Sharp_Objects

bustle around all day, clean the kitchen tile with a toothbrush, pull the lint from the floorboards with a toothpick before she spoke much about anything uncomfortable. Sober at least. Still, I maneuvered her to talk of Ann and Natalie, guaranteed her anonymity, and started up my tape recorder. The girls were sweet and cute and darling, the obligatory cheery revisionism. Then:
    “We did have an incident with Ann, on Sewing Day.” Sewing Day, still around. Kind of comforting, I suppose. “She jabbed Natalie Keene in the cheek with her needle. I think she was aiming for the eye, you know, like Natalie did to that little girl back in Ohio.” Philadelphia. “One minute the two were sitting nice and quiet next to each other—they weren’t friends, they were in different grades, but Sewing’s open. And Ann was humming something to herself and looking just like a little mother. And then it happened.”
    “How hurt was Natalie?”
    “Mmm, not too bad. Me and Rae Whitescarver, she’s the second-grade teacher now. Used to be Rae Little, few years below us…and not little. At least not then—she’s dropped a few pounds. Anyway, me and Rae pulled Ann off and Natalie had this needle sticking right out of her cheek just an inch below her eye. Didn’t cry or nothing. Just wheezed in and out like an angry horse.”
    An image of Ann with her crooked hair, weaving the needle through cloth, remembering a story about Natalie and her scissors, a violence that made her so different. And before she thought it through, the needle into flesh, easier than you’d think, hitting bone in one quick thrust. Natalie with the metal spearing out of her, like a tiny silver harpoon.
    “Ann did it for no clear reason?”
    “One thing I learned about those two, they didn’t need a reason to strike out.”
    “Did other girls pick on them? Were they under stress?”
    “Ha Ha!” It was a genuinely surprised laugh, but it came out in a perfect, unlikely “Ha Ha!” Like a cat looking at you and saying “Meow.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t say school days were something they looked forward to,” Katie said. “But you should ask your little sister about that.”
    “I know you say Amma bullied them…”
    “God help us when she hits high school.”
    I waited in silence for Katie Lacey Brucker to gear up and talk about my sister. Bad news, I guessed. No wonder she was so happy to see me.
    “Remember how we ran Calhoon? What we thought was cool became cool, who we didn’t like everyone hated?” She sounded fairy-tale dreamy, as if she were thinking of a land of ice cream and bunnies. I only nodded. I remember a particularly cruel gesture on my part: An overearnest girl named LeeAnn, a leftover friend from grade school, had displayed too much concern about my mental state, suggested I might be depressed. I snubbed her pointedly one day when she came scurrying over to speak with me before school. I can still remember her: books bundled under her arms, that awkward printed skirt, her head kept a bit low whenever she addressed me. I turned my back on her, blocked her from the group of girls I was with, made some joke about her conservative church clothes. The girls ran with it. For the rest of the week, she was pointedly taunted. She spent the last two years of high school hanging out with teachers during lunch. I could have stopped it with one word, but I didn’t. I needed her to stay away.
    “Your sister is like us times three. And she has a major mean streak.”
    “Mean streak how?”
    Katie pulled a soft pack of cigarettes from the endtable drawer, lit one with a long fireplace match. Still a secret smoker.
    “Oh, she and those three girls, those little blonde things with the tits already, they rule the school, and Amma rules them. Seriously, it’s bad. Sometimes funny, but mostly bad. They make this fat girl get them lunch every day, and before she leaves, they make her eat something without using her hands, just dig her face in there on the plate.” She scrunched up her nose but didn’t seem otherwise bothered. “Another little girl they cornered and made her lift up her shirt and show the boys. Because she was flat. They made her say dirty things while she was doing it. There’s a rumor going around that they took one of their old friends, girl named Ronna Deel they’d fallen out with, took her to a party, got her drunk and…kind of gave her as a present to some of the older boys. Stood guard outside the room till they