Here’s a secret from a girl who’s seen it all: if you stay up late enough, sometimes you can catch a glimpse of heat lightning on the bus ride home. When the air conditions are just right and the weather is on the fairer side of rain, and when time warped in the club so now you’re on the 205 home at four in the morning, and when the front seat on the top level of the bus is vacant so you can look out at the whole skyline during the ride – that’s the magic recipe. You have to be alone, too, or else you’ll get stuck in a conversation and forget to look up. Not that conversations on the 205 are uninteresting, or anything. Some of your best chats have occurred on the back row. The dark does something strange to the human psyche; loosens the tongue and addles the brain to such a degree that sometimes you step off and realize that you’ve spilled all your most important secrets over the span of a twenty-minute ride.
But real girls know that magic, true magic, only happens to you when there’s no one else around to see it. Magic doesn’t like witnesses. If a tree falls in a forest with no girl around to hear it, does it still make a sound?
Heat lightning doesn’t. Make a sound, that is. It’s quiet as the grave; final like it, too. Back home, people substitute the word heat for silent or summer. Back home, people love things that end. During the very last weeks of the season, the southern humidity knits itself into clouds-upon-clouds in the night sky, gray cotton balls on black construction paper, and heat lightning races across the heavens every evening as a last hurrah. So now you’re twenty years old on the 205, yeah, but you’re also drunk, so simultaneously you’re eight, sitting on the front porch with your grandmother. Together, you’re waiting for what will probably be the last summer storm of the year, as the weather works itself into a complicated dither on the horizon. The wind smells like pine needles. The rocking chair creaks beneath your weight, like an old tree in the breeze, or your grandmother’s bones when she bends down to kiss your cheek. Speaking of bones, you’re soaked to your own from jumping in the pond earlier. Actually, jump is a strong word. Your cousins had urged you in, so propel might work better. Perhaps even push. It doesn’t matter, though. You would’ve gone in anyway. You’ve never been afraid of the snapping turtles.
When you hit the surface of the water, it had bubbled beneath your weight for a split second, like it was figuring out if it wanted to let you in. You wobbled, waited, worried it wouldn’t accept you. The only thing worse than falling in would be not falling in. Then the tension finally broke and you sank into the pond with a tremendous splash, flailing limbs attempting to find purchase, but water is slippery and your hands are very small, real girl. A gulp of pond went right down your throat. You choked on it, but valiantly, you stayed beneath the water to swallow it, refusing to give them the satisfaction of coughing. Belly full of pond water, you broke the surface again, victorious this time. Grinning, even. You were the first one in. They were just cowards. Just boys. Maybe the pond wouldn’t even have let them in. In your rocking chair, you smile to yourself, and think about how brave you had been.
You’re still on the bus, real girl. Don’t forget that. But while you wait for the show, you can keep thinking about the porch.
In the dark, Grandmother passes you a glass of iced tea. She asks, “Are you cold, baby?”
She can’t see you, but she knows you’re shivering. No one else in the world would’ve picked up on that, except her. But you know real girls, magic girls, don’t get cold from insignificant things like involuntary pond plunges, so dutifully you say no, you aren’t cold. It’s been hours, but your hair’s still kind of wet, and it’s freezing you through. You run your hands over your biceps in an attempt to warm them. The goosebumps on your skinny, scraped-up arms: another secret you are allowed to keep. Sometimes you wonder if your grandmother kept secrets as a girl. You wonder if she had ever even been a girl, or if she sprung from the womb fully formed, a rolling pin in one wizened, liver-spotted hand and a plate of cookies in the other.
You dismiss the idea. She wouldn’t have known you were cold if she hadn’t done the same thing when she was a real girl – she must’ve been pushed into the pond too, and dried out in the dark, shivering just like you in the cool breeze. Maybe, just like you, she was the only girl in a family of rough and tumble boys. Maybe she also had to prove herself everywhere she went. In the sandbox, at the pond, in the bed of the truck as it flies forty miles an hour down the highway. In the woods at sunset, when all the boys abandon you so you have to find your way back home in the dark by yourself. At dinner, when they’re all piled on the couch to watch the game while you’re in the kitchen, helping out with the cooking. When you’re setting the table, glaring daggers into the living room as you fling forks around.
At night, time shrinks and stretches and thins in the middle, a worn-out slab of dough that demands reworking. You, eight-year-old-you, is speaking to Grandmother, while twenty-year-old-you is listening; Grandmother, sixty-three-year-old-Grandmother, is asking questions, and ten-year-old-Grandmother is replying. You have her eyes. Everyone says it.
Experimentally, you tell her, “I jumped in the pond today.”
She says, “I know, sweetheart. Was it fun?”
She doesn’t say: Were you careful? Did you hit your head on the bottom?
This confirms Grandmother’s former real-girl status. She knows the pond is far too deep to hit one’s head, and she also knows that careful is not in a real girl’s vocabulary. You nod, satisfied, and tell her yes, it was fun.
Grandmother grew up on this farm, too. You forget that sometimes. Back when people were born in homes instead of hospitals, she was born in the back bedroom where you now sleep every summer night. But you weren’t born anywhere near here – most of the year, you live three hours away, in a neat, tidy suburb that had been planned from the get-go, and your first screams were heard by hospital walls. You’ve got the whole farm fooled, though, real girl. By the end of every summer, you could pass for a pasture native, running wild on your calloused feet, the skin hardened and battle-worn from going barefoot for weeks in the fields. Every year, when you have to strap back into sneakers for the first day of school, you close your eyes tight to hold back the tears, because the insole feels nothing like soft grass and the leather pinches your toes. You wish it wasn’t so dark out right now, so you could sneak a peek at Grandmother’s soles, to see if she has callouses too. She probably does. On your first day back on the farm, you’d accidentally stepped in a sticker bush, and screamed when the little barbs lodged themselves in your skin. Rookie mistake. Grandmother hadn’t batted an eye, just cleaned you up and told you to watch out for mysterious electric green patches next time. That’s always where the danger lies, she said. Bright colors in nature are a warning: stay away from me, or else!
The 205 stops. You jolt forward in your seat. The movement is good for your split mind; you’d gotten too settled in your rocking chair on the porch, but now you’re definitely on the bus. Outside, mist accumulates in fine lines on the glass windows. In your thick-soled boots, your feet are soft again, unbattered. You mourn the loss, but recognize the beauty of the trade: hard heels given up for thicker skin everywhere else. You need it, in this frigid city. The porch suddenly feels a thousand miles away. Indulgently, you allow yourself to look up the exact difference. Four thousand, five hundred, and seventy-one miles, says the Internet. But your family’s farm is on the outskirts of town, so it’s probably more than that, somehow. What number is bigger than four thousand, five hundred, and seventy-one? In your inebriated state, you can’t think of a single answer.
On the bus, someone brushes past you in their search for a seat, and you pull your knees in, tuck them beneath your body to take up less space. That wasn’t very real girl of you, but you feel heavier than usual tonight. This bus seat is gobbling you up. There’s a rip in your tights, on the side of your thigh, and you push a fingertip into it, wondering where it came from. Maybe you snagged it on a wayward nail at the club or something. Under your ministrations, the little tear grows into a finger-shaped mass, bright and pale where your skin peeks out from behind dark fabric. You knew exactly what would happen when you poked at it, but you frown at the result anyway. It seems like the right thing to do. When you catch sight of your reflection in the mirror, you wonder: What would Grandmother think if she saw you like this? Eyeliner sweat-smudged down your cheeks, a crazed look in your eyes, holes in your tights. The hem of your skirt skims high on the fat of your thighs, even though you used to kick and scream every time someone tried to force you into a dress. Instead, you went everywhere in threadbare Levis, hand-me-downs from your cousins. Where did the little barefoot princess from the porch go? She had something to prove. Do you?
The heat lightning hasn’t come yet. There are only a few stops left for the magic to happen. Maybe you stayed out too late this time, real girl. The hole in your tights is bigger now, and as you widen it with another finger, you feel a sinking kind of disappointment. After all this time, you should know this: every girl can only be real for so long before she starts to disintegrate. Before the holes grow. Three A.M. would’ve been fine. Four is pushing it, so be more careful next time. You don’t want to miss the magic.
On the bus, you interlace your fingers in your lap and hope. Pray. Whatever. Same thing.
Finally, finally, a tiny heartbeat of lightning streaks across the sky. You smile, and thank the powers that be. The wish-fulfillment center of the galaxy seems to be hard at work tonight – but it also helps that real girls have a direct line to God. We pay for the calls with bruised knees and elbows instead of quarters.
The lightning turns the world gold and silver, and time twitches. When everything goes point-blank white, you’re on the porch, watching the universe with Grandmother’s hand in yours, and then when it settles into a lesser kind of light, you’re back on the 205. From the top deck, the city’s rain and grime look holy. In Grandmother’s grip, the pastures are green and never-ending. Every part of this night is old, just in divergent ways. Real girls aren’t technically old, you know that, but they are immortal, which is the same thing in a different shape.
When the lightning strikes again, you’re definitely on the bus, and you’re thinking that maybe you should make a wish on the next bolt. It seems like the thing to do. Eyelashes, dandelions, ladybugs, shooting stars… logically, the next item in that magical little list could be heat lightning. But you can’t seem to get the timing right, because the schedule of the strikes is so willy-nilly. When you were on the porch, you had a whole list of wish ideas. You wanted a house in the country, a big black horse with a white star on his forehead, and an endless supply of the buttered noodles Grandmother made you for lunch every day. You had so many wishes that you couldn’t decide which one to ask the universe for. But now you can’t think of a single one. And the girl on the porch, holding on tight to her wishes, suddenly isn’t you anymore. She’s far away, drinking her iced tea. And you’re on the bus. And no one in this city takes their tea cold.
These are all good things, probably, you decide. It’s great that you have no more wants. That little hayseed princess, sitting on the porch and wishing on lightning for her life to begin, would lose her mind if she could see you now. Your world has gotten so big that you don’t have to wear your cousins’ old jeans anymore. You buy skirts, pretty ones, and you take the bus through the city by yourself, like a real girl. You haven’t ridden a horse in years. You drink Cosmopolitans with your beautiful friends in beautiful, overpriced places, and together, you dance the whole night away. They all love you, and you love them, and when you speak to them, you always make sure to pronounce the -g sound on the ends of gerunds. Your family makes those parts round, but you know that’s not how people here talk. In this city, they take all the softness out of their speech, make it hard and clipped. So now you do, too.
Once, you were on the phone with Grandmother, and one of your beautiful friends walked into your room. You finished the call, hung up, and then asked the beautiful friend what they needed. And they’d tilted their head, like a curious cat, and smiled at you.
“You sound so different when you speak to your family,” the beautiful friend said. “Your accent comes out. Did you know?”
The friend was not a real girl. You laughed in a way that you hoped conveyed oh that’s so funny! and not oh god I can’t believe you noticed that. You said, “Really?” Then you said, “I’ve never realized.”
In this moment, not that one, the 205 rolls up to your stop. On the horizon: one last flash of heat lightning. You close your eyes and wish, irrationally, for a pony – any size, any color, dealer’s choice – and then you stumble down the stairs to get off the bus. Elsewhere, else-time, a small girl with small hands gets up from her rocking chair on the porch, says good night to Grandmother, and goes inside to wash her empty glass in the sink.
So she’s gone now, safe and snug back in the house. You don’t harbor any hard feelings; it was her bedtime. She needed to go. But that means that it’s just you here, real girl, standing by yourself at the bus stop in the rain. In the dark. You’re lucky that it’s a quick trek home, because you’re all alone and this city is a little scary at four in the morning. But you’ve learned how to do it. You’ve stopped smiling everywhere you walk, because that got you weird looks. Not that it matters right now. You don’t see a single person out on the streets. The bus has pulled away and it’s just you and the rain.
You turn onto your street. Wind rips through the hole in your tights and you shiver, pull your coat a little tighter around your body, walk a little faster. Belatedly wish you hadn’t made the hole bigger. Then your boots hit a puddle but your feet don’t get wet, and you realize that if you’d been barefoot, that water in that puddle would’ve frozen you all the way through, from your pinkie toes up to the crown of your head. The boots, the ones that cramp your toes, have kept you dry and warm. Do real girls wear boots, you wonder? You don’t know, but you hope we do.
Your building creeps into your sightline. At night, it looks like a massive, rotting tooth, bone-white and pocked with windows. You’ve never been able to find roof access, even though you know it’s possible. Sometimes, on warmer evenings than this, you see people up there smoking. Once, one of them flicked a butt down onto the pavement, and it had fallen five floors just to land a foot away from you. Part of you, a strange part you’d never met before, had wanted to pick it up and smoke the remaining tobacco until it was well and truly dead. The wanting of it hit you so hard that you’d rocked back on your heels, and your traitorous fingers twitched to grab it. But you’ve never had a cigarette before in your life, and lung cancer sounds like an awful way to go, so you left it there, wasted, half-smoked on the ground. Maybe someone else picked it up, someone that appreciated it more than you.
You’re full of memories tonight, huh, real girl? Wonder why. Maybe all the Cosmos are to blame. Maybe it’s just that time of year. Just like nighttime, winter does weird things to people’s minds. The cold creeps in and all you can think about is how you used to be warm, back when you were fourteen and still slept in a twin-sized bed with all the windows cracked, to let the summer breeze in. None of the windows in this building even open. Safety hazard, apparently. They don’t know that real girls need to feel the wind when they fall asleep. But you’re making do.
On the ride up to your dorm on the fourth floor, you stare into the mirrors that line three of the four walls, and wonder who decided mirrors were a good idea to put in an elevator. From the middle of the glass box, you can view the hole in your tights from so many angles. One of the mirrors must be warped, you decide, because the hole looks cartoonishly large and not even round at all, but ovular. It grows and shrinks and grows again, right in front of your eyes. But in the other two mirrors, it’s normal-shaped, and still.
When the elevator opens, you swipe your fingers under your eyes in an attempt to corral the smudged eyeliner, and step into the hallway, then up to your door. The keys, the lock, you struggle with. For a while. Your hands have always been shaky – you can’t even blame the Cosmos for that, even though you wish you could. Finally, you get the door open, and collapse into your room.
Decisively, you throw the tights in the trash. If you don’t do it right now, they’ll sit in a drawer forever. Grandmother could probably sew the hole for you, fix them up good as new, but she isn’t here. You should probably start going out in pants, anyway; the temperatures are getting lower every day, and you don’t have to pretend to be warm anymore. When you’re shivering, you go inside, or put on a jacket. You don’t wait in the rocking chair on the porch for someone to notice your goosebumps and hand you a blanket.
It’s an algorithm, a quick, practiced one. Your boots, you line up by the wall. The skirt goes on a hanger in the closet. Your top goes in your laundry basket, and you go in your bed, covers pulled up to your chin.
The windows aren’t open, and you can’t hear the cows lowing, or the breeze humming through the trees. The bed doesn’t smell like pine needles, or Grandmother’s detergent. But you aren’t soaked with pond water, and you wished on heat lightning for a pony, and tomorrow, you’ll meet one of your beautiful friends for coffee.
You feel her again, distantly. She’s still on the farm, tucked into twenty-year-old sheets patterned with tractors. She’d fallen asleep the second her head hit the pillow, and she’s probably already dreaming of horses and green pastures. If she can do it, so can you.
You close your eyes. Even real girls need sleep sometimes.