod your thighs, pinch your upper arms.

It is true, that the sickness that plagued the end of summer is gone. That in its place is a hunger that wakes you in the middle of the night like a presence in your room. You eat only as much as you dare, having already been scolded by Sabrina for scarfing a box of macaroni and cheese at two in the morning when it was the last one left.

You’re not getting fatter, you tell yourself. Sabrina’s just lashing out, being mean. You heard her on the phone again this weekend, murmuring into the receiver. While she was talking to him, her voice small and high, you crept into her room and slid open her desk drawers. Your fingers came away dusted with purple iridescent eyeshadow. You rubbed them on the front of your sweatshirt, pushed yourself to think harder about where Sabrina might hide something. You wanted the notebook the most but you would settle for any clue. When you turned to her unmade bed you saw the glint of something metallic nestled in the sheets. A lighter, just like the one Sabrina used to sterilize the needle when she stitched you together, an S scratched into the back. You recognized it as the one the Coyote used to light his cigarette in the car that day. You’ve tried not to think of it but it takes you back, his eyes narrowed in some private delight, like he was pulling off a practical joke.



* * *



The bell rings, startling you. As the girls in the back file out of the room one of them reaches into her bag and drops a can of chocolate SlimFast on your desk.

You feel relieved to go to history class first period. It is barely October but Miss Hamilton already has the room decorated for Halloween, paper moons silhouetted with black cats against the window. Bats swooping from the top of the blackboard. Diaphanous tissue paper ghosts hang from the ceiling above the heat registers, twirl on their strings.

Behind you Jessica Wolfson whispers to Anna Kempe. Shit, do you have a tampon?

You shiver, as though someone has put a cold hand on the back of your neck. Start to count.

You haven’t had your period for over three months.

You pluck at your sweatshirt. Sabrina’s voice in your head. You’re getting fat. You try to remember what your mother told you, all those years ago, about periods and when and why they come. About what it means if it stops. But what you remember best is your mother talking about the moon, how women’s bodies are tied to its pull. How women give life and how she summoned you and Sabrina from the darkness of the world’s unconscious, the two of you glinting with stardust. You liked this idea so much—your baby limbs shimmering in her womb—that you never bothered to question it. To hold it to the light.

Miss Hamilton clears her throat to get everyone’s attention, easy in this advanced class, smaller than the rest and populated by overachievers aching to get scholarships to Rutgers in a few years.