He asked if he could come on her breasts. They weren’t using a condom and
she wasn’t on birth control but K didn’t like using condoms and Baby Girl
was too scared he would stop fucking her if she protested. Baby Girl let
out a cry. He pushed too hard. She started crying. She hates crying in
front of anyone.

He didn’t stop or seem to notice that she was crying—he thought maybe she
was just sweating because he couldn’t even remember the last time she
cried. He kept staring at the tattoo of a girl riding a bicycle on her arm,
watching her muscles flex the wheels as if it were floating down 3rd Ave
near all the warehouses behind the BQE.

When he was in high school, he would go down there to smoke with J, sitting
on the abandoned tracks letting the air brush against their new tattoos,
still raw from the needles. The air would make it sting. He liked how the
stinging felt. His mother would yell at him for getting home too late and
scream about how he has too much freedom for a boy his age, slap his arm
with a broom like she was a witch.

Sometimes he really believed she was one—the way she’d spit on him to get
rid of the evil eye because the evil eye was always there, and if they
weren’t careful, the devil would find them, make them do terrible things.
He was just like his father and brothers—useless men who will live useless
lives. Devil men, she’d say. But he never paid attention to what she said.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter.

Baby Girl washed her face in the sink, allowing some of the water in her
eyes and down her neck as if to drown herself. She wants to drown herself
sometimes—or fall onto the tracks or in front of cars—but something always
stops her. She doesn’t know what. Baby Girl steadied herself against the
cold marble, her body illuminated by the dirty yellow light from the
window, as if she’s on fire. She wants to be on fire, her body to turning
to ash, ash scattered in Coney right near the Wonder Wheel. She lost her
virginity in one of the bathroom stalls to H—she could feel him now,
grabbing her hair and fucking her from behind, his breath in her ear as he
sometimes stroked her hair. He left for Philly the next day. His roommates
found his body a month later.

There was still a residue of cum on her chest. She wiped it off with his
towel.

***

Nobody asked how it started. Outside Baby Girl’s apartment, a cherry
blossom tree had grown sometime before she was even born, its pink flowers
sweating in the sun. It was probably the best thing about her view, which
was mostly of the cars and trucks speeding along the BQE like horses also
made of metal—there’s no use for real animals in the city. There haven’t
been real animals roaming for a long time. Even the humans aren’t real
humans. She wondered if metal horses were real horses once, born only to be
turned to metal later on, their hearts pickled and put in jars by
mechanics.

She stood naked at her window, looking down into her neighbors’ yards. Old
Man started replanting his vegetable garden, like he does every year. His
pet pig lay in the corner, its large belly exposed in the sun, its black
fur matted against its body from the heat. Sometimes the pig would wake her
up in the early morning, its squeals loud, an entire building collapsing in
the middle of the night. Baby Girl wondered why the pig was always so
scared.

She woke up to the sounds of sirens. She was alone. There was the smell of
smoke like a ghost just entered the room, maybe trying to keep her alive,
maybe trying to feel for someone else they once knew, maybe trying to get
something. There is never anyone, even when the room is full of people. She
sat up to look out her window and saw flames rapturously dancing up to the
sky—getting closer to where god is supposed to be. It’s what her teachers
always told her. And she mostly believed them, she was too afraid of going
to hell because she kissed girls but then she stopped believing them when
she saw Sr. Charlotte kissing Sr. Mary in the hallway leading up to the
third floor in the convent.

Baby Girl wasn’t supposed to be there—so she scrambled away before they
could catch her—although what could they really have done to her?—but even
now, she remembers them kissing like flames, struggling, veiling something
more than desire. We all need our reason to live. She can’t help but think
how they’re probably dead now anyway, buried in different cemeteries near
families who never realized who they actually really loved.

All of a sudden she feels like she’s sitting in a stranger’s car, feeling
the blood in every single finger pulsing up and down her body and the door
is locked and she can’t get out and what if she gets fucked by a stranger
or what if the stranger wants to watch her masturbate and she doesn’t know
how because she doesn’t know how to stop feeling lonely. She watches the
firemen come out of the building. Baby Girl is glad it’s not her apartment
burning down but part of her wants it to be her apartment burning and all
of her books and papers and photographs and film equipment shriveling up
like they never existed.

When she comes back from buying groceries, some of her neighbors are
smoking cigarettes and she can hear them talking about the fire. They said
it was a drug deal gone wrong—probably a cocaine house, probably a
whorehouse. A man’s body was found stabbed to death. One of the guys sees
her, winks at her, asks how she’s doing, if she needs help. Calls her mama.
She smiles, says no, laughs a little. Says she can manage on her own, no
need to go out of his way—she immediately regrets the words that come out
of her mouth, but she can’t help it. Sometimes she’s not sure if she
prefers being small, taking up less space—or she’s afraid to have needs.
She’s tired of men who don’t say what they mean. She’s tired of men.

Baby Girl still smells the smoke even long after L comes over. She sees a
man sitting in the corner of the room—she can’t tell what he’s wearing or
what he looks like, but she knows he’s there from the outline of his back
and shoulders and legs. He’s long-limbed like the cherry tree in Old Man’s
backyard. L is talking about his band and how they’re going on tour in a
week and how he wishes she could take off time at work to come for a bit.
He’s lying on his side, playing with her orange sheets and starting to roll
a cigarette.

Being in a room with L makes her feel like she’s talking to a ghost and she
wonders if the ghost knows this. The ghost is watching her, sneering at her
and she can’t tell if he’s sneering because L is already too high, already
at that stage where his body is too heavy and his teeth are numb—or if he
thinks Baby Girl is a piece of shit because she’s weak. Baby Girl knows she
should stop hanging around guys like L, but she wants to help L, she wants
to be sweet to him, she wants to give him what he needs to get better, even
though she knows he won’t ever get better.

L touches her arm, brings her body closer to his. She stands there, letting
her arms fall awkwardly to her side until she caresses the side of his
shaved head, and she wants to tell him how ugly he looks when he’s high.
She doesn’t say this to him. He pushes her onto the bed, puts his hand up
her dress. He tells her how much he loves her pussy, that her pussy is
magic, that she is beautiful. Baby Girl doesn’t say anything. The ghost
watches, but his face is hidden by a shadow.

His mouth is on her mouth and she feels lost. He stares at her like he sees
someone else inside of her, a ghost. He calls her Cleopatra. Tells her to
give him her “sweet eyes,” to fuck him like a good girl. Baby Girl doesn’t
know what this mean because she doesn’t think she’s a good girl. He sees
her lost and he likes that, moving her legs open a little more and she
feels like she’s on a boat drifting to a remote island somewhere full of
jacaranda trees and avocados so large they can’t fit into her hands.

He continues to dig inside her, digging the moat around her house, the sea
around her island. She wants to be the sea. She doesn’t want to live
anywhere or be anyone’s baby. But Baby Girl also wants to be someone’s baby
even if she’s not the only baby. She hears someone, not L, whisper into her
ear. The whisper is full of many whispers and it scares her but before she
can say anything, the whisper is gone. She looks around for the ghost, but
the ghost isn’t there in the corner anymore.

L finishes quickly before she’s even felt anything. He asks her if she
came, and she says no, but that it doesn’t matter. And she kind of believes
it doesn’t, but she wants to know what it feels like to come every time you
have sex. Basically, she wants to know what it feels like to be a man. He
says he needs to go, he’s going to be late for band practice, that he feels
bad he won’t see her for awhile after this, that he’ll miss her.

Baby Girl looks at him, tells him, It doesn’t make me that sad.

***

I’ve never been here before, Baby Girl says as she climbs out of the
backseat of O’s car. They drove out to Long Island to see O’s dad and swim
in his pool and drink expensive wine because his dad’s a plastic surgeon
and has more money than he knows what to do with. When O’s dad sees her, he
says she looks like a bruja. Says she looks like trouble and winks at her.
Her body burns hot then cold like it’s raining outside, but it’s not
raining. O isn’t around to hear any of this—he’s somewhere in the house,
bringing their bags up to his childhood room.

His dad brushes her shoulder, asks how long she’s been friends with O, what
she does. Baby Girl notices a picture of O’s mom on the table in the foyer,
almost completely covered by bills and unread copies of the “The New
Yorker.” This was before she got cancer, her long black hair still
cascading over her shoulders, holding his younger sister. This was before
the chemo, before the affair, before the years of binge drinking, before O
planned her funeral by himself because his dad was busy marrying his second
ex-wife.

Baby Girls looks at him now—his receding hair pushed into a small messy
bun, looking more like a yoga instructor than a plastic surgeon—and his
loneliness is unmistakable—so much so that she feels stupid she didn’t
notice it before. Is she that oblivious? His hand slips down to her
waist—Baby Girl doesn’t know what to do, feels bad for him, so bad that she
lets him. When O comes into the room, his dad leaves to make a phone call.
Baby Girl never tells O what happened.

They’ve been swiping left for hours, trying to find cute boys, until “Candy
Darling” comes on and O starts to cry. He says he wants to be beautiful
too, just like Candy was—her long lashes, the slope of her lips, those
thighs. Baby Girl did his makeup before, applying rose to his cheeks and
silver glitter to his eyes and winging the eyeliner so he felt like
Marilyn. He is beautiful, but he isn’t a girl. And he doesn’t want to be a
girl exactly either. He wants to be something else, something other than a
man. He hates being a man.

He lights a cigarette, and goes to smoke it out his window so he dad
doesn’t smell it. The eyeliner starts to smudge, making him look more like
Robert Smith than Candy Darling. Will this feeling ever stop? He asks, then
says, I wish I would just stop being a pussy and kill myself
already…Although, I shouldn’t say that, pussies are stronger than dicks,
you know?

And Baby Girl laughs. They both laugh. Because it’s true, pussies are
better than dicks, even though they both love dicks too much. You can’t
kill yourself, you know, you promised me, Baby Girl says. And he says, I
know, I won’t. I can’t break my promise to you. He’s serious even though
she’s smiling.

That frightens Baby Girl because she doesn’t want to be the only reason
he’s alive, the only reason he won’t kill himself. Because she knows she
can’t be the only one in this world who loves him—and she loves him more
than anything, more than the taste of salt on her mouth from swimming in
the ocean—but she’s afraid.

Sometimes she wants to kill herself too, and sometimes she tells O this and
they both laugh and make each other pinky-swear that they won’t. But she
also knows O can’t save her—because she doesn’t really want to be saved—and
she knows she won’t really kill herself. She just thinks about it
sometimes. To stop existing and to die are two different things. Sometimes
she wishes she could do both and still come back to life, as if she’s a
plague of scorpions—as if the ghost ate her and spit her back out.

I need to find a new boy, fucking is a good distraction, you know? O says,
laughing a little, throwing back his head so his cheekbones cut through the
moon—his last boyfriend got bored, started fucking someone else. Which was
okay, as O explained, because he was kind of shallow anyway and didn’t even
like good music or old films. They agreed that the ex-boyfriend was too
lame to be truly sad about. At least, that’s what O said.

It’s too bad I’m not a boy, Baby Girl says, though she doesn’t really want
to be a boy, because dicks are terrifying. But Baby Girl would be a boy for
O, because she wants to make O happy. Anytime she says this, O tells her
she’s perfect, that he would never want her to change. You know how in love
with you I am, he always says. Baby Girl wishes she could be both, for him.

They lie on O’s bed, which is too small for both of them to fit comfortably
without spooning each other. Baby Girl closes her eyes and falls asleep.
It’s 3 AM when she’s startled awake. The moonlight peeks through the
curtains like knives and she sees her tarot deck on the bedside table, all
the cards spread out as if someone was going through them. She saw The
Hanged Man—his upside down body hanging from a tree glaring at her. Then
she saw it.

Again, the smell of smoke, of burning filled the room. But there was no
fire. O still slept undisturbed, his arm around her waist. She looked over,
only to see the ghost was standing next to O, no sound of breath. There
wasn’t any sounds, not even cicadas or crickets or the sound of an old
house or a rustled breeze circling through the trees to remind her that
there is a world and she is alive within it. There was nothing.

The ghost moved around the room. Baby Girl wasn’t exactly afraid until his
face was pressed up against her face. But there wasn’t a mouth or eyes or a
nose, just a faint black shadow next to her, with no breath or sound, just
the smell of smoke like burned wood and rubber and hair. It made her
stomach clench the closer he got. It made her feel like she was dying—an
octopus twisting inside her belly, her organs—or pregnant.

The whispering starts again, but she can’t make out any words. For a
second, she thinks he’s saying, “Don’t you know me?” But then, he tells her
to go to sleep. The whispering stops and she feels a hand on her chest
pushing her down until she can’t breathe.

***

Baby Girl wakes up to O smoking a cigarette, checking all his missed text
messages, deciding who to ghost and who to send selfies. She can only see
the ghost—tasting that terrible putrid burning in her mouth, so far back
inside her throat like she’s hiding something, like she’s hiding the kind
of thing she wouldn’t tell her father about.

The ghost is still there. She names him Z, because she can’t remember who
he is or what he wants. Her belly feels swollen. It feels like it’ll be
swollen forever. O brushes his hands through her hair and suggests they get
real cute and go to the beach. They kiss and pretend she is a boy.

They drive around while listening to Sam Cooke, flicking ashes into a coke
can and Baby Girl puts her feet on the dashboard. It’s 90 degrees out and
every part of her is sweating. She’s not even sure what’s she sweating out
anymore.

Eventually, there is the beach and she hears the sound of waves hissing
along the shore like a snake. Unlike in the city, the beaches here are
clean—which is hard for Baby Girl to get used to. The trash is
comforting—the kind of comfort her parents have after 40 years of an
unhappy marriage. And there’s a lot to be said for the comfort of
expectation.

No one calls O a fag today. No one really seems to care that he’s wearing
red lipstick and a sequined crop top. When Baby Girl and O are together,
it’s hard to tell them apart. They revel in this and call themselves The
Twins when they meet strangers. Baby Girl loves this—she loves telling O
everything, except about the ghost, about Z, about H, about the octopus in
her belly, about The Hanged Man.

She is alone as O goes to swim in the ocean, allowing the tide to push and
pull him. Next to her are two boys playing in the sand, the older one is
burying the younger one. They are both quiet until the older boy starts
shoveling sand on the little boy’s face and the little boy starts
screaming. Their mother tells them cut it out, that she’s tired.

Her phone buzzes and she has a dozen missed texts from her sister and L.
She ignores them all, checks her Facebook until she sees a link to an
article with the headline: “How to Get out of a Depression: Get naked.
Touch someone. Be touched. Don’t piss off your cat.” She saw the ghost’s
face on her phone, clicking the link to his profile.

There was his name. This is what he wanted. This is the man whose face she
remembers staring down at her as a child, all dressed in black and hovering
above her bed. This is the man who said it wouldn’t hurt. This was the man
who said she was always going to be his. Baby Girl sits up and squeezes her
sides, tries to dig in as if she was trying to pull out her own organs, the
octopus. She fights the tears. She fights them for as long as she can.