Free Girl Unwrapped by Gabriella Goliger

because as soon as he does, he will drop like a stone.
    “Now is the time for a clean sweep,” her mother says, handing Toni a large paper bag. “Throw broken toys or the ones you don’t want in here.”
    Though the remnants of Golly and Teddy have gathered dust in a corner of the closet for ages, Toni hates to toss them out. Even the mutilated tribe of dolls tugs at her heart. She wants to keep everything, the tattered board games, cracked water pistols, ripped rubber balls, even gumball-machine charms that litter the bottom of a drawer. Her mother taps her foot with impatience.
    “They’re only things. Don’t get attached to things. I left home at sixteen with hardly more than the clothes on my back. Everything comes and goes.”
    One day, Toni finds the cuckoo clock in a box of odds and ends relegated to the garbage. It gives her a strange feeling to see the clock, which once hung grandly on the kitchen wall, lying on its back amid stinky rags and clutter, its pendulum chains spilling out of the bottom. The clock hasn’t worked right for some time; still, the outside is the same as ever, a dark brown wooden house with a steeply sloped roof and a trap door under the eaves. Behind the door, the tiny bird that once seemed so real to her is just a flimsy bit of papier-mâché. She rips the frail body off its perch and crushes it between her fingers. Suddenly enraged, she gallops through the half-empty rooms, hitting the walls with her fists, while part of herself looks on from afar and says scornfully, “You’re really much too old for such nonsense now.”
    She’d imagined that on the day of the move all the guys of her gang would gather round on the front walk, long-faced, giving one another comradely slaps on the back to cheer themselves up. Arnold would give a captain-style speech about how the gang would always stick together no matter what, and Toni would say she’d be back to visit soon. But the first of May turns out to be a Monday, a school day. No one is around except a whimpering baby in a stroller and its bored-looking mother.
    Toni has to help carry down boxes, which they pile beside the curb until the moving van arrives. Then there’s nothing to do but stand and watch as the two brawny hired men take over, emptying the apartment with surprising speed. When her parents’ mattress appears—naked, sagging slightly in the middle, looking not entirely clean—Toni has to turn her head and is suddenly glad none of her chums are here to witness the sight. Finally, the van doors slam shut and the truck roars off carrying practically everything her family owns within a space not much bigger than their balcony. After the van leaves, Julius, Lisa, and Toni stand at the bus stop with suitcases of newspaper-wrapped fragile or precious items Lisa didn’t trust to the movers. The other passengers on the bus stare as they heave their bags inside, stumble forward, try not to bump any elbows, and wrestle the suitcases into the narrow aisles between the seats. One man smirks a little, as if he knows all about people like them and is not impressed.

chapter 6
    Overnight, Toni’s become a beanstalk, long, gangly, big-footed, everything stretched out and wrong. Clacking across the kitchen floor in high-heeled mules, Lisa turns on the light, then starts back at seeing her newly hatched giant of a daughter, an overgrown dinosaur, cracked out of its grotesquely large egg, lurking in the shadows by the fridge.
    At thirteen-and-a-half, Toni is five-foot-eight and still shooting upward, towering over her mother and approaching her father’s height, but there’s no advantage to being tall. Instead, she feels exposed, naked, every inch open to her mother’s scrutiny, to say nothing of the scrutiny of kids at school and strangers on the street. Everyone can look her up and down, there’s so much to see, and it’s hard to say which is worst, her mother’s anxious appraisal, the withering glances of classmates, or the