Finalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Fiction Contest
The girl suspected it was her mother’s brilliant idea to invite the cousins to the cabin—a bad move, even if this had been a normal summer. Both cousins had grown breast nubbles under their t-shirts since the girl saw them last, but they hadn’t gotten any smarter. All morning long one of them had been calling herself Cake Slam, something to do with getting lots of likes on her stupid birthday cake on Instagram account, and the other one, Gigi, had been spending her time editing her eyebrows on her selfies.
Soon after they arrived, they pushed Mr. Snopes, the cat, off their laps and shut him out of their bedroom, but after a while they fished him out from under the couch and posed with their cheeks pressed against his big head and their eyes held wide and dreamy and took each other’s pictures to post on Instagram with backgrounds of palm trees and a sunset from Hawaii. The caption said: “Home Girls & Kitty Chillin’ at the Lake.”
Earlier, when she first heard they were coming, the girl had imagined taking them fishing. She’d been at the cabin for a week already and had learned how the bass liked to nose along the bank in the grass, under the shade of a big cottonwood. She’d walked down the cobbled set of stairs to the dock and picked her way through a short stretch of grass-clotted sand to the boathouse to get the poles. She had to dust off the cobwebs and untangle the knots in the lines. Then she’d dug some fat worms out of the side yard and put them in an old cottage cheese container with plenty of damp dirt. When she was all done, she’d sat down and waited.
When the cousins pulled up, she tried to wave them down to the dock. They waved back quick, their faces blank. When the girl went up to tell them to come and fish, they said they had to take their stuff into the cabin. The girl went back down to the dock to see what would happen. The dock was old and splintery, and she sat cross-legged gazing at the water, where the sun glistening off the waves turned it into a swirling field of diamonds. Pretty soon it got hot, and she moved back to where the cottonwood had heaved up the concrete steps.
In the shade, close to the bank, the dark shape of a small fish nosed along in the shadows. She picked up her pole and spoke to the worm before she hooked it up, and then flicked in her line. Everything was still, and she didn’t feel even the smallest tug. Fish didn’t bite when it was hot. She knew that already. She’d tell that to her cousins.
After a while she put the poles back in the boathouse and took the worms up to the cabin and put them in the refrigerator.
The cousins sat on the edge of the twin bed in the upstairs bedroom showing each other their screens and moaning. “Oh my God! He is dating her?”
“He’s cheating on her too. She’s so dumb. She doesn’t even know.”
The girl sat facing them on the twin bed, not saying a word as they got dings for messages that made them gasp and tap their screens. “She’s going to do it,” one whispered, flicking a glance at the girl. The next message made her blush, and there was slap-handing and screaming as the other one tried to grab the phone. “You faker! You’re meeting him?” They touched each other’s arms and used their eyes to signal each other to go to the bathroom.
One whispered, “God so clueless,” on the way out.
“I hate my eyebrows,” the other one answered as the bathroom door slammed shut.
The girl was 12, only two years younger than her cousins. But sitting in the room, she knew that 12 was the same as not being born yet. She went downstairs. The cabin had a little den off the main entry with pine paneling and a curtain over the door and a chair for reading. Beyond the den, in the living area, the girl’s mother and her mother’s sisters were sitting with one half-full bottle of wine and one empty. The girl snapped the curtain closed and flung herself into the chair and paged through her National Geographic. She’d been reading an article about sea turtles, but flipping through the pages to find it, she stopped for a moment to stare at a row of men with spears and not much more than a hankie on their privates. She found men’s privates interesting but mysterious, but her study left her with no worthwhile new information about their size, shape or function, and so she turned back to the sea turtles.
When the cousins came out of the bathroom they were fixed up with braided hairdos, trying to change their looks, but it didn’t help, because Gigi had fat cheeks and brushy red hair that looked like a used wire pad from under the sink, and the other one, Cake Slam, had drawn fat black wings on her eyelids, but her face was still as long as a horse and so was the rest of her. They passed by the curtained door on their way to the kitchen to get individual serving bags of chips, all the while keeping track of the people they were “following” on their phones. The girl ascertained that following meant gawking at teenagers who gave sassy opinions about food or ear pods or movies. When the cousins went back up, the girl waited a minute and then followed them.
Now they were listening to a video about tying scarves. They helped themselves to a closet and tried knotting them around their chests so their new boobs popped out, and hee-hawed around until the girl wanted to vomit. When her mother’s sisters were leaving, they called up, cheery-voiced, and told the cousins they’d pick them up tomorrow.
Her eyes drifted from the page as she contemplated coming alive in the thin light of a full moon, the awe of being born, of finding oneself—guess what—female.
The afternoon dragged on. The girl’s mother had been lying on the couch but when the girl came down, she popped up and got busy in the kitchen, whisking the tube of cookie dough from the frig, clattering open the pan cupboard and sliding out the cookie sheet, calling singsong up the stairs, “Who wants to make cookies?” A few minutes later, she tried again. “Anybody for swimming? Or a walk?” But they didn’t come, and her mother laid back down on the couch.
The cabin was mostly one big room, with pine boards on the walls and windows all around. The kitchen looked out over a patch of daylilies and the blacktop that circled the sparkling blue lake. On the side where her mother was, the greenish brown Platte River moved quiet and endless, with white birds lifting from the sandbars and eagles drifting above the tops of the trees on the opposite bank. The water was settled here and there with sandbars that rose and dissolved over the seasons. A tree limb glided past, tumbling and swirling in the current. The girl returned to the den, picked up her National Geographic and opened to the article she’d been reading. If her dad called, she would just have to wake up her mom.
Three species of sea turtles are endangered. The babies hatch out at night and… the girl sat back. Read more slowly. Sex is determined by incubation temperature? Her eyes drifted from the page as she contemplated coming alive in the thin light of a full moon, the awe of being born, of finding oneself—guess what—female. Her fingertips brushed the glossy pages as she considered being a girl helpless against a pull that would set your claw legs windmilling for purchase in the waiting sand, helpless against the mysterious power that would draw you toward the endless, saving ocean. After a time went by, the girl confronted a second set of photos—baby sea turtles, dead ones, laid out beside rows of colored plastic.
When it was time for dinner the girl boiled hot dogs and made macaroni and cheese. She used to enjoy making sure every tiny bit of butter melted into the macaroni before she sprinkled on the cheese packet and stirred in the milk. But now it was more like a chore. Upstairs, the cousins screeched, and the girl’s mother sat up. “My goodness those girls sound like they’re having fun,” she said. “Don’t you want to go see what they’re up to?”
“They’re watching stupid people on their phones,” the girl said.
“Honey, they’re here to see you! Why don’t you find something for them to do?”
The girl went to the bottom of the stairs, “Time for dinner!” she yelled. When they came down her mother became suddenly brisk, dealing out plates, encouraging everyone to eat up, dishing the macaroni from the pan into a bowl, putting the hot dogs into the buns. The cousins blabbed about some girl’s post that got about a million likes. They were mad because all she had to do was dress up her little brother in a cowboy suit.
Cake Slam turned to the girl. “We could dress you up. It’d be just as good. We could fix your hair and I bet everyone would love it….”
The girl rolled her eyes. “No thank you.”
“Oh honey,” her mother said, looking across with sad eyes.
“How about we go fishing?” the girl said.
Cake Slam looked like somebody’d asked her to pick up dog poop. “In that dinky lake? That’s gross.”
“Do both!” The girl’s mother chimed. “So much fun!” She beamed. “And tomorrow, how about we buzz into town? We’ll get cake mix at the grocery store and Cake Slam, you’re the expert. You can show us how to make cupcakes. That way you’ll have something to take home!”
“Okay.” A moment later, “Are there any other shops in town besides the grocery store?” Cake Slam shot the girl’s mother a side-eye. “I’m not that much into baking anymore.”
The girl’s mother sagged.
Then Gigi. “Whatever. Might as well go. There’s not a lot to do here. No offense.”
“Not if all you do is look at your stupid screen!” the girl yelled, wolfing a load of macaroni huge enough to make her choke.
Her mother looked anxious. “My gosh!” she said feebly. “There’s all kinds of things to do. There’s… nature! Birds! And… and it’s so good for you girls! Such a nice change!”
Gigi shrugged.
The girl glanced at her mother, disgusted. “They want boys. That’s what they like.” A moment later, she brightened and started to laugh. “I know! How about…” She laughed harder, and the last word spit out like an explosion, “Howard!” Howard was Mrs. Abbott’s chubby grandson. He’d been at the cabin a few times, swimming off the dock. Howard’s breasts were bigger than either of the cousins, and the more she pictured him, the more hysterical it became. Fat, bare-chested Howard and the cousins, dating! She collapsed into violent, choking laughter, gasping for breath and weeping, her hair stringing into the macaroni and cheese.
“Settle down,” her mother said, looking hard at her.
When the girls went back upstairs, the mother fell back into her chair. “I don’t know what I was thinking. What am I going to do with those girls?”
“You shouldn’t have invited them,” the girl said.
“My sisters thought…”
“Thought what?”
Her mother looked away. “They thought you girls would enjoy yourselves, that’s all.”
But the girl knew better. The cousins were supposed to be making it seem like things were normal. But nothing was normal anymore.
A little asphalt drive circled the lake, perfect for golf carts, and this was the first summer the girl was allowed to take one out alone. Summer after summer her father had instructed: Step lightly on the brakes when approaching a turn. Stay to the right. Check your mirror. Slow if a car is coming, move to the side. The cousins agreed to take a ride but first they had to change and put on red lipstick. The girl assumed they’d sit in the front and let her teach them what she knew. Instead, she sat alone, like a chauffeur, while her cousins lounged on the backwards-facing bench seat and blasted their play lists into the fading daylight. They knew all the words, roaring them out until a naughty part came, and then singing “wha-wha-wha,” at top volume, or turning it down for just long enough, and either way, when it was done, they’d laugh and jerk and make a show of themselves.
Ms. Abbott’s cabin was directly across the lake and the girl slowed as she came to it and peered through the trees. “Hey Howard!” she shrieked when she spotted him. She slammed the breaks. He was sitting on the front steps. She pulled the golf cart to the side. Howard looked up from where he’d been tossing beanbags at a corn hole board. “Jump in!” the girl yelled in a jolly voice. “Let’s go for a ride!” Howard stood and walked slowly towards the cart.
“Who’s that?” Cake Slam hissed.
The girl yelled, “Howard, meet my cousins. They’re looking for some fun.” Howard didn’t seem as chubby as the last time she saw him. His oversized t-shirt hid his globby boobs, and the girl was disappointed. He looked puzzled. She turned towards her cousins. “Howard lives here sometimes,” she said. “With his gramma.”
“How does he stand it?” Cake Slam said.
Howard squinted. “Stand what?”
“You wanna go for a ride?” the girl said. “Sit in back, there’s plenty of room.”
“No there isn’t,” he said, and slid in beside the girl.
As the girl glanced at him, she noticed the older boy leaning on a ladder beside the stoop, his hair gleaming in the porch light.
“Who’s that?” Gigi said softly, touching her Brillo pad hair, her ankles dangling off the cart like she might like to jump down. The boy crossed the yard towards them. He was tall and dark, and had on slouchy jeans and a white t-shirt, tucked in. A hammer dangled from his fingers. The cousins twisted to look at him, and, the girl suspected, to let him have a good look at them, which showed just how dumb they were.
“Hey,” he said to Howard, “What’s up?”
Howard shrugged. “Just going for a ride.”
The girl stepped on the accelerator.
“What the hell?” Howard sputtered as the golf cart shot back onto the blacktop.
“What are you doing?” Cake Slam yelled. “Stop!”
Both cousins demanded that she turn around. The girl nodded agreeably as she pressed ever more firmly on the accelerator and yelled back. “We’ll loop around the lake,” she said. “Howard wants to go for a ride.”
When she drove past her own cabin, her mother was framed in the square light of the kitchen window, doing dishes at the sink. The cousin’s chatter went still. In the quiet, the wheels of the golf cart squireeed. Fireflies lit the bushes alongside the road. Fat toads appeared in the soft headlights. Howard leaned toward her.
“We should go toad hunting again,” he said, keeping his voice soft. “It was fun that time.”
The girl nodded. “It was.” Howard had come along with her and her dad. Her father had brought her a birdcage. She’d sit with it perched on her lap and he’d point out the stars and explain about the toads coming out of the grass to enjoy the last heat of the day. The girl had told Howard that heat stays in the blacktop when the air cools down at night. And when her dad stopped the cart for her to grab one, and it peed on her hands, she’d screeched and complained until Howard died laughing. Afterwards, they’d had toad races in the bathtub before they went to the tangle of grass and weeds in the back yard and released them, the girl feeling beneficent and powerful.
Now she indicated the cousins in back, gesturing with her head. “They’d never do it,” she said quietly, so that only he could hear.
“They’re stupid,” he said, staring straight ahead.
The girl elbowed him, and when he glanced at her, she nodded.
Shortly before they came to Howard’s cabin, the cousins turned on their music and began to hoot and holler again and both of them made a fuss about lip gloss. Their excitement made the girl perverse, and she drove right past the house. The gleaming-hair boy waved as they went by, and the cousins screamed at her to stop. She took her time about turning around, and when she pulled over, Howard jumped off. The cousins sashayed up to the boy, talking in teasing voices while the girl waited. Pretty soon they all disappeared behind the cabin. The girl hesitated, then bent low and scrambled across the lawn. They’d walked out onto the dock. Crouched behind a lilac bush, she could hear them.
“Cabin #74,” Cake Slam was begging. “Howard knows which one.”
“We’ll have a beer waiting,” Gigi said like a know-it-all that could read the boy’s mind.
The cousin’s voices, laughing and muffled, made the girl creep close enough to hear whispering about the cabinet where they kept the wine. “She’ll never know! She’s already blasted!”
“I’ll go!” Howard yelled. “We can go swimming.”
“Oh God!” Gigi said. The light on her phone went out and she slid it into her pocket. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that shitty lake.”
“It’s fun,” Howard told the older boy.
“We’re supposed to be babysitting our cousin,” Cake Slam said.
The girl had been frozen in the shadows, but now she crashed out, her footsteps hard on the decking. “They’re not babysitting,” she said, glancing at the older boy. Now, up close, he was so inescapably handsome she blushed, and looked quickly away, so he wouldn’t turn suddenly, and catch her seeing him.
Gigi giggled and pawed the boy’s elbow. “Right,” she said. “We’re just keeping her company.”
The older boy clamped Howard’s neck. “Me too. Hanging out with the Howster.” He gave Howard’s head a soft push to release him. “He’s rotten company though.”
“Well,” Gigi said, moving in front of the boy, in position to look directly into his eyes, motioning her head back towards the girl, “We… well, this is kind of… different.”
“Different how?” The girl’s question was cold and furious.
Cake Slam whirled. “Why don’t you go back to the cart? We’ll be there in a minute.”
“You go to the cart!” The girl was yelling now, hating the look of discomfort on the impossibly handsome boy’s face.
“God!” Cake Slam’s eyes flashed in the dark. “You are so embarrassing! Just because your dad left, you don’t have to act like a brat!”
Confusion locked down the girl’s rage. She turned to Howard. “They don’t know anything about my dad. He’s taking a break, okay? He didn’t leave. He’d never leave.” Even as she said it, even as the horrible cousins forced it out of her, the girl knew better.
“Hey, chill why don’t you? How about we go for a swim,” Howard said, giving the girl a sly glance. He turned to the cousins. “Who’s in?” He stepped up and shouldered Gigi off-balance. “It’ll be fun.” He bumped her again. This time Gigi stumbled a little and giggled, tossing her head at the handsome boy.
Cake Slam crossed her arms. “Ugh.”
When Howard turned and gave the girl another look, the sight of him and all of them silhouetted in moonlight, waiting, was a miserable call to action. The girl lowered her head and hurled herself across the dock into Gigi’s gut.
Slowly the girl tested a familiar turn of lip, a small dangerous glare around the eyes. Prettier than her cousins, she thought.
The chirp of cicadas arose as they drove back without playlists. The girl gripped the steering wheel, her mouth set in a grim line, wondering if she’d gone too far this time. Behind her, Gigi sat with her hair plastered to her head, her dark eye wings trailing in long lines and splotches that she’d rubbed onto her face. When she first got out of the lake, she was such a pain in the butt that even Cake Slam told her to dry up. Gigi was still wrapped in the towel the handsome boy had handed over, right before he told them he was out of there. “I guess I’ll see how the water is,” he said. He was sick of all of them. After he and Howard jumped in the cousins quieted down, exchanging embarrassed dejected murmurs as they watched the boys swim out further and further down the beach. Then they got out. They didn’t come back to say goodnight before they went back into Ms. Abbott’s house.
At home the girl parked the cart and started down the steps to the dock.
“You better come in,” Gigi called after her. “We might as well work on that selfie.”
“No thanks.”
Gigi lingered for a moment at the top of the steps. “Your mom won’t want you out here.”
The girl dropped down on the lopsided step and leaned back against the old cottonwood, letting the coarse bark dig into her back as she watched the moon slide out from under a thin layer of clouds. Somewhere above her head the screen door slapped hard against the frame. Moments later her mother appeared at the top of the steps, pausing before starting down, the phone held out like it might contaminate her. “It’s dad,” she said finally, pushing it at the girl. “I told him what you did to Gigi.”
The girl waited until her mother went back up, then whispered, “Hey dad.”
Moments passed, him asking questions, saying the kind of things he always said. Then, she said what she always said, “Are you ever coming home then?” And a few minutes later. “I will, but they’re stupid. I don’t see why I have to…”
There was a long moment of quiet. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try.” She went back up the steps, and then took a minute to walk to the backyard where the moon glistened on the river. Water everywhere, she thought, feeling strangely outside herself, water going past all day and night, never running out, always there, the same, always changing. Back inside, she grabbed her National Geographic before trudging upstairs.
The cousins dressed her in scarves for the photo, and she slipped into the hall and pulled off her t-shirt and spread the scarf over her own bare chest before she allowed them to tie the knots. They admired the results. “It’s a cross between a bikini and a crop top,” they assured her.
The girl looked down. The scarf looked like a Band-Aid on a stick. It looked ridiculous.
They sat her on the toilet seat and curled her hair and put pink on her cheeks and black coloring on her eyelashes as if she was some new pet. She tried to concentrate on her magazine. “Did you know that temperature determines the sex of sea turtles?” she said.
Cake Slam looked up from her make up bag. “Really?”
“Yeah, and the babies can’t move their heads in and out of their shells.” Cake Slam nodded, enough encouragement for her to turn the page and show another picture. This one, they hardly glanced at. Seeing it again, the girl grew desperate. The image showed plastic that had been found in the baby sea turtle’s stomach, laid out in four rows beside its dead body, the baby turtle had mistaken the bright colors for food. The horror was plain and urgent, the oceans steadily poisoned by fake food. Her voice quaked. “Don’t you care? The ocean, it’s full of garbage!”
Gigi put a finger to the girl’s mouth. “Shush now,” she cooed, smearing pink goo onto the girl’s lips, then pulling up her up and standing her in front of the sink so she could look in the mirror. “You just take a look at what we did.”
The girl stared, registering her cousins’ shock at what they’d created. Before them was a stormy girl with wavy hair swept back from her forehead, a stranger with flashing eyes, not different from girls in magazines or on ads on TV. Someone pretty. Slowly the girl tested a familiar turn of lip, a small dangerous glare around the eyes. Prettier than her cousins, she thought. That much was plain as the difference between a blue gill and a bass.
Cake Slam got out her phone and pushed the girl into the bedroom. “Stand over there!” she bossed. Gigi clasped the girl’s hand, and the girl dropped her magazine so she and Gigi could stretch down their clasped hands and turn their faces to the camera and press their cheeks together.
“Smile!” Cake Slam commanded. She held up the phone and clicked it. “Oh God! Killer shot!” She snapped a few more. And when she got them arranged in another pose, “After this it’s my turn,” she said. “I’m putting Mr. Snopes in mine.”
A few clicks later the girl followed Gigi over to have a look.
“Ohhh it’s so cuuuute…” Gigi moaned, dropping to the edge of the bed with the phone in her hand.
Cake Slam grabbed it back. “I’m posting!” Moments later, she squealed. “OMG! Three likes already!”
Beside Gigi on the bed, the girl put her hands to her face, at once confused and horrified, and something else. Thrilled.
“OMG, five!!” Gigi sang out.
The girl jumped to her feet, as if she’d been awakened from a dream. “Let’s finish up!” she shrieked, casting her eyes about. “Cake Slam! Where’s that damn cat?” Downstairs she snatched Mr. Snopes off the kitchen windowsill, then raced back up and burst full throttle into the bedroom, her face already plastered into the cat’s fur, her eyes alert but dreamy, already on the lookout for the camera.
Suzanne Kehm’s work has appeared in The Montreal Review, The Battered Suitcase, SN Review, Thumbnail, 2River, The Platte Valley Review, and Pinyon Review. Her first novel, The Smell of Smoke, was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her second, Grace Remains, is up for grabs. Kehm received the Nebraska Arts Council’s Distinguished Artist award and was recognized by the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from the University of Nebraska. She spends her spare time fixing up old buildings and working a grass ranch tucked into the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills on the banks of the Keya Paha River.
Header image generated by Adobe Photoshop.
