A Teenage Girl's Guide to Being Consumed

It all started when I called a dead boy’s phone, the other end picked up, and I assumed the line went to heaven, so I told God what I did.

I wake in the Ad-mini-stra-tive Seg-re-gat-ion Un-it, which was how the officer put it to my seventeen-year-old self, who they (and I) thought was dumb as a showgirl and couldn’t believe what she was being put in for. I had been perched on a cold chair in a white interrogation cell, and I had looked past the officer’s armored shoulder at the other guard, who thought I might be innocent, so I cracked my elbow across his face and watched his expression turn.

I liked watching his face. It was creased and ugly when he saw the Rockefeller Women’s Correctional Facility. It should have been his dream—there were women everywhere, and every one of them had a problem for him to let fester, then fix. I asked the other officer his name, and he said Nick, so I tooled it around in my mouth.

“Nick, your wife could be here someday. Two hundred girls arrive here every month, that’s what they told me. There couldn’t be nothin’ much keepin’ her away—around you all the time.” I grinned so he knew I was joking, even though I wasn’t really.

He stared at me blankly, like he hadn’t heard, but I could see the fine muscles of his face working. His mouth twitched faintly into a snarl. I didn’t think, and for some reason I fluttered my eyes. I watched him lean back. I hoped he might see me the way he treated me, like his wife, soft-cheeked, teeth straight as a ruler, handcuffed in the back of a police van, my forehead pressed to whitening against the metal mesh separating me from him.

I’m up and already strolling to the door when the prison guard says, “Hey Samantha, you ready?” I back up to the door and place my hands in the slot, where she slides the familiar cold kiss of a pair of cuffs around my bony wrists. They make me feel like I could devour someone whole, these handcuffs. All that danger in me.

The meal hall is almost empty but for me, a few other girls, and the sound of the guard’s radio, its sharp voice murmuring across channels and the linoleum tile under my feet. No one is inside this morning because the sky is a clear and syrupy blue—the same blue that stretches over wealthy suburbs and old eighties malls—drowning the facility’s concrete acres in steady, white light. I can see a line of girls now, about fifty of them, trekking across the Indiana-wheat grounds for their hour of leisure. Identical little orange silhouettes, tall and short, old, young, thin and heavy. Beautiful, violent, dangerous women.

Betsy sits at my usual table because she can’t exercise—she’s too old and fat around the knees. She still acts as high as the day she was arrested in 2001, but she is soft and kind, and I have been friends with her for seven years now. Breakfast is gravy-something, and I can smell it, oily and thick, drowning the air. All the food here is like that, Betsy says, slow and stupid, that it’s meant to sedate us girls, and to make us ugly. And then she takes another bite.

She squints at me with her blurry, gray eyes, gray as old drain water, and says, “Queenie is outside.”

Queenie is another girl, pretty and quiet and better than any of us. If the weather had been gray and viscous, not a flattering gold, and if she hadn’t lived in Springfield, she wouldn’t have been seen by the thirty-year-old man behind the school, she wouldn’t have had to sell for him, to be kissed by him. If she hadn’t worn her favorite olive green coat, she liked to tell us, she wouldn’t have caught his eye. She wouldn’t have made all those decisions that got her locked up here.

“She better get out soon,” I say, pushing sloppy gravy around on my plate. “Better get out and make the right choices this time.”

We baby Queenie; we want to put a little meat on her brain—a little knowledge—so she’ll never come back here. Betsy smiles her crooked smile, each of her teeth as variable in height as the distant pale silos, the only deviation in the endless Indiana countryside.

An alarm rings and we head back to the bunks for count time, which happens five times a day, and lasts thirty minutes each time, every day. They count and count until the numbers reach the high heavens and if one number is off, they start again. I stand across from a girl who is so small none of us expected her to be in here for shooting a man, but here she is. I like her only because she’s a good kisser. A lot of us don’t come here gay, but the loneliness of a life sentence will do that to a girl. Of all seven hundred and forty girls here, I bet only forty aren’t gay. It’s the gayest place on earth. My boyfriend would hate me now.

The days pass the same. Sometimes Queenie joins us. We say grace over weak potatoes, cheap white bread, and instant coffee. Speaking to God is a funny thing for rotten girls to do. We sew shoddy sleeping bags for the military, and the stitches could run to infinity, tacking down each of my fingers on the way, and I wouldn’t notice. Instead I think about how I got here.

I met my boyfriend under the slotted light filtering through the bleachers at a football game. His name was a beautiful, antique thing, something I wanted to dust off with a tiny porcelain brush and hold in the palm of my hand: Milton Smith. He was slender and had long golden eyelashes, like tiny strokes from a fine French paintbrush, and had this bronze, all-American war hero look to him. His features were so perfect he was almost pretty.

That night he said, “Hey,” and I looked at him, half-resigned, half-disgusted, wondering when he would get to the part where he would hit me or try to kiss me. I noticed his eyelashes, all white under the big stadium lights, and wondered if he would close his eyes when he did it. They seemed too perfect for violence.

He offered me a caramel from the pocket of his letterman jacket. I was on a keto diet that week, but I took it and ate it anyway, even though it was warm from his pocket and tasted like oil. He pulled a cigarette from his jacket, lit it with an antique lighter, and clamped it between his teeth, the smoke twirling in spirals up through the bleacher benches. The sight of this golden boy smoking went through me like a knife. He didn’t seem like one of those arrogant boys, who butted heads on the football field, who fixed their hair in the shine of the lockers and took the mufflers off their cars so the roar of the machine was produced in waves behind them when they drove.

He raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow and offered the cigarette to me. I shook my head.

“My mom will kill me.”

“Come on, beautiful. It only matters what you smell like. Say what, I’ll give you my shirt.” He offered it again, his arm stretched out and the fine bones of his hand catching the light.

“What?” I said, stupidly, like people thought I was. I knew what he meant, but I wanted him to prove it. He handed me the cigarette and I took an experimental drag while he peeled his shirt off. The smoke was smooth and sour and burned the back of my throat. I took another to mask the pain.

I knew I shouldn’t have looked, because no one wants to be another screaming fangirl in the crowd of an NSYNC concert, but couldn't help it. I liked how slim he was, how I could see the nubs of his collar bones poking through the line of his shoulders.

“Come to the party Thursday?” he said innocently. He couldn't have known it, but my mother had raised me to always answer yes. She’d said only two things could happen if I said no—he’d hurt me, or he’d ask again and again until I said yes.

“Sure, baby,” I smiled, and he smiled back, his teeth fine and straight, his grin a white crescent in the shadows under the bleachers. I put his shirt on and expertly slid my smoke-scented one out from underneath. I handed it to him to wear, because I was at least his height, maybe taller, and it fit him well, though I waited for him to make some kind of horrible comment. He only flicked his hair back with one hand and said, “Cashmere.” I ignored every rule and watched him walk away like a movie star.

On Thursday night, I ended up in some ‘70s living room off Highway 26, and Milton had already kissed me twice. He kept feeding me crappy alcohol in various iterations, mostly cheap vodka mixed with Kool-Aid and pink soda that glittered hypnotizingly in the dim lights. I loved Milton already, with his black cashmere and cigarette smoke, always so elegant and so vulnerable. Hours passed in what felt like seconds and I was dipping him sloppily over my arm because we were confused and young and his eyes were like a hawk’s and I was his, and he was bronze and timeless, padded shoulders, tiny waist, smile like a 1950’s dental ad. We’d be in love forever.

We even went to church together, found out our parents knew one another, and giggled and brushed arms in the pews, and I watched sweat collect in the neck of his white polo shirt. When the pastor’s hour-long voice got particularly high, Milton leaned over. I thought he would say something about the sermon, but he whispered instead, “Hey, tiger,” his voice slow and syrupy as honey, “I like you.”

Sweat slid from my hairline. I touched his thigh and smiled like a cat.

After the sermon, he dragged me off to God knows where (she must care for me more now). I told him to let go and he cupped my jaw, his hand gentle and calloused and said, “Beg your pardon?” So I grinned and threw my skinny arms around his neck and kissed him again.

It was so easy to become his. He took me out, to the movies, up and down main street, to a gun range, and got me to shoot.

“Watch for the kickback,” he murmured as I pulled the trigger. The gun bucked on my shoulder and we both yelled as the bullet thwacked into the center of the target.

My mouth was raw from him. His lips crushed mine each time my bullets found the tiny circle at the middle of the target.

It all coalesced on the fifth Friday in June, like blood pooling at the bottom of a carcass. I rang the little bell on his door and his mom opened it, glam and brass-haired like he was. I went up to his room where he was stretched out pretending to sleep.

“Milton,” I said, and he pretended not to hear me until I stood by the bed. Then he seized me and pulled me down next to him and I screamed in protest. He started pressing his lips to my jaw, but his embrace felt odd. His full, lazy eyes were blurry, and when I pulled away from his grip for a moment, I saw a pile of pills on his desk.

“Baby, let’s get married,” he murmured, his face pressed into my skin. I wanted to slide my hand between us. His flesh was burning.

For the first time, I disobeyed my mother.

“No,” I said.

He grinned idly. “You make me crazy. Marry me here. We never have to leave.”

His words sent a bolt of panic through me, something sour and sick that left a taste in my mouth, because I could suddenly see my future. Endless Indiana nights. Kids, which I never wanted. Growing old and morbid with him. My lips splitting and turning to red petals with each of his desperate kisses.

“No,” I said again, shoving him so hard I toppled off the bed. I scrambled up and away from him, because he had propped himself up on an elbow, and his eyes were as cold and slick as obsidian.

I hit the bullseye at least seven times.

I don’t remember when they found his body, but I know it was a long time until they did. They were looking for a strong, tall man, with size twelve shoes and thick hands. I was five eleven and at the time was training to cheerlead at the next basketball game. I would lift my blonde best friend onto my shoulder, holding her so no one could look up her little sports skirt, and she would shake her hands and long, blonde ponytail for the Cougars.

The first night I laid in that bare cell, slick with one-am light, phantom police lights playing over the ceiling, I could picture my sentence stretching out in front of me, an endless thing, and my sobs could have swallowed me whole. It seemed impossible that I will die here. I was just immortal, endless, beautiful and charming and young. Now I rot, hopeless and dangerous. I am no longer a beautiful girl—I’m malevolent. A creature. All because of him.

I didn’t exactly kill him, but to them, it was easier for the police to think a woman did it, than to imagine that a man like him would act like I claimed he did. It was easier to see me holding his life, teetering, on the tip of my finger, than for all-American, Harvard-bound, million-dollar smile Milton to be the one tearing into me, smelling like rose shampoo, grinning into my neck when he bit me, my eyes bulging out of my skull, lacerating me. I was half cannibalized when I pulled off the only thing I could reach—the red Steve Madden heel he gave me—and held it like an ice pick, hitting his skull over and over with dull thuds. I’d had so much practice, and oh God, oh God! I was incoherent and intoxicated by him, and I was blood, and I was beautiful.

I could show them my wounds a million times. The imprint of his slender hands in my bony shoulder blades. The teeth marks in my chest. The festering wound in my forearm where his ballpoint pen slid between my fine, intertwined bones.

I can’t forget him. I still love him now. Betsy says I’m impossible when I think about him. “Shut up, Samantha,” she’ll say, and I’ll sit down, and I’ll breathe, and Queenie will bring me cold, sour coffee. I desperately want him still. I want the coolness touching me to be his mouth, his blood, like wine, drenching his teeth. I wanted him to see how they tore into me in court. I wanted him to know how lovely I was dressed at every one of my hearings, in all those tiny skirts and tights and tank tops. I wanted him to be the one that answered the phone when I confessed to his mother what I had done. I wanted his smooth, radio voice to purr out of the receiver. I watched Queenie leave at last and her back was his tailored shoulders. She never returned, just like he didn’t.

I’m a maneater. That’s all I am now. I was other things once, but now that’s what I am.

“Come on, Beautiful. It only matters what you smell like,” I remember him saying, now with the knowledge all I smelled like was blood.