Bloody Mary

by Katherine Sinback

Marija Zaric

I saw Lizette perched on the crumbling wall that separated the playground from Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary’s garden. The chipped mural of arboreal delights on the wall beneath Lizette was a minor disruption to the enveloping gray of the winter day. Afternoon pick-up chaos swirled around her. Kids swarmed the tire swing. Lizette was oblivious. Regal in her Old Navy regalia, her hair tucked behind her elfin ears to show off the gold studs gunned into them. Her chosen crew of three surrounded her, eyes drinking her in like a natural wonder.

“She is like so boring,” Lizette said. Her deployment of “like” was skillful for a second-grader.

She had an older sister. Her kind always had an older sister.

“She thought that reading to each other from some stupid comic was an acceptable entertainment activity.” Lizette punctuated each word with a pause, a moment of enforced gravity that the girls gobbled, heads nodding as if in a trance.

“I told her, ‘That’s not what we do at parties, Rita. That is not an acceptable entertainment activity.’”

Lizette smirked, momentarily obscuring the tiny baby teeth that clung for dear life in her eight-year-old mouth. A mess of brown corkscrew curls framed the pink pudge of her cheeks. She could pass for a cherub but for her eyes. Her eyes were all teenager. She rolled them so much at her parents, at her teachers, at the kids who surrounded her on the playground that I wondered if she’d have any rolls left by the time she hit adolescence. When I first met her at my daughter’s sixth birthday party, the eye rolls were cute, like a puppy-wearing-a-top-hat cute, but now when she deployed an eye roll anywhere near my jurisdiction I resorted to yoga breathing to quell the annoyance that spiked inside me.

Across the playground Lizette’s mother, one of the younger mothers at Eleanor — as we parents called the school, because we like to keep our women leaders on a first-name basis — pushed a stroller with her right hip and left hand, while she single-handedly executed a scroll on her phone with the other. I have to give it to the younger generation, their phone-handling skills leave us forty-and-up moms in the dust. She moved slowly, a floating log occasionally caught on a rock or dip in the pavement, while kids rushed around her, pulsing with the energy of recent release from the confines of desks and rules. Although Lizette and her mother looked nothing alike, the set of their shoulders, the purse of their lips, the way life seemed to step out of their way bound them together as family.

My daughter, Nell, had yet to emerge from the flood of kids through the double doors. At my urging, she said she would talk to her teacher after school. My refusal to helicopter her through the trials of her young life was itself becoming another trial of her young life.

Her lip trembling, she had said, “I hope Mrs. Lincoln can help.”

“Give it a try,” I had pulled her in for a hug, but her body had remained stiff in my embrace.

I pulled back and tucked a hank of her ramrod-straight brown hair behind her ear. She had gone too long between haircuts. Her bangs crowded her eyes. She shook the hair back to her face. I tried to see Nell like Lizette would, tried to find the parts that wouldn’t pass mean-girl muster. Nell’s eyes were uneven, her nose a little bulbous, and she was prone to hunching over the mound of her belly. She was still a question mark. She had growing to do. The rest of her could catch up to the parts that stuck out, that formed the bullseye for Lizette.

Unless Lizette destroyed her first.

On the playground, I hovered behind a line of chatting parents, scrolling through my own phone without seeing more than the flow of color-blobs and letters. The line of parents in front of me provided cover so I could keep an eye on Lizette and the girls who, until last Friday, had been Nell’s posse. Their abandonment of Nell, their lockstep following of Lizette, was the central mystery of my weekend, the seed of my daughter’s torment.

Nell was not the clueless Rita who Lizette, a few feet away from me, continued to bury with her critique of Rita’s birthday party. A continuing refrain of all the things that were not “acceptable entertainment activities.” Rita was the daughter of the resident hippie-artist parents who made the liberally-intentioned, modern-day Yuppie parents of Eleanor Elementary kids feel noble for nodding hello at drop-off. The perennially disheveled mother of Rita always had a baby on her hip and a teenager screaming at her from the edge of the playground. I never did put an exact number to their brood. Guess a number between one and ten. Rita’s mother and the presence of the impish Rita in their children’s classes let the parents pretend they still had a foot in the hip, young worlds they left behind for the comfort of corporate jobs and upwardly mobile school districts. The boring adults they had become. We had become.

When Nell had ragged on Rita for her crooked haircut the first week of school, I had set her straight.

“Sweetie, you must be kind to her. She can’t help her hair. Or she can and you still have to be kind.”

“But she’s weird.”

“There’s nothing wrong with weird.”

Nell froze in the doorway to her room. The first week of school had been an adjustment. A new teacher, a new seating chart, and she was forced to sit next to Rita instead of Lizette.

“And saying mean things behind her back doesn’t count as kind. That’s just a different kind of mean,” I said.

Nell had blinked, tensed her jaw and then, borrowing from Lizette’s dramatic repertoire, twirled on the slippery toe of her socked foot. “Fine, Mother.”

Nell and I had a joke that every time she called me “mother” she had to eat an olive, one of her most hated foods.

“That’s another olive for you,” I said to her back, forcing a laugh.

She said, “I like olives now.”

***

Last Friday my husband picked Nell up from school. She tumbled through the door and collapsed into my lap. Her face was mottled pink and her blue eyes were bloodshot and puffy. I looked over her head to my husband’s clueless shrug.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, baby,” I said, running my hand over her hot head, her drooping ponytail.

The story came out in drips. Lizette said Nell couldn’t come to Rita’s party. That everyone else could, but not Nell. The girls had big plans. It was a slumber party with the promise of pizza and sundaes and Rita’s parents letting them do whatever they wanted.

“I don’t think I got an invitation,” I said, racking my brain for the memory of a neglected e-vite that could be the key to eliminating Nell’s misery. Not that I would let her go. My softness towards Rita and her family ended where intention became unmonitored slumber party.

“I-wasn’t-invited,” Nell hiccupped. Lizette told Rita she wouldn’t come, none of the girls would, if Nell was invited. And Rita had made her deal with the second-grade devil, ditching Nell in favor of Lizette. Rita’s parents were too occupied with their brood and their art, whatever it was that they did that left their pant legs paint-splattered and fingernails crusty, to give input into Rita’s party list. Unlike the rest of us, they were not avid spectators in the junior social games at Eleanor.

I rubbed Nell’s back, pausing by the knot of her shoulder blade, as the thought, the tiny crumpled idea tossed before my mind’s eye, started to unfold. The teachable moment, the disaster.

The words tumbled from my mouth. “Well now you know how Rita must feel when she gets left out.”

Because, until today, Rita was the outsider, the outcast who cohered the gaggle of girls that ruled the playground from their perch at the top of the slide by virtue of her being excluded.

Nell detached her body from mine. As if my chest had grown spikes.

“I’m not Rita,” she growled. She ran to her room and slammed the door behind her, only allowing my husband to pass through the threshold for the rest of the night.

Nobody was there to witness my noble sacrifice of my daughter’s comfort in the name of justice for artfully underprivileged outcast children everywhere. What treacherous ivy had I planted between my daughter and me.

***

On the playground watching Lizette hold court was like gazing into a crystal ball. I saw the past, my past when my own personal Lizette, who went by the oxymoronic name Ami, set her sights on me at my fourth-grade slumber party. The ice cream cake had barely melted in our stomachs when Ami hopped on my canopy bed, grubby toes digging into the edge of my pillow for balance, and issued her proclamation.

“Nobody talks to the birthday girl and that’s an order,” she said.

“Real funny! That’s no way to treat a lady,” I said, forcing mirth into my voice as I quoted one of Ami’s favorite jokes.

“Did you hear something?” Her eyes moved around the room, forging silent covenants with my three best friends.

I followed her gaze, searching my friends’ faces for recognition, while they silently acquiesced to Ami’s demands with blank expressions. My eyes fell to their nightgowns: Wonder Woman pajamas, a faded daisy flannel nightgown, tiny Holly Hobbies dotting a cotton shift. My friend in the Holly Hobby pajamas bit back a grin.

“You breathe a word to your mom and we’ll never talk to you again,” Ami said to me.

Ami’s favors were given and withdrawn in random fashion, but she followed through on her threats. My tongue went numb. My mouth dry.

The slumber party was a play that I watched from a corner of the basement. I pulled my legs into a tight ball, tried to warm myself in my nightgown, a new pink nightgown with a rosette collar and lace flounces on the sleeves that my mom had bought me as a birthday present. “You never forget your first slumber party,” she had said, enveloping me in a hug.

Ami led the girls in all the sleepover games: Light as a Feather, MASH, Bloody Mary. When they clustered by the bathroom door and tried to conjure a ghost by chanting “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” while Ami stood before the mirror with a lit candle, I let the words form in my closed mouth, become a forbidden whisper on my tongue. I used the techniques I learned from my brief third-grade dalliance with ventriloquism to chant, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” without my lips betraying my chant. “Duddy Nary, Duddy Nary,” I exhaled through clenched teeth. The girl in the Holly Hobby pajamas whipped her head around and glared at me, sensing that my voice had joined their circle, but I didn’t stop. She said “Ami” just as Ami let out a shriek.

“I saw her! Did you see her? She had blood dripping from her eyes,” Ami said.

The would-be informant either got caught up in the ghost excitement or decided that calling attention to my act of rebellion would betray a crack in Ami’s power over me, that she would be forced to join me in exile.

I stayed awake for as long as I could. When I felt my eyes start to flutter, my concentration on the ceiling waver, I pinched ridges into the flesh of my thighs. What Ami could do to me in my sleep was a horror that could not be given an invitation. She’d been going to slumber parties since she was five. She had older sisters.

When light started to creep through the rectangle of window above my head, I let myself relax and fell into a fitful sleep. I jerked awake to my mom’s voice calling down the stairs, “Oh sleeping beauties, it’s breakfast time,” my nightgown drenched in sweat.

The morning after, after the pancake breakfast where Ami ostentatiously thanked my mom for every flapjack and every puddle of syrup she spread onto her plate, and after the girls trailed away from my house, through the front door, only pausing to thank my mom for the party but without saying a word to me even though Ami was already safely seat-belted in her pea-green minivan and unable to monitor whether they disobeyed her orders and dared to drop a stray “happy birthday” on their way out, after the sleeping bags were rolled up and the gifts tossed into my wicker garbage basket because I thought I could obliterate the night if I got rid of the evidence, and after my mom found the bruises dotting my legs, I uncorked the valve that had been keeping all the misery bottled inside my chubby newly ten-year-old body. The swell of feelings were tigers released from a cage and gnashing at the open air, at the new freedom. I leaned into my mom and mumbled what had happened into the weave of her sweater, inhaling the fabric softener like it alone could heal what Ami had torn open inside of me. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment as I told her about Ami’s proclamation and worse, the easy capitulation of the girls I thought were my friends, as if Ami’s robbery of my birthday party was a terrible secret. My mom patted my back and held me as I cried. Then as my sobs receded, as my tears dried on my raw cheeks, as I wiped at my face and tried to rein the parts of myself that had spilled into the world back inside, she pulled away and looked me in the eye.

“Why do you think she did that?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Was it my pride at my new bike? Had she seen Eric Bing, her dream boy, when he squeezed my shoulder at lunch and said, “Happy birthday, kid?” Was it my new sneakers that Ami accused me of copying from her? Or had she seen some defective part of me, found a truth that even I didn’t know existed? All I knew was she had been my best friend until twelve hours ago. She had stolen my birthday party. Worse, I let her do it.

My mother shook her head. “Well, that is really bizarre. That doesn’t sound like the Ami I know.”

She stood from my bed and smoothed the crinkled spot of comforter where she had been sitting.

“I know you girls will figure it out. You always do.”

My hands found the spots on my legs where the bruises blossomed. I wished I could squeeze them until they gushed blood.

***

I looked at Lizette and saw into the future too. A future where her alliance to Nell would shift according to an invisible emotional weather system. All would be tranquil until Lizette’s parents decamped on one of their Hawaiian getaways, leaving Lizette, her older sister, and baby brother with the au pair. Lizette would whip into school the next day, a hailstorm of insults on her tongue. “You’re such a copycat, Nell. A loser. You try too hard and everyone knows it.” Nell would slowly collapse under their weight, her shoulders sag around her until she was hollow. Or, in this day and age, Lizette wouldn’t have to say anything. She could post something online in a coded language that only teenagers understood so that when I dragged the principal and Lizette’s parents into a meeting to address the issue once and for all, Lizette could widen her eyes and shrug, “What? I didn’t mean anything by it. If Nell feels so bad about herself that she’s reading an insult into everything maybe she needs professional help.” The parents would stare at me dead-eyed. Sniff at my use of the dreaded b-word.

“I hardly think this situation rises to the definition of bullying,” Lizette’s mother would say, her phone dangling loosely from her hand with the image of whatever Lizette had posted fading to black as it slipped into sleep mode.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Lizette twisting a brown curl around her finger while snapping gum like a Pink Lady. But Lizette wouldn’t be an obvious villain. She would be subtle, more Kardashian about it.

It wasn’t fair to pin all of this on an eight-year-old girl who learned her trade from an older sister, but I couldn’t help myself. The more I watched Lizette on the playground, the more stories whipped up around me, montages of past and future misery.

Lizette’s mom finally made it across the playground. She beckoned her daughter to her with a glance, her eyes raised from the screen for a moment, then a pursed smile and quick nod.

Lizette rolled her eyes at her friends before chirping, “Laterz, alligatorz.”

I felt the tangle of my emotions start to tighten and solidify as Lizette pushed up from the wall and slung her bag over her shoulder. The tangle melted and forged into a blade, a steely presence that ran the length of me. My center turned cold and stiff.

I stepped out from behind the curtain of parents, my phone in hand like a shield. The blade carried me into the soup of bark chips at the edge of the concrete, my deliberate stride cutting into Lizette’s trajectory. Her hip against my thigh was a glancing blow, but I felt the phantom poke of her bone as I watched her stumble. She caught herself on her hands before sprawling onto the concrete.

Our eyes caught on each other. Something foreign flashed across Lizette’s face: fear, surprise. My expression remained steady. A snag of truth before I gasped. “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry!” I extended a hand to her. “Are you okay? I’m so, so sorry.”

Duddy Nary, Duddy Nary, a tickle in my throat.

The line of parents paused their conversation as their eyes landed on us. Her mother’s eyes darted above the screen.

“I’m such a klutz,” I said to Lizette’s mother, my eyes wide. I held up the phone. “Distracted while walking. Guilty!”

Lizette pushed herself up.

“You okay?” Her mom asked.

Lizette nodded.

“Is there anything — ?” I started to ask.

“She’s fine. No harm.” Lizette’s mom held up her phone. “I almost walked into traffic once.”

“Technology will kill us all,” I said. I felt Lizette’s eyes on me. Now I was the one to drink in her gaze like a Roman spectator guzzling the blood of a fallen gladiator.

Lizette’s mom smirked. “That’s for sure.”

Lizette grabbed the stroller and started to push it down the concrete path. “Careful,” her mom hissed, a hand on Lizette’s wrist. “He just went down.”

My cheeks felt hot, flushed. The circle of parents returned to their talk of the upcoming Eleanor auction, the greatness of the garden program, how they didn’t know how single parents did it all. Their voices turned into another layer of playground bark chips, swimming around me. I wondered what it would be like to drown in bark, to cough splinters from my rotted insides.

Nell stepped from behind me and wrapped her hand around my wrist. I jumped from the shock of her moist palm.

“Oh sweetie, you got me!” My hand fluttered to my chest.

Nell beamed. Her eyes danced. She handed me a crumpled note unfolded. In swooping handwriting: You are my best friend.

“How nice,” I said, the paper balanced on my open palm. “Who is that from?”

Nell rolled her eyes and jabbed her finger in the corner of the note where an L opened like a jaw.

“Duh, Lizette,” Nell said.

“Now sweetie, don’t ‘duh’ me,” I said, folding the note into one hand as my other found Nell’s hand, still sweaty from the tight clutch of her prize.

“Fine.” Nell swiped the note from my hand and pulled her hand away from mine. She started walking down the path, following the wake of Lizette pushing the stroller.

I felt a breeze on my palm where the note had been, a chill from its absence.

---

Katherine Sinback’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, daCunha, Gravel, Clackamas Literary Review, The Hunger Journal, and Oyster River Pages. She publishes her zine Crudbucket and writes two blogs: the online companion to Crudbucket, and Peabody Project Chronicles 2: Adventures in Pregnancy After Miscarriage. Crudbucket was featured in the 2007 Multnomah County Library “Zinesters Talking” series and was included in the 2016 Alien She exhibit at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Born and raised in Virginia, Katherine lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. She can be found on Twitter @kt_sinback.