Baby Teeth

1.

Just before the Internet. Just before the creeks dry up and shrink, and the heat grows unbearable. Just before they bulldoze most of the woods and build the ugly duplexes. Before all of that, there was the two of us. June and I, selfish, clever, bright and dizzied by our own still-new imaginations. June and I in the summer.

Ages ten, eleven, twelve. We were always running. We’d disappear into the thinning patch of woods behind her house, dressed only in our swimsuits, carrying towels and Fudgesicles, and we’d race to the creek, follow the muddy gleam of it through the trees. We stayed there for hours and hours. We splashed around and pushed each other and sprawled across the flat rocks, reading and tanning, ants under a magnifying glass, until our skin flaked and peeled. We gathered shark teeth and animal bones out there, dug through the silt, stones, and trash for fossils, left to haunt the creek-bed for probably thousands of years, we estimated, grandiose, hair sweat-sticky and matted to our faces.

It was that kind of place. Suburban-yet-rural Illinois, frozen and dull in the winter but sun-washed and alive in the summer, traces of the prehistoric everywhere if you got your hands dirty and were bored enough to fantasize about rocks. We certainly were.

Sometimes we headed out to the deeper part of the creek where it widened into more of a river, and we’d climb up Devil’s Drop—a jagged, rust-colored boulder­—and throw ourselves into the water’s foaming mouth, screaming and laughing. Mid-air, above the dragonflies and tadpoles and water-snakes, it felt like we’d cut a hole through the atmosphere, just for a second, and slipped into another one with brighter edges, more color. Just until the water hit our skin.

2.

Their old house was demolished this year.

After high school, I went to college in California, and for those four years, I refused to visit my mother and the twins unless we met somewhere else—Chicago, usually. After I graduated, I moved there, and my brothers graduated high school, left, and my mother moved, too. She lives in a different town now, but it’s only about an hour drive from our old neighborhood.

We’ve tried to dissolve the other town—my first home—in our memories, my mother and I, to reassemble our lives elsewhere, putting distance, however much we could bear, between ourselves and it. On holidays, though, when I’d go see my mom, at some point, I would find myself sitting in her car, late at night, staring at the wheel. I’d drive an hour on the highway, my gut in my throat the whole time, unable to think or put on music or anything, until I was back on our old street, until I saw our old house and drove past it, towards June’s. Or, what used to be June’s. I would sit there for at least half an hour, like a creep, and do nothing but stare. Sometimes it was all lit up and sometimes it was black. Families have come and gone.

My ex-girlfriend Emily came with me, once, when I visited last year. She didn’t know the details—just that I had a friend who once lived there, who’d died when we were still kids. She watched me watch the house. She asked, gently, what it was I was looking for exactly, confused.

I wanted to be alone. I couldn’t handle anyone seeing into me like that, all that desperation, the burnt-up parts, whatever dumb fierce superstition pulled me back to the house, to the past it contained and would never give up.

“Are you looking for a ghost?” Emily asked, teasing, but I turned to her as if she’d slapped me.

“No.” I answered, sharper than intended, and started the car again, took off without another word. We headed back in silence until I apologized, let her take my hand and keep it on her thigh for the remainder of the drive.

It’s not that she was wrong. I just didn’t want to admit to myself that she might be right.

But anyway, it’s gone now. I drove up there this year, and instead of the house, instead of the familiar white awning and bay windows, there was nothing—a heap of dirt, the remnants of a construction crew, a demolition permit clinging to the fence.

3.

June and I first became friends in elementary school, and we stayed inseparable for years. Growing, crooked, into our preteen selves. June’s house sat down the street from mine, twice as big, even though, unlike me, she had no siblings.

My mother was a single parent in all the ways that count, to me, the eldest, and Jackie and Sol, twins five years younger. We had intermittent visits from our father—or, “shit-stain,” as Mom more frequently called him—who slipped in and out of our lives, charming and elusive and careless, his bursts of affection brief and sharp like jugular cuts, leaving a lifetime of mess and scar tissue in his wake.

Mom quickly became close with June’s mother Natalie. At least a few nights each week, they sat on our back patio, cold lime-topped Coronas in hand, sometimes passing a joint back and forth only semi-covertly, while June and I hung out, doing amateur witchcraft in my room or pretending to be vampires. We did more than tell ourselves stories; we wove ourselves into the roles, slipped in and out of obsessions, monsters, characters. We liked to pretend. To exit the mundane territory of our own lives and bodies, even for a moment.

…

Natalie spoiled me whenever I went to their house. She married young, and June’s father was probably fifteen years older or so, beloved amongst his colleagues and neighbors, handsome in the generic white-man way, easygoing, doting. He traveled often for work, but when he was home, he hosted barbecues and movie nights in their backyard, brought out the projector and rented a popcorn machine. He’d spend more time with Nat and June, in those weeks, than my own father ever did with me in what felt like my whole life.

Nat didn’t have a job. She read constantly, heaps of fresh hardbacks piled neatly on counters and shelves. She cleaned and cooked and tended to the house, and to June. Whenever I’d come by, she’d bring us too many snacks and sodas, always checking in to gauge our level of contentment. Occasionally, she’d drive us to the Barnes and Noble, thirty minutes away, and let us each pick out a handful of new books, whatever we wanted.

My mother never minded. She understood Natalie, in some unspoken way.

Once, I asked her why she thought Nat didn’t work anymore when it’s clear how smart she was. My mom, chopping onions, actually paused what she was doing—a rarity, in our house—and looked at me, at the pile of books on our kitchen table, and said, softer than I’d ever heard her, “I don’t think she knows how smart she is. I don’t think anyone ever really told her.”

A shrug, and back to cooking. I sat there, quiet, until she told me to go start the laundry.

4.

This spring, I went back to my mom’s house for Easter. I didn’t mention the destruction of the house, what I’d seen on Christmas. After a few too many glasses of cabernet, during a lull in the conversation, I couldn’t help myself. The question slipped out.

“Do you ever think about them?” I asked. My mother sat across from me, eating apple pie. I was washing the dishes. She paused mid-bite, swallowed, looked up at me, and I knew she instinctively knew who I meant.

We never talked about them. What was there to talk about? But here I was, talking. She glanced towards the living room, where my brothers and all our partners sat, now and then exploding in half-drunk bursts of laughter. I knew that look. Don’t spoil this for once. Just let us have a good night.

“No,” She said, finally. “That was so long ago.” She took another bite of pie. “There’s more than enough to be sad about, mija.” I felt fourteen again, scolded for being too morose, too serious, sulking too much for my own good.

“Right.” I said nothing else. Just let the warm water rush over my palms.

5.

But I do think about them. And I know she does, too.

6.

We ate honey on graham crackers. Mandarins and sliced apples sprinkled with cinnamon. Marshmallows we snuck from June’s cupboard and shoved into our mouths, almost always choking, seeing how many we could fit while still speaking. We ran from her house to mine and back again, often trailed by one or both of my brothers, whom we treated like dolls at times, dressing them up and painting their faces with our mothers’ makeup. We gave them an early education in the performance of femininity, one we could never quite nail ourselves. Not without bruising. Not without strain.

When it was still warm, we liked to sit with lemonade, watermelon topped with Tajín, given to us by my mother, and watch moths self-immolate over and over, their frail wings smearing against the porch-light. Our arms would swell and redden, lined with mosquito bites, which we itched furiously until we bled. When it was cold, we sat inside and drank chili-laced hot chocolate until our stomachs hurt, lit candles, and tried to scare each other with ghost stories that were really just the plots of random Goosebumps episodes.

…

One night, the summer before eighth grade, June and I built a blanket fort in her room. We huddled under it, swathed in pillows, brought our ginger ale and Nat’s homemade snickerdoodles and lit our soft cave with flashlights. We tried to out-burp each other, out-gross each other, till someone, repulsed, delighted, doubled over with laughter.

That night, the heat drenched everything, including our hiding place, but we wouldn’t give it up. Instead, we took our shirts off, not caring; we’d seen each other naked before. But the sugar and heat went to our heads, and we sat closer than usual. June told me secrets she’d always carried around, ones I’d not yet intuited, ones that made my stomach churn. Her father, she whispered, was not the good man, exactly, that everyone thought he was. Or, he was, but not all the time.

“He freaks me out sometimes,” June said. “Like, he can be really—just—cold. To my mom, and to me. And then it, like, goes away, and everything’s fine.” She hesitated. “Lately I feel like he might be cheating on my mom, though.” Nat had gone to bed by then, but June lifted the blanket and glanced toward the locked door.

Her words stunned me. The few times I’d seen them together, despite their age gap, her dad had seemed almost painfully enamored with his wife. He’d always have an arm around her or reaching towards her, would whisper into her hair or kiss her in front of everybody. Natalie didn’t appear quite as passionate, but she did seem to come to life, in those moments, in some strange, unfamiliar way.

June didn’t explain her suspicion. She let it hang there, a souring.

“But they seem, like, really in love,” I argued. “Don’t they?”

“Sometimes.” June shrugged. She didn’t seem to want to say anything else.

Or maybe she did. Maybe I didn’t let her. Didn’t want to hear anything but the story I’d assigned them in my head. I should’ve listened harder. I should’ve paused and lingered on that moment, on June’s expression—drawn, tense, like she’d said something she shouldn’t have—but at that moment, she grabbed my hand.

“Promise me you’ll never do that,” she whispered, desperate. “To me.”

It was an odd thing to say. We were kids. We were best friends. We certainly weren’t a married adult couple. And still. Still, I understood. She wanted a promise. An assurance that we’d stay linked forever, knitted together, somehow. That we’d never replace each other, never be anything but this bone-to-bone, this heart-to-heart.

So I nodded. She leaned forward, silent, and that night, June kissed me for the first time. Nothing tentative about it. I kissed her back, clumsy, startled, and warmth flooded my whole body.

Later, she changed her story. She claimed that we were obviously just practicing the whole time.

I remember, though. She wasn’t practicing. Not for boys, not then. Neither was I.

7.

The sun would pool between the trees like blood rising along the skin of our legs and armpits, nicked from our inexpert shaving, too much pressure and not enough water. We ran past the creek then and into the thicker part of the woods, collapsed in the clearing and let the amber light spill into our bodies and fill our bones, muscles, tissues. We said we could feel ourselves beginning to glow, for real, seriously, no, seriously, and a slippery heat rushed through our faces. This was when we turned to each other, opened our eyes, and started to inch closer and closer until our mouths met and we kissed, tangled up and glowing red, dirt in our hair and smearing our faces. We took our clothes off and touched each other and kept kissing till the sun went down and we’d get up and sprint home and shower, the two of us, in my bathroom, watching the dirt and leaves and the glittering redness slide from our bodies and disappear down the drain.

Outside, and in our beds, over and over, for the first months of eighth grade, we kissed, and more, startled by our own capacity for feelings like these. We were afraid, and uncertain of what we were doing, but unwilling to stop. We didn’t talk about it, not while it was happening. To speak would’ve punctured something. Undone it.

It’s not that June and I didn’t hurt each other. But we always made up. Our barbs and thorns always came from a place of intimacy, of enmeshment, of being together so much we sometimes scraped ourselves raw on all that closeness.

Around age eleven, we’d read Twilight for the first time, stealing it from my mom’s nightstand, hoping for less angst and more weird vampire sex to giggle over and read to each other in hushed, overly sultry tones at night even though we didn’t quite understand what sex really entailed. We sometimes bit each other, both metaphorically and not, because, of course, we were vampires, we’d say, well into age thirteen, wincing, our teeth leaving smears of purple and yellow-green on each other’s necks, skin pulsing, faces flushed. We were ridiculous, too old to play pretend, but we didn’t care. We knew it wasn’t real, probably.

But still. Something about it seemed real enough.

8.

Occasionally, I think that if June and I had more time to love each other, fully, maybe we would’ve. Once we passed through the rites of garden-variety shame, past puberty, fear, all that inherited bullshit. But it’s more likely that we’d have stayed apart for good, pushed too far apart to ever heal the fault-lines. More likely, we’d be strangers now, decades later, maybe friends on Facebook, maybe running into each other at home during the holidays, but nothing else.

9.

At the end of eighth grade, things changed. That summer, before high school, June and I stopped talking. It happened without warning. It happened and nothing had ever knocked me off my balance quite so hard.

We changed. Diverged. June started talking about boys that year. Boys who, to me, inspired plenty of feelings—irritation, disgust, exhaustion, boredom—but never anything like a crush, never anything like want. We’d mercilessly mocked Bella, whose so-called love for Edward, we thought, was mostly embarrassing and really her only distinguishable personality trait besides being pale. I was Mexican, and June was white but we lived in the sunshine state, or whatever—more like the sun-shit state, we’d snicker—and my mom would make off-color jokes about June beginning to “look like us,” in the summer, with all that time we spent outside, so the “pale” particularly made us laugh. June had fine, soft reddish-blonde hair and freckles, though, and my hair was dark, thick, a forest of tangles, skin erupting with acne around that time, arms and legs hairier than most of the other girls—and some of the boys—at school. June tanned quickly and deeply, yes, but she’d never look like us, as my mom put it.

June had made fun of Bella but she was more Bella, easily loved, white, and increasingly consumed by boys. Her attention flickered, from me and all of our games, our pretending, to what she called the “real” stuff. She’d begun to experiment more with makeup, clothes, showing up to school in expensive sundresses and eyeliner, hair up to reveal her shoulders, and boys looked. They kept looking, and she started to look back. She started to spend more time with a group of girls I’d never felt quite able to connect with, girls we’d always known and used to be friends with, who’d changed, slowly. Girls that seemed to have no trouble being girls, much better at it than I was.

The nights in her bed, skin to skin, bodies shuddering and warm and wide-awake, mouths pressed together, all of it fell away, as if it were, to her, background noise, a dress rehearsal for this next phase of life. For a love you could claim anywhere, not just in the dark.

I resented femininity then. It was hard not to. Mostly, I wanted it, desperately, craved that strain of belonging, effortless as it seemed. Of course, I didn’t realize that underneath all of the costumery and powder, there was nothing effortless or uncomplicated about it, about any of those girls. They just had a different strategy for dealing with it, one I couldn’t hack.

…

I tried to talk to June. After she started to ignore me. I wanted to demand an answer. To beg, if necessary, to understand. Why, one day she was there, the next, she wasn’t, absorbed into the rituals we’d always belittled. She wouldn’t look at me. I felt every hair on my face, on my chin, my arms. I felt the unruliness of my hair and the itchiness in my skin. The new awkward wideness of my hips, the acne marking my forehead. The wrongness of my oversized tee-shirt and jeans, my dirty Converse, all of it. She shook her head.

“What about—” I started, but she cut me off, knowing where I was headed. What about those nights, the kissing, the touching? What about “Promise me?” Where did it go?

Where did you go?

Quietly, she said, “It was nothing. Nothing happened.”

10.

It is not an easy story, but it’s the one I can’t stop living, regurgitating, tending to. It is not an easy story, but it’s a true one.

11.

I tried, still try, to remember hints. Smudges in the glossy family portrait of the three of them, all smiling wide. I try to recollect clues, to resurrect them in my head so that I might understand what happened, why he did what he did, how no one knew. It wasn’t my job to know. Still.

All I can summon, though, of him, is this:

Once, at one of June’s parents’ backyard get-togethers, brimming with laughter and beer and music, I ran into the kitchen, too hot, I was nauseous, the sunlight monstrous outside. I stood there, panting, leaning against the fridge, didn’t notice her dad until he cleared his throat. He was making margaritas. Cutting fruit, salting glasses.

“You alright there, Mina?” He’d asked, concerned.

“It’s just really hot,” I’d said. He went to the freezer and grabbed a handful of ice. He didn’t say anything, just leaned over and held it against my cheek. I stayed still, let the shock of the cold enter my skin, calm me down. After a long moment, he’d pulled away, smiling at me, and went back to his margaritas.

“Thanks,” I’d mumbled, embarrassed at the easy tenderness of his gesture. The way my chest tightened and longing tore through me, for a father like that, who’d hold ice cubes to your face to cool you down. Who’d look at you with concern in the first place. June’s father had never said much to me. In that moment in the kitchen, though, he’d become, silently, more of a father to me than my own dad had ever been, just for a short stretch of time, just for an afternoon.

12.

June’s father killed her on a Wednesday. In the middle of July. She was about to turn fourteen.

He’d gotten home from a trip the day before. Everything seemed okay. No arguments or disturbing noises were heard by any neighbors. One reported walking their dog past the house earlier and having seen the family eating dinner together at the dining table. Later that night, around two or so, he got up, took out his hunting knife, which he kept in the closet.

He did what he did. First, he killed Nat. June was next. Defense wounds were littered all over her body, the coroner later said. She fought back until she couldn’t anymore.

He washed his hands and his knife. He listened to his only daughter gurgle and cry until everything went silent. He felt tired from the fighting, so he decided he’d take their bodies to the woods in the morning. He went back to sleep.

He just snapped, is what everyone said, after.

As if a man were a twig. To be stepped on, broken apart. Just like that.

13.

When June died, we hadn’t spoken in months.

At the funeral, my mother and I stood off to the side, behind the other mourners. Because the loss pelting my whole body came spiked with anger. June had broken my heart and now she was dead. Ash and bone in an urn submerged in white flowers. I didn’t know how to hold grief and hurt in one breath. How to not feel guilty about feeling so wounded, so sick with spite and longing.

My mom barely spoke. She didn’t cry. She had gone quiet and blanked-out since the murders. She didn’t want to talk about it. Just told me that she hoped he suffered in prison for the rest of his life, that he got what he gave.

We left right after the service.

14.

I used to run through the facts like an incantation, like I might, somehow, undo them—

Her father slept through his alarm. Got up late and rushed to work, leaving the bodies behind. Natalie had recently asked the housekeeper to come in on Thursday. She arrived, cleaned downstairs for a few hours, and noticed an odd smell coming from the rooms above.

She went up. She saw what he’d done. She called the police near-unintelligible, choking on every word. He’d done a messy job. He’d been careless, overconfident. The blood got everywhere. He left his stained pajamas in the laundry machine. The knife, he threw into the creek.

It didn’t matter. The press conjoined two words into one sordid phrase and its magnetism eclipsed any of the actual details: family annihilator.

Shut up, I thought, the first time I read that term. Because he didn’t annihilate either of them, not entirely. They were gone, but they lingered, everywhere. June lingered. In me, in every visit I took to the creek, every night spent in my bed, any brief shiver of joy foreclosed by her absence.

I learned what they do to dead white girls. They make them martyrs. But June was never an angel in need of rescue or a lesson in punishment or anything. June was just a kid.

15.

I have no personal pictures of the house, but there are several online. Real estate images, a few years after the murders. I still don’t know why they didn’t raze it to the ground then, why they let the place sit there and fester, silent, tomb-like. Eventually enough years passed and enough new people moved into town that they could sell it. In the listings, they didn’t mention what had happened there. The memory of June, of Nat, of him, of so much violent loss, seeped into the walls and stayed there, quiet, painted over but never entirely erased.

Now even the house is gone. Now I can’t even look for a ghost.

16.

When they died, I went still. For a long time. It all felt like gruesome, melodramatic fiction. Dumb and bloody. The plot of a cheap movie. Or, yes, a true crime spectacle, but one that happened elsewhere, to someone else. Not to the girl I’d loved and hated desperately, not to her mother, who’d mothered me, too. I did not want to run anymore, to sprint through the forest or splash in the creek, not without the knowledge that somewhere, June and Nat existed, alive, vibrant and frustrating. Maybe I am suspended even now. Maybe the loss of them takes up more room than I want it to. Than I’ve ever afforded it.

17.

I wonder if, when I die, whenever that is, I will think of June, age twelve, wild and running, a scream hovering on the cusp of her mouth—a joy-scream, of release, of being without walls.

I wonder if she thought of me at all. Or if she saw the expanse of mud and water and magic, that painless hidden world of ours flaring into sight one last time, neurons firing, before the lights went out. I hope so. I hope she hurt him when she fought back, that she broke him apart. And I hope that her brain protected her, Nat’s too. That it swathed them in all the warmth and light they should’ve known for much, much longer.

18.

Age nine. June, tongue poking around her mouth, face scrunched up, trying to coax a loose tooth from its hiding place. “I need to get it out,” She complained to me, frustrated. “Otherwise, it might come out while I’m sleeping and I could choke on it. That’s what my mom said.”

She asked me to do that thing we’d seen in movies, where you’d get a long piece of floss and tie the tooth to a doorknob, slam it shut, yank it free. She sat on the toilet seat while I stuck my fingers in her mouth, squinting and grabbing as if I were searching for stalagmites inside a cave, and I eventually got the floss to tie around the loose tooth, tying the other end to the door. “Don’t tell me when,” she said, closing her eyes. “Just do it.” After a moment, I slammed it shut with my foot.

That bloody tooth on the bathroom floor. How she laughed, smiling wide at me with the leaking red space where it had been. She ran her tongue over the gap, licking up her own blood, pressuring the wound into submission.

Smiling at me, she said, “I barely even felt it.”

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