Chapter Text
It is all a belonging of the macabre and unexplainable justification of the grief that comes with growing up as a girl. it’s pink bows, summer dresses, dolls and an inability to cope with the insanity. You see every woman in history standing behind you fucking screaming and every time their voices pick up you know - this isn’t going to be good.
It’s collecting bones and sharp things from the ground below. Looking at blood and knowing this is all you are. Picking and pulling off skin and hair, coating your body with makeup, foundation and eyeshadow and everything you can use to come off as something other than you really are.
Girlhood is a mask that no one can see through and is impossible to break. It is of porcelain and you have to paint it carefully every morning for the rest of girlhood.
Genevieve is seething as she hurries down a hall, her notebook tucked into her chest, book bag across her shoulder, shoes digging into her heels, bra strap into her shoulder. She’s been dress coded twice today, though her skirt is below her knees and her button up is buttoned all the way to her neck. She’s supposed to meet Mikey and get the hell out of this place, but Mikey’s class is on the fifth floor and her locker is on the sixth, so Genevieve’s younger sister will have to walk up the stairs, grab her things and get back down all the way before Genevieve officially loses it.
She stands outside the school and pulls a cigarette from her school bag, she puts it in her mouth before she can realize she doesn’t have a lighter. It was all out yesterday and she didn’t have the time to buy a new one yesterday.
She stands there in silence with the outer wall of the school digging into her shoulder blades. The cigarette gets soggy in her mouth but she doesn’t care, she stares emptily out into the concrete.
Eventually she gets home and crashes into bed, tearing her bra off. The darkness of her room is beyond comforting. Her eyes can finally relax after being under beaming, artificial lights all day.
It’s dark out when she leaves the house again, she trecks the same road she usually does. First she walks by an old hand-me-down store and buys four VHS tapes, then she passes 7-eleven where she buys a Diet Coke and a bag of gummy worms, then she stops by the cemetery.
She sits by a grave for hours, talking, crying and screaming. When Elena first passed, her parents didn’t mind how often she visited the grave. When they found her sleeping next to the rock they told her that she was only allowed to go once a week - but it didn’t help what rules Genevieves parents decided on, Genevieve was back to the grave and made it an almost nightly venture. She didn’t do it to piss off her parents, she did it because some loud damn part inside of her refused to let go of the one person that understood her.
When she gets home her throat stings, her gummy worms are all out and her parents are asleep. With a long black t-shirt with a band logo so faded it isn’t readable she watches the VHS horror movies she bought, and then leaves them outside of Mikeys room for her sister to watch.
She sits in her bed, unmoving, for hours after the movies are silent. She knows, this is all the begging for the macabre solution to girlhood.