Estella

“It’ll be your turn soon.” Mother was a cruel bitch and she liked to taunt me every chance she could get. You cruel fucking bitch. I wish I could slap her face. I wish I could take the coffee cup from her hand and splash the wine across the cream colored walls. I wish I could grab those shards and cut open her thick skin, make her human again, show her that she could still bleed.

“You look at me with those eyes and you think I don’t have a clue that you hate me. I hate your fucking ass, too.” Mother has it in her mind that she would have been a dashing model. She talks of her long legs – none finer on a giraffe. She bends slightly to show the curve in her hips – none rounder on any childbearing woman. She puckers out her breasts like a child her lips – non suppler on a cow.

“I’ve got to get to school.”

“Why bother? You’re free from that shit when you hit 16.”

“I like school.”

“You’re a fucking fool.” She smirks at me. I don’t just hate her. I look at her ugly soul every day of my life and try in vain to trade it in to the devil. It’s already his.

I don’t have a boyfriend. Mother says no one will buy the cow if you give the milk away for free. She’s saving me so I can have my memoir of a Geisha. I hope it’s more Venecian than Roman. I’d hate to have a disgusting boar lay claim to my virginity.

The clock is ticking. I’ll be 16 in less than ninety days. It means that my mother can’t get into the same kind of trouble for pimping a minor. You’re probably wondering why I don’t run away or kill her in her sleep. And then what? I’d end up on the streets, selling my little ass anyway, and probably getting raped and beat by a pimp. At least this way, I might be able to convince her to let me keep going to school and I can get a scholarship to college. She tells me dreams are for little girls who can actually see butterflies. I’ve convinced myself we live in a toxic city and the cell phone signals have caused a mass winged creature suicide. Unfortunately, I heard that’s only a hypothesis relevant to bees.

She makes me do pelvic exercises every morning. I have to squeeze my clitoris like I’m holding in my pee. She says she knows if I ain’t doing them right. That I really don’t get, but I ain’t trying to have her checking. She still leaves me some privacy.

She tells me I have to be squeamish the first time around or the guy’ll doubt that I’m a virgin. I figure it shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t even like being hugged. Not that ma ever tries. She told me I had to stop riding my friend Jimmy’s bike when I was ten. I had fallen onto the pole hard as hell and she nearly broke my head. I thought she was going to lift me up and make me feel better. Instead, she gave me a swift whack and told me that I didn’t understand what I was worth, untouched! I think that’s when she first got it in her head that she was going to do this. She had seen the Lifetime depiction of Sybil. Who is inspired by a schizophrenic? I’m just glad she ain’t gotten the itch to fill me with water and cooking utensils.

“What is this?”

“I need you to try on these outfits. We have to take some pics.”

“Uh, this is a stripper outfit and this is my fifth grade uniform. Don’t you think it’s a little extreme?”

“I didn’t make the men or their fantasies. I just know them all too well.”

“Just don’t put me on craigslist. I want to come out of this alive.” She chuckles. It’s all a joke. We live off of welfare. Ma convinced the state that she’s not all there. She was waitressing and they mugged her in the back lot. I think it was more than a mugging, but Ma won’t ever say. Anyway, she convinced them that she would never recover. She even found a doctor to say that her back injuries would constantly hamper her possibilities of holding down a job. I can’t really tell. She was popping pills way before that incident and she still moves around enough to keep up with her OCD.

We take the pictures. She says she’s going to start the bidding. I have no grand illusion of Richard Gere climbing up my fire escape after he samples my goods. I sleep on the couch in the combination living room kitchen. Ma would probably trap him in her bedroom and hold him hostage until he agreed to maintain her habit. Just two more years. I could survive two more years. I had nearly sixteen under my nickers.

She should have just put up a Christmas calendar – the daily countdown was that momentous. I couldn’t sleep. I stopped eating. She said I was becoming skin and bones, but I didn’t care. I threw myself into my books and created a parallel universe. I was a huntress. I ran with coyotes. I had a coffee colored horse named Bandit. I was free.

“What would you like for your birthday?” I didn’t understand if this was a real question.

“Don’t look at me like that. Is there something special you would like? Not like an Xbox, but something manageable?” I said nothing. I wanted nothing from her. I wanted to rescind my birth and choose another canal to travel through.

“Don’t say I ain’t never offered you nothing.” I continued to bite down my nails. This would be the last night that my body would be completely mine. When she went to bed, I laid down and took off my pants. I explored each little hair. I touched my clitoris, followed the soft grooves. I tried different fingers, savoring the sensation I could give myself. When I was happy that I knew myself well, I followed the contour down to my juicy hole. I put one finger in and then two. I tried different combinations. I moved slow and then fast. I went deep and pulled my fingertips up towards my navel. This would be the last time that my body was mine.

That morning, I went to the bathroom before she woke. I took some of her painkillers and hid them in my panties. She had left me a new set, bra and all. We went to a hotel by the railway. She checked in as mother and daughter. She said she’d be back for me in the morning. I swallowed all of the pills. I didn’t want to feel anything. I think I fell asleep because his hands were upon me before I could say a word. I looked up. Mr. Rooney. He moved my eyes away from him and told me not to try to look at him again. He moved me onto my side. Mr. Rooney, Charlotte’s father, the bank manager. I had known him since the first grade, before Charlotte was moved to private school. Mr. Rooney. I didn’t feel him enter me. I didn’t hear his grunts. I imagined his hands were the wind and his wetness was a summer rain. I concentrated on riding Bandit, on brushing her long mane, on cooking a summer trout that I would catch in the river.

Morning came and he was gone just as quickly as he’d appeared. The hours passed. Finally, there was a knock at the door. “Young lady, check-out is at 11am. You have fifteen minutes.”

I dressed myself already knowing what my destiny would be. Maybe I had always known. She didn’t come for me. I never saw ma again.