Chapter 1
Farley sits with her back up against a wooden bed post. She is aware of a slight discomfort in her spine and the awkward positioning of her limbs. She thinks about how she’s somehow perched in an uncomfortable position that is all her own doing. The thought makes her uneasy, and she then gets frustrated when she can’t seem to recall the last time she’d felt wholly comfortable. She looks at her nail beds and continues to pick at the rough edges of her cuticles. She’d never really liked her hands. Her nail beds were practically miniature, but their respective digits were long and thin; she felt this particular coalescence did not make much aesthetic sense. She often felt this way about different intersections of her physical appearance. Her remarkably long and slender torso was disproportionate to the brawny appearance of her thighs; her nose was too strong for her short and rounded face; her eyes were too sharp for their soft grey-blue coloring. When no one was watching, she often spent superfluous amounts of time marveling at, obsessing over, and then berating her reflection. Sometimes hours went by and the only proof she had of her presence in their passage was a prolonged, meticulous, compulsive plucking of her dark, thick eyebrows.
Farley is in her senior year of high school. When she was a junior, she had been awfully childlike in her appearance. At seventeen, Farley paid careful attention to the formation of adults’ perception of her existence. She noticed that they would always subconsciously establish a mental synthesis of her body, stature, vocal ability, and face shape and then exclaim wow, I’d have thought you were fourteen!
Whenever Farley would express concerns about her form, her mother was steadfast in her assertion that Farley was just what they call a ‘late bloomer.’ Farley was never sure about who ‘they’ were, and so she went ahead and adopted an unwavering belief that she was never to bloom at all. This way, she could coax herself into a disillusioned peace with her fate rather than falling victim to a helpless, desperate yearning for a train that was not on its way. To her genuine surprise, about halfway through her 17th year of life, she began to develop breasts. By her lonesome, she would examine the lumps of fat beneath her pale, puffy nipples. Now that she had these breasts, she found that she was not particularly pleased with them. They never looked quite right; the left was slightly larger than the right, and now she felt her nipples looked abnormally large. Although she was truly disheartened that in the face of her bodily evolution she merely found new things to dislike about her appearance, she couldn’t be dishonest with herself. She did, however, suppose that this newfound fruitfulness of her thighs and chest made her waist look slimmer, more frail, and thus more feminine. She wasn’t sure why slim and frail autonomically translated to feminine in her mind, but she had an inkling that this neural pathway arose from watching her mother’s eating habits.
Despite her ravenous insecurity surrounding her new body, she noticed that boys were beginning to find her funnier, smarter, more enjoyable. She’d always been smart, but it wasn’t until the ‘bloom’ that boys she’d known since grade school would be immensely intent on asking her for help. She became fascinated with the notion that these boys could take pleasure in her appearance when she found its flaws abundant and intensely apparent. Farley had always been insatiably curious about the inner workings of male desires. She is very aware of their seemingly widespread desire to conquer and attain. She does not consciously realize that her insecurity made her conquerable, attainable, and therefore exponentially more desirable to some 17-year-old human boys learning how to live in carnal bodies. Or maybe it was the fact that her quiet nature gave rise to mystery, and thereby an inherently desirable quest towards figuring out to embark on.
“Farley,” Ian shouts. “Let’s go.”
Farley glances at the antiquated clock hanging on the dilapidated yellow wallpaper of her bedroom. She wishes, like she does most mornings, that it wasn’t such a pale shade of yellow.
“It’s a quarter past seven, would you calm down?” Farley snaps back.
She goes back to the besetting task of grooming her nail beds. Once her left index finger starts to bleed, she pops it in her mouth and makes her way out of her weird and uncomfortable position. She quickly finds there is no increase of solace in this new position of obsessively sorting through clothes strewn about her room in hopes of finding an outfit that will make her look less bad. She settles on an orange, sleeveless turtleneck that smooths her breasts and hits at a flattering place at her torso when paired with one of the two pairs of jean shorts she owns. They make her thighs look a little too big for her liking, but then again, her ‘liking’ is a kind of unattainable fallacy to strive for. Farley reaches for a jar of vaseline and puts some on her eyelashes. She holds them in an upward position. She pats her face with a drug store blush and dabs a half-dried-out concealer wand on a couple of red blemishes on her forehead before swiftly slinging a gray Jansport over her shoulder.
“Ian?? Are you ready?” she says.
“Uh, yeah. For like 30 minutes,” he replies.
Ian doesn’t wait for Farley to catch up with him at the kitchen before trudging through the front door of the ranch house. Ian is 18 months younger than Farley, but he’s about double her size. Farley’s always been worried about her younger brother, but the stress of his wellbeing is too big for the vessel that is a naive and anxious mind. In turn, she doesn’t ever know the right thing to say to him and habitually chooses to merely avoid the task of saying anything meaningful at all. Making that choice overwhelms her and, when it does, she gets peculiarly angry with Ian without being able to explain why. On their way towards the gate, the two find their parents sitting in their beloved plastic teal lawn chairs drinking black coffees. They seem to be talking about the cattle.
“Hey, you two rubber bands,” Pete says.
Pete, above all else, is a good guy. He’s about 55 years senior of Farley; 56 and a half of Ian. Farley is abnormally wise as a result of having an abnormally aged father, but her 17-year-old-mind is far too concerned about the shame of straying from the norm to appreciate this in any capacity. Ian, on the other hand, has never really cared too much about his father’s age. It’s funny how lots of boys can just hit some metaphysical off-button on the things that might evoke vulnerable, uncomfortable emotions. Farley had always been simultaneously jealous of and terrified by her brother’s possession of this button.
“Hi sweethearts. I hope you guys have a really good day at school, okay?” Michelle says.
“Yeah, okay, bye.” Farley remarks.
“Love you,” Ian says.
“We love you too, honey.” Michelle says.
“Oh, Farley, did you see my text?” Pete asks.
She hadn’t seen his text; she was busy fixing her cuticles.
“No, sorry I didn’t look,” Farley replies.
She starts haphazardly fishing for her phone out of her backpack.
“Oh don’t worry about it, that’s okay. I just wanted to remind you to go pick up that refund check at the office,” Pete says.
Pete was always overly concerned with inconveniencing those around him. He wanted people to like him, which irritates Farley for some reason. She wishes he would be firmer, more forceful in his desires. She thinks being told emphatically what to do from now and then would make her feel less exhausted. She doesn’t know that Pete never felt like his parents loved him very much.
“Okay. I’ll do that,” Farley says.
Farley had been inadvertently billed a late fee for a Physics textbook last spring semester. It was a twenty dollar charge mailed to her father. Most parents in Flagstaff would have just paid the fee, Farley presumed. Pete, on the other hand, asked Farley about the incident at length. The whole thing made Farley feel guilty and hapless. Other kids weren’t picking up refund checks at the office.
The two continue onwards towards the exit of the ranch. They never budget too much extra time to make the bus. Farley feels the turtle neck start sticking to her underarms. Fuck, she thinks. She’s already uncomfortable and she hasn’t even made it to the corner. That’s never a good sign. Farley thinks about Hank Greenwald, one of the boys who now finds her particularly funny and smart and enjoyable ever since ‘the bloom.’ She likes everything about him: the way he places the eraser of his pencil between his thin lips, how his dusty hair falls across his slightly blemished forehead, even the simple nature of his mind appeals to Farley for some reason she cannot articulate. She is 17 and she has a crush; her feelings for Hank are destructive and futile and have a hold on every fiber of her body; she doesn’t like to admit the power he has over her even to herself.
“Hey motherfuckers,” Benji says.
“Benjjjjiiiiiii boyyyy,” Ian replies.
Benji Hamilton is the only other kid at Flagstaff High School that lives on a ranch. He’s an only child; Farley’s always been amazed by his ability to embrace his abnormality without a sibling to share the perception with.
“What’s up Benj,” Farley says.
“Ah, you know. Nothing,” Benji replies.
Benji’s deep brown eyes linger on Farley’s fingers. She thinks that he notices the raw skin surrounding her cuticles. It makes her movements a little more uncertain; her voice slightly less sure. Her jitters worsened when she thought about the certitude that was his perception of these abnormalities.
He didn’t notice them at all.
“It’s so crazy it’s one week til summer break,” Farley throws out.
She thought it was useless thing to say and said it anyways. It was better to say something odd than to remain in the milky silence.
“Yeah, so what are we gonna get up to this summer?” Benji returned.
“The end of the river. Obviously,” Ian chimed in.
The End of the River was an elusive town myth about the area that existed at the northbound end of the Sacajawea river than ran through the woods at the back of Flagstaff. Unbeknownst to them, Benji, Ian, and Farley all actually had different ideas of what exactly existed there.
Maybe The End of the River would give Farley reason to stop picking at her cuticles, something larger to focus on, or something that would make everything make more sense. Little does Farley know, something of that power is only found within yourself. So until then, she will just keep picking at her cuticles and berating her reflection in the mirror. But regardless, her hope that that answer existed somewhere—be it mentally or physically, fictional or substantiated—kept her going.
Another day, she thought to herself. Another day.