The Girls I Keep Under My Bed.

The running bath water whooshed as she stepped out of her white cotton briefs, the packaged kind her mother still brought home from the grocery store, for a daughter who now saw youth only as a sailboat fighting its way across the tides of adulthood. Goosebumps lined her body and refused to fade like soldiers getting ready for battle, erect and unmoving in a systematic order. She did not know what name belonged to her today. Certainly not Esther or Claire; girls with those names stayed far away from bathrooms that belonged to boys. And yet here she was, in her boyfriend’s bathroom using his mother’s soap to wash away the blood that stained the skin between her legs, in a house where the sounds during the night were so far from her father’s coughs and the rattling of plumbing pipes that had lulled her to sleep since she was a little girl when names like Princess, Muffin, Baby, belonged to her. There was no plug but still she sat in the near empty tub, cradling her wounded body, legs intertwined, arms hugging torso, as a bird would protect her newborn babies with the span of her wings. The pain shot up between her thighs like electric shocks and pulsed between her legs, splinters she could not reach. She had been broken.

She was used to shaping herself into any number of people. She could be girls with names like Liza and Florence who did not mind sleeping on couches where cigarette smoke had made home in the pillows, or waking up to a back of unfamiliar freckles. She could be Rachel or Emily who wore bows in their straight brown hair and came across as naive and innocent with their lack of hips and pointy elbows and the way they sat spines straight, shoulders back, in near empty apartments that belonged to boys who slept with girls named Laurel. But Rachel or Emily could wipe these freckles off with a single flick of fingers, have sophisticated conversations with these boys when the Laurels left the room, and pretend they wanted her. But the person she wanted to be, the girl with her own name, Dawson, was the hardest one to catch. She was afraid this person was already lost, faded between the horizon of the girls she was and those who were left to come.

Soft light spilled in from the small window that sat above the toilet. It soaked the room in a soft yellow hue, the kind of light that made everything seem beautiful; from the small hole in the porcelain sink the cracked, old blue bar of soap tried to hide to her small and boyish figure. She had eased her body out of the tub, knuckles whiter than winter as they gripped the sides of the bath, to study herself in the full length mirror, wondering if she looked any different now; if being a woman meant that people would mistake her for a Judith or Vivian. But all she saw was the way her slightly greasy hair fell in waves just below her chest and the dark semi circles under her eyes gave proof to a night full of adventure and light sleep. She placed her hand on her hip, jutting it out slightly to the side. In these moments, her naked body embarrassed her, as if these observations were too intimate even for the sunlight to witness, let alone her own eyes. But they were necessary, after nights like these, when she felt the girl she was slipping further away, when she needed to catch her before loneliness filled the space she would leave behind. She ran a red comb through her dark brown hair, breaking apart the waves until it resembled a bird’s nest filled with sparkling treasures, and plucked out the faux-diamond studded pin that had held her bangs away from her face. She reached into the bottom cabinet, rifling through the wicker basket of lipsticks and leave-in conditioners. Shades with the names Majestic Peru and Acorn Kisses made her wonder why her boyfriend’s mother was not named Madison or Sophia. Buried in the bottom was a small stick of gloss, the kind she bought from the drug store when she was ten; as she ran Wondermint across her lips she wondered if this woman, who was in the next room, wore this when she wanted to feel young again, when she felt that her son had been taken away from childhood, from the arms that had packed him sandwiches before school, arms that held him as his small body shook when he was sick, arms that had loved him in the way only a mother’s arms do.

She remembered quite suddenly in that moment the time her own mother had once handed over a bag of chocolate raisins, a white twist tie holding the top closed and she had known exactly what she would find when she looked at it; Chocolate Raisins spelled out in the neatest writing one would ever know- O’s so precise you could have mistaken them for rings of gold and C’s so concave that you could sit in them, spine curved in a perfect semi-circle. Standing in a bathroom that her mother would never know, she realized for the first time that her mother’s writing would always be more familiar than anything. She wishes then that she knew herself as well as she knew her mother’s handwriting and felt ashamed that she was standing in a boy’s bathroom naked, his mother in the room next door. And so she stopped thinking of her own mother, and pretended in that moment that she had no parents and began to feel incredibly lost.

She could feel the loneliness creeping toward her, crawling out from the small holes in the shower head and dripping out of the faucets. It had found her again. She held her eyes tightly closed, waiting for it to latch onto her. She could deal with loneliness surrounding her, had mastered the art of swatting it away like it were smoke twirling in the air, trying to suffocate her. But when she wasn’t fast enough, or maybe when she just didn’t have the energy, she could not capture loneliness in the meshed web of uneven truths she had created in an act of self-protection. And so, in moments such as those, it would smash itself through her body and settle at the pit of her stomach. So she does only what she knows best; tip-toes through the hallway and into this boy’s room where he lies sleeping, his faint snore filling the space with a delicate melody that temporarily melts the loneliness, and leaves Dawson hovering in the sunlight of the bathroom, her outline dancing across the walls in a mass of shimmery reflections, waiting for the girl’s return.