Sharp_Objects

I saw Natalie’s mother, crying into one of her old T-shirts. I saw me, a despairing thirteen-year-old sobbing on the floor of my dead sister’s room, holding a small flowered shoe. Or Amma, thirteen herself, a woman-child with a gorgeous body and a gnawing desire to be the baby girl my mother mourned. My mother weeping over Marian. Biting that baby. Amma, asserting her power over lesser creatures, laughing as she and her friends cut through Natalie’s hair, the curls falling to the tile floor. Natalie, stabbing at the eyes of a little girl. My skin was screaming, my ears banged with my heartbeat. I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around myself, and wept.

    A fter ten minutes of sobbing in my pillow, I started pulling out of the crying jag, mundane thoughts bobbing into my head: the quotes from John Keene I might use in my article, the fact that my rent was due next week back in Chicago, the smell of the apple going sour in the trash basket by my bed.
    Then, outside my door, Amma quietly whispered my name. I buttoned up the top of my nightgown, pulled my sleeves down, and let her in. She was wearing a pink flowered nightgown, her blonde hair flowing over her shoulders, her feet bare. She looked truly adorable, no better word.
    “You’ve been crying,” she said, slightly astounded.
    “A little.”
    “Because of her?” The final word was weighted, I could picture it round and heavy, making a deep thump in a pillow.
    “A little, I guess.”
    “Me, too.” She stared at my edges: the collar of my nightgown, the ends of my sleeves. She was trying to glimpse my scars. “I didn’t know you hurt yourself,” she said finally.
    “Not anymore.”
    “That’s good, I guess.” She wavered at the edge of my bed. “Camille, do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait?”
    “Like an anxiety attack?” I couldn’t stop staring at her skin, it was so smooth and tawny, like warm ice cream.
    “No. Not really.” She sounded like I’d disappointed her, failed to solve a clever riddle. “But, anyway. I brought you a present.” She held out a square of wrapping paper and told me to open it carefully. Inside: a tidily rolled joint.
    “It’s better than that vodka you drink,” Amma said, automatically defensive. “You drink a lot. This is better. It won’t make you as sad.”
    “Amma, really…”
    “Can I see your cuts again?” She smiled shyly.
    “No.” A silence. I held up the joint. “And Amma, I don’t think you should…”
    “Well I do, so take it or don’t. I was just trying to be nice.” She frowned and twisted a corner of her nightgown.
    “Thank you. It’s sweet that you’d like to help me feel better.”
    “I can be nice, you know?” she said, her brow still furrowed. She seemed on the edge of tears herself.
    “I know. It’s just that I’m wondering why you’ve decided to be nice to me now.”
    “Sometimes I can’t. But right now, I can. When everyone’s asleep and everything’s quiet, it’s easier.” She reached out, her hand like a butterfly before my face, then dropped it, patted me on the knee, and left.

Chapter Ten

“I’ m sorry she came here, because now she’s dead,” said a weeping John Keene, 18, of his younger sister Natalie, 10. “Someone killed my little sister.” Natalie Keene’s body was discovered on May 14, jammed upright in a space between Cut-N-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware in the small town of Wind Gap, Mo. She is the second young girl murdered here in the past nine months: Ann Nash, nine, was discovered in a nearby creek last August. Both girls had been strangled; both had their teeth removed by the killer.
    “She was this goofy kid,” John Keene said, crying softly, “kind of a tomboy.” Keene, who moved here from Philadelphia with his family two years ago, and who recently graduated from high school, described his younger sister as a bright, imaginative girl. She once even invented her own language, complete with a working alphabet. “A regular kid, it’d be gibberish,” Keene said, laughing ruefully.
    What is gibberish is the police case so far: Wind Gap police officials and Richard Willis, a homicide detective on loan from Kansas City, admit there are few leads. “We have not ruled anyone out,” Willis said. “We are looking very closely at potential suspects within the community, but are also carefully considering the possibility that these