"Coats"

She changes her hair color every weekend. Sometimes she has her brother drive her to the ratty drugstore on the corner, to pick up whatever color they're selling for a dollar today. Other times she mixes up whatever she's got left over and tells herself she'll like whatever happens. She hasn't failed herself yet.

"Your hair will fall out by the time you're twenty," her brother says.

"What are wigs for?" she answers, and she smiles when she says it, but her lips curl sour around her teeth and there's a sharp edge to every word.

She forgets to eat when her brother doesn't remind her. She can get so lost in something that she doesn't feel the pangs in her stomach. It should scare her, she thinks, but it doesn't. Her body is angles and points, the joints loose, like she's tied together with twine. She hasn't much skin, and what's there is pale, so the veins and bones lay visible, close to the surface.

"Not much between me and the world," she'll say, and if you ask her why she wears all those clothes, that's her reason. The real reason isn't that complicated. It's just how she likes to be.

She moves like a marionette, jerky and graceless, like she's not sure just where her body lies in space. She wears coats, long and dark, their bottoms frayed from where they coast across the pavement. "You look swallowed up in those things," her brother says, and she wonders why he worries about her.

Around other people, she talks loud, but she hardly ever laughs. She'll smile, most often at things that aren't jokes, but her laugh is something she keeps held in her chest. When she lets it escape it's a flicker of sound, sharp and bright, like lights spinning in some carnival game.

The words she says are nothing special. It's the way she says them that makes people listen. She talks like every word is a weight. She lets them each fall before the next is spoken, like rocks to the bottom of a pond. They listen when she's loud, but it's when she's hushed that they lean in, wanting to hear her secrets more than what she offers freely.

She looks like a girl with a lot of secrets. She looks, too, like a girl who carries her anger around with her, a mass hard as flint in her stomach that never dissolves. Both are true, but she likes people, which is somehow too strange for people to expect. She likes how sudden their smiles are, and how they scuff their feet on the pavement, and how they talk to new babies. But she doesn't know how to tell them any of these things, so she lets them think what they like.

She's different when she's alone. She pulls her arms in tighter to her sides, makes her steps smaller when she walks. She tries to keep her face still, but her lips press tight together and her eyes stay fixed on the ground. She knows how to be alone, but not how to be alone when other people can see you, and you haven't got any defense.

Sometimes she goes to visit a boy in the city. She rides the train out of Jersey and runs her fingers over the names that people have carved into the plastic seats. She wonders if they ever think about the places they've left their mark, if it makes them glad to know that strangers see it. She walks to his house and she isn't scared of being alone, because everyone in this city is alone behind a face that pretends it doesn't care.

She walks past a homeless girl selling costume jewelry on the sidewalk and buys a gaudy necklace. It's bright blue and hangs to her waist; she likes to feel it sway in rhythm as she walks. After a sprawl of pavement and buildings that clamor for the sky, she's at his apartment, up in the elevator with its rusty grate.

He grins at the ugly necklace when he opens the door, his hair sticking up like he's been sleeping. He grabs it and tugs her inside, and the string breaks. Beads fall to the tile, a shower of shallow clicks sounding, and they follow them to the floor. She wonders if he'd apologize if his mouth wasn't on hers already, tasting like salt. They do this every time, like they're getting it out of the way, so they can talk, like friends. His fingernails rasp against the inside of her coat as his arms circle her waist.

She wonders what it means, how safe it makes her feel- like the security a child finds in a hug. She thinks, he's worth holding onto, but she knows she won't. She'll slip out of his hands, smoke right through his fingers.

When she walks back to the train station that night, she goes down the metal stairs, stomping hard because she likes the solid sound her boots make against them. Her brother doesn't look up when she gets home, but she sees him go tense, wanting to ask where she's been.

"School tomorrow?" he asks.

"No," she answers, "it's a holiday." The lie comes easily, not that either of them believe it.

She doesn't turn on the light when she goes into her room. She lies on her bed and the instant her head hits the mattress, she realizes she forgot her coat on the train. She has others, but still she worries. What'll it do, she wonders, speeding up and down those tracks, with no way to choose who will get their hands on it first?