The Geography of Girlhood Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  the geography of girlhood

  “Perfectly captures what being a

  teenager is all about, from the smallest

  insecurities to the biggest

  heartbreaks.”

  —Sarah Dessen,

  author of The Truth About Forever

  “Compelling, evocative, funny,

  sensual, and painfully real.”

  —Ann Martin,

  author of Newbery Honor Book

  A Corner of the Universe

  “This is what it feels like to grow up, and

  these are the poems that every teenage

  girl, overwhelmed by longing, jealousy,

  and passion, would love to write.”

  —Leah Stewart,

  author of The Myth of You and Me

  “With pithy, evocative metaphors,

  Smith’s free-verse poems capture the

  fizzy energies, soul-deadened malaises,

  and ultra-confident poses that mark teen

  girl experience.… Smith gets the climate

  for her geography just right.”

  —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s

  Books

  “A beautifully written, remarkably

  perceptive take on growing up. I only

  wish this book had been around

  when I was a teenager.”

  —Julia Stiles

  “Funny, sad, all too real, and a

  thorough delight to read.”

  —Tom Perrotta,

  bestselling author of Election

  “Lyrical, gorgeous, and hard-hitting.

  I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Lauren Myracle,

  bestselling author of ttyl

  “Kirsten Smith’s verse is spare,

  subtle, and tender.”

  —Deb Caletti,

  author of National Book Award finalist

  Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

  “Alternately caustic and vulnerable,

  above all, Smith’s writing is true.”

  —E. Lockhart, author of

  The Boyfriend List

  “Readers will be enormously satisfied.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2006 by Kirsten Smith

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08683-7

  The text was set in Frutiger Light, and the display type is handlettered.

  Contents

  PRAISE FOR the geography of girlhood

  Copyright

  1 marine life

  2 low tide

  3 the lay of the land

  4 Bodies of water

  5 the river of sixteen

  6 the Wrong road Out of town

  7 the flanks of home

  acknowledgments

  To Mel and Katie Aline

  and

  In memory of Stan Pollard

  1

  marine life

  Pop. 9,762

  Clam season is about to start

  and ninth grade is almost over

  and I have rowed myself

  out to the middle of the bay so I can see the place I live:

  everything is trees and water and rain

  and smoky stink from the paper mill

  and small town, small town.

  One day, I’ll find my way away from here

  and go somewhere real

  and do something great

  and be someone wonderful.

  One day, I will be standing at the shore

  of a completely different body of water

  and it will be big and wild and dangerous

  and it will be like this one

  never even existed.

  Fourteen

  Fourteen is like rotten candy,

  fourteen is a joke that no one gets.

  When you’re fourteen,

  you look good only once a week

  and it’s never on the day of the dance.

  When you’re fourteen,

  you have a mouthful of metal

  that no one wants to taste.

  Fourteen is going to bed at night

  and wishing you could wake up with a new face

  or a new dad or better yet,

  a new life

  that doesn’t look anything

  like this one.

  My Sister’s Body

  I have been living in my sister’s room

  for so long,

  I begin to think that

  her body is mine.

  The long torso,

  the breasts lodged high

  like tea cakes

  on her powdery skin.

  In our room

  I watch my sister dash around,

  her lips like bruised plums

  as she waits for Bobby

  to gun up to the house.

  I look at her

  and memorize everything.

  So when the time comes,

  and the boy’s eye glitters like a crime,

  I will know what to do.

  I will peel off my crushed velvet shell

  and stand before him,

  tall and beautiful

  and so white

  he can barely breathe.

  Pretty

  They say girls take after their mothers

  and in the case of my sister, it’s true.

  But in the case of me

  I have my father’s eyes and my father’s toes

  and scariest of all

  my father’s nose.

  My mother was pretty

  but my father is not,

  so that means whatever beauty there is,

  that’s what my sister got.

  Diana

  Lips, limes, she had it all.

  That’s what I say about my mother,

  a dreamboat that drifted away,

  a flower on a live spit.

  She had the beauty of a fire alarm:

  loud and hard to ignore,

  always too late to stop the house from burning down.

  I don’t remember much about her

  just that she was an expert at drinking too much

  and falling down just a little,

  and she always said glass could cut glass,

  a diamond was nothing special.

  The day she left, I was six and learning to swim,

  coasting like a petal in the community pool

  when she came to whisper her last how-to’s into

  my ear:

  How to hold the man gently over the flame

  until he is golden as toast,

  how to butter him,

  how to almost gobble him whole,

  when to stop

  and call him love.

  How My Father Sees Us

  To him, we are piles of lingerie.

  We are water-rings and dented fenders,

  we are a trail of CDs littering the road to nowhere.

  Because of us, he’s always on the prowl for chaos,


  a man with a little box for this

  and a little bag for that.

  To him, we are the kinds of daughters that

  make a man want to invent things

  just so they can make their way along.

  He tells us he hopes that when the time comes,

  and with the help of all he’s given us—

  the fishing-lure markers, the toolbox,

  the lectures on which boys are trouble

  and which boys are good-for-nothings—

  we’ll be able to move gracefully

  through the world.

  We will be tidy and professional,

  well organized and successful,

  but what he doesn’t know is that

  we will leave just enough of a trail—

  a stain on the davenport or a chip in the paint—

  so that he can recognize us

  as his daughters,

  so he can seek us out

  and call us his own.

  Closet

  This morning, Tara catches me

  sneaking into her closet and

  when I ask to borrow one of her shirts

  to wear to the dance this afternoon,

  she tells me she’s not loaning me anything

  and if I ever go in her closet again,

  she will maim me

  and then kill me.

  I ask her what I should wear

  and she says she doesn’t care

  but whatever it is

  it shouldn’t have stripes.

  Friday Afternoon Dance

  Dances are a dream come true

  or a nightmare,

  depending on who you are

  or how you talk

  or what you choose to wear that day.

  I made the mistake of polka dots.

  I stand on the far wall

  in a free-fall shame spiral.

  Elaine and Denise are next to me,

  hopped up on Milk Duds.

  Denise is wiggling around so hard

  that when Eric Chandler asks her to dance,

  he can barely keep hold of her.

  In his fourteenth year, Eric’s arms are at war

  with his legs

  and it’s safe to say his legs are losing.

  Then Stan Bondurant comes up

  and tells a joke about Polish people

  before he takes Elaine out to dance.

  Stan’s fine, but I have a thing about class clowns—

  it seems like they’ll do anything

  to hide their heart.

  As for me, the song is halfway over

  and I am at the edge of the dance floor

  like a stone at the edge of the sea,

  waiting for my rough edges to be smoothed

  into something worth touching,

  and I tell myself that one day someone will come for me

  and until then

  I’ll wait.

  Seagulls

  After the dance, I get a ride home from school

  with my sister and Bobby

  and they stop at the beach

  to do what they do,

  which means I’ve been sent off

  to collect shells

  like I’m five.

  A Navy helicopter flies by

  and the birds on the marsh start to panic

  and the air fills with a great cloud of wings

  and I realize that’s how it goes here:

  nothing ever happens

  and if it does

  all the things with wings

  fly away.

  The Search for Extraterrestrial Life

  Tonight after dinner, my dad shows me his new

  computer program. He says it looks for signals in space

  while you sleep. Are you talking about aliens? I ask.

  He nods like it’s totally normal. My father has either

  officially lost his mind, or maybe he’s on to something;

  maybe if scientists can find life on other planets, then

  maybe one day somebody can find my mother.

  Late Bloomer

  They say my mother was like a hydrangea,

  prone to wilting and then falling apart

  at the slightest sign of stress or sun.

  They say my mother was a rhododendron,

  she always looked better after the rain.

  They say my mother did so many bad things

  to so many people she loved

  she was a snapdragon with nowhere to go.

  Me, I say my mother was a night-blooming jasmine,

  she was at her best when no one was looking.

  I say my mother was a late bloomer

  who didn’t get time to grow,

  but then again, what do I know.

  What I Know About My Parents’ First Date

  It was night and the snow on the Ridge

  was just starting to melt.

  As they made their way up to the top

  in his old truck,

  my mother noticed the rams

  propped against the hillside,

  feeding on dirt.

  The stars came out fast that night

  and my mother imagined

  that from somewhere on high,

  someone looked down and said,

  See that girl’s skin? Protect it.

  I Sing the Body Retarded

  I was late for school today because my sister was trying

  to instruct me on the ways of feminine hygiene and I

  can’t seem to get it right and tampons are officially my

  enemy and I will be stuck with maxi pads forever which

  means I will be uncool forever and it’s safe to say there

  is definitely something wrong with me, which now

  makes this the fourth time today I have thought that,

  the other times being when Rob Calderon told me to

  “grow some tits” during P.E., and when I had sweat

  stains during third period for no reason, and when

  Danny Helms said that blue eyes are the prettiest and

  here I am, stuck with brown.

  On the Equator

  Today after I got out of play rehearsals, Skyler Reeves

  came up to Denise and Elaine and me, all fresh from

  cheerleading practice and wearing her shiny skirt

  and her shiny hair and her shiny smile. Can you guys

  come over Saturday? she asked and Elaine said,

  Of course we can!

  As Skyler walked away, Elaine was talking a mile a

  minute about how cool it was going to be, and Denise

  looked lost and sad and far away, and I stared at my

  two best friends and saw that if we were a continent

  unto ourselves, Elaine would be the north pole and

  Denise would be the south and I would be somewhere

  in the middle, trying to navigate all that space in

  between.

  Slumber Party

  We are at Skyler Reeves’s house

  watching Maggie Cartwright’s dad’s copy

  of Showgirls

  which could be fun if it weren’t so embarrassing.

  Denise has spent half the night

  hiding in the bathroom,

  because sometimes she gets that way

  around more than three people.

  When I ask Elaine

  if she thinks Denise is alright,

  Elaine shrugs and says, Sometimes Denise is such

  a freak

  and Skyler Reeves laughs.

  Elaine acts cool and won’t look at me.

  But what she doesn’t say

  is that her half brother is in jail

  and Skyler Reeves’s mom is on her fifth marriage

  and Maggie Cartwright likes being spanked

  and I am what I am

  so basically

  that makes us all freaks,

  doesn’t it?

 
Everyone Else

  After the movie,

  we all lay out our sleeping bags

  and Skyler and Maggie start

  talking about what happened

  at the Senior Prom last night,

  telling stories about high school girls

  like Lisa Tavorino and Kelly Barnes

  and Jenny Arnold and Jenny Able

  as if they were movie stars.

  Even my sister’s name comes up once or twice

  and Dinah says, She’s so pretty, as if

  I were somehow not aware of this fact.

  Skyler and Elaine and Maggie are

  so ready to become those girls

  and then there’s Denise,

  who’s still hiding in the bathroom,

  and as for me, all I know

  is that even though high school is only

  three weeks and an entire summer away

  it still feels like it’s a faraway land of them

  and I will forever be living

  in the same old hometown of me.

  The Jennys

  The story goes that Jenny, homespun girl,

  hopped onstage during the Prom last night

  and started singing with the band.

  Jacked-up on the fervor of fifteen,

  drunk Jenny sang the girl-part of a duet,

  didn’t notice her boyfriend’s hand

  loitering on another Jenny’s thigh.

  High school seems filled with Jennys,

  most of them hiding out as Jennifers,

  others as easy-access Jens,

  but these two—Jennys to the core.

  They’ve spent the year ruling popularity contests

  and baffling teachers with their identical penmanship.

  They discovered beer and marijuana

  and that’s when the trouble started:

  one Jenny liked Budweiser,

  one liked smoking out on the cliff.

  One Jenny has her hair tipped black,

  the other wears Mike Shaw’s letterman’s jacket.

  Last night, so the story goes, they were at the same

  dumb dance,

  one Jenny onstage, the other by the lockers.

  They took turns kissing the same boy:

  a beer jock, more Jenny’s type

  than Jenny’s, but it’s not about the kissing anymore.

  It’s about the fierceness of the name,

  the matching J’s and A’s on

  every science quiz for the past eight years,