Mama's Boy

PRELUDE: Fate of a Daddy's Girl.

O. Fate of a Daddy's Girl.

Sierra Greene is turning into the man her mother hates.

And at seventeen, she still thought you could escape your father. You can never escape a father that's not there, only lingering. She wasn't listening to his voice invading her mouth, his words, his vomit, his pills. She didn't see how her gestures already mirrored his; she didn't see him in the way she held her body, in the way she signed her name. She didn't hear his whisper in her blood.

  Her father is dead.

She notices it most during the things that don't happen anymore, or the things that haven't happened yet.

When daughters push away mothers, daughters grow up to be phantoms. Tossing away the body Mother gave her to adopt the wavering shadowy form of Daddy.

Father and Daughter used to exchange smirks over Mother's shoulder, hissing in tongues they believe foreign to her; as though she never had a father of her own. But Aimee Greene is different than Sierra Greene. So smart, yet not smart enough. Each night, Father told Mother all the ways Daughter is disappointing, a junkie (just like her daddy?), while counting on fingers of lingering smoke. And Mother sees this, she sees a snake wrapping around her daughter's throat—whispering smoky sweetness into her ear while contracting his grip. Mother says nothing. Sister says nothing, Sister follows their dirty prints in the ground.

Daughter will not notice the bite until long after the snake is gone and the venom has replaced Mother's warm blood in her veins, until she is like Father; coldhearted specter, being of mist, being of nothing.

Sierra Greene buries her father's things next to the tree where the cat died, a dozen years ago. She is going to wait for the needles and the rifle to sprout from the ground like a fungal birth. She hasn't called in a while because there aren't any telephones in hell. She sits alone in the dark, watching the ceiling, but she isn't really, not really watching the ceiling, because she took too much.

And now she's nineteen, and a boy raised by dogs is in love with her. He drinks beer and smells like nutmeg and cries when she ditches him at parties and raids his medicine cabinet and tells him he's nothing, nothing at all except for a needy mama's boy. And then she realizes she needs him, because when it gets bad and everything is bloody and when she throws up, who else will love her? Daddy is gone, Mother is fading, standing behind a wall, crumbling, watching. Her friends will tell her to stop, and when she tells them no, they call her a narcissistic hedonist and leave her in Montana Nuevo's bloody-disgusting bathroom.

  And she needs Steve Harrington because everybody else is gone. She's bleeding. Her mouth feels like fire. She'll sleep in his bedroom—sweaty and sticky—and he'll watch, cry, say nothing. Because Steve Harrington was raised by dogs. Steve Harrington traces Sierra Greene's freckles, lets his tears fall onto her cheeks, because she won't feel it, she can't feel anything. Because Steve Harrington was raised by dogs, he knows that when your mother hits you, you don't strike back. You do not turn red. Maybe you wait at the door, because the only thing you can think about is her—whether said her is Sierra Greene or your mother.

Sierra Greene needs Steve because everybody has left. She's drunk, she whispers through tears, "I'm so bad, I know it. Stevie, I know it, I'm terrible, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm awful, I love you. I love you." She winces as she says the last three words. The tears dripping down are not out of love, nor remorse. Maybe... desperation. And it works, Steve will whisper back, stars in his eyes, because this is something he's wanted his entire life, and why does he still feel so sad? Because the next day, Sierra Greene will ride her bicycle to Montana Nuevo's house and she will rot, she will stink of burning baby dolls and rusting necklaces. Steve might call Montana's house phone, she probably won't answer, because they're staring at each other, watching each other's faces morph into different colors, different shapes. Sierra Greene will pass out in Montana Nuevo's bathroom, and her head is bleeding because Montana is foaming at the mouth in the next room and Sierra was standing over the tile floor when she fell. She can't remember it, nothing forward, nothing backward.

Death is nothing at all. Nothing that counts. She has only slipped away into the next room, the same room her mother has shattered in all these years, the pieces of her falling every time Sierra breathes. There will be no more of that.

Gracie Greene has taken Sierra Greene's soul.

Sierra Greene is just like her daddy, Gracie Greene is just like her big sister. Gracie Greene's lips go from a soft pink to freezing blue when she's angry. On days like these, Father's rage spills off of her tongue and Mother won't look her in the eye without seeing the man she thought she had escaped.

In eighth grade, Darling Hunter broke up with her shitty boyfriend, but she still wears his cologne every time she hurts herself. Sierra would say something mean when she smells it on her, but she doesn't do it anymore after Darling brought up what Sierra did in her car last summer, the reason her sister is dead.

When Gracie Greene was in fifth grade, she had a math teacher who said she was his favorite. The next semester, a prettier girl joined the class and he tossed Gracie aside like a rotten apple, invaded by fruit flies and worms. These days, Gracie screams at her mother when she tells her it's time to go out, but Gracie hasn't done her hair or makeup yet. Or when Mother refused to get her a new lipstick she needed. She started skipping meals, and then she stole her big sister's soul. Now, when Gracie does her makeup, the room fills with this gut-wrenching smell of dead, ripe fruits and she can't breathe until she's painted herself enough to not recognize this face anymore.

When I say we are all the men we hate, what I mean is every day a sister (Gracie or Sierra?) looks in the mirror and her body begs for something soft. Sometimes she even reaches out to hold her but lately her hands have been looking like her father's teeth. It's tearing her apart but she's never learned how to stop.

That's what happens to a Daddy's Girl.