Free Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz Page B

fast as I can.
    I leave so fast, I don’t realize I still have the naked fake Barbie until I’m in my room with the door shut behind me. And this is where I drop her. I let go like she’s about to burn me.
    *  *  *  *
    In the morning, when I wake up, I go to the bathroom and the door to Mama’s room is closed again. And I can hear her snoring, which she never used to do. I go back to my room to get dressed.
    Before I put my socks on, I inspect my feet. They’ve always been big, but they’ve grown even larger; overnight, they are absolutely gigantic.
    I pick up the naked fake Barbie and hold her so she can also see my feet.
    â€œWhat do you think?” I ask. I talk in whispers, afraid of my own voice.
    She zooms in, taking a closer look at my lotus boats. My toes are hairy and my nails are dirty and need to be trimmed. Mama is the one who cuts my nails. I pull the Barbie back really fast. She is disgusted. She stands in front of me, tilting her head to study my face. She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head.
    â€œ Something must be done,” she says, and then she blows out her breath the way I do after I’ve been holding it in and crossing my fingers to make a wish.
    *  *  *  *
    When the morning bell rings, I hide behind the shed and wait until everyone’s inside.
    And then I unzip my backpack and start pulling out the supplies—first the scissors, then the hammer. The roofing nails are still attached to one another by wire. The Ziploc baggie opened by accident inside my pack, and the little tubes of lipstick all spilled out. Gran gets these from the woman who goes door to door, from one old lady to the next, and always says, “Avon calling.” These are samples and look exactly like regular lipsticks, only smaller. Gran has hundreds, but I’ve only stolen thirteen.
    The last thing I take out is the naked fake Barbie doll.
    I wrapped her up with rubber bands so she can’t move anymore. I cut off the end of my shoelace and used it as a gag to silence her.
    I didn’t much like what she had to say.
    Despite the rubber bands, she squirms around in my fist. The little arrows Mama made don’t come off. They won’t smear even if I spit on them and try to rub them away with my thumb. I cut off her hair and I can see the hundreds of tiny holes where her hair was fed through like one of the Chia Pets I’ve seen on the television. She is crying and looking at the ground where her hair landed in plastic clumps of platinum blond.
    Next, I break off two of the roofing nails.
    I put one nail between my lips as I hammer the other through her left hand. She is screaming as I attach her to the back of the shed, where the other kids carve their initials into the wood. The gag turns her screaming into a squeaking, and she is a mouse. The second nail bends and I have to get another, but it goes right in and the naked fake Barbie sticks to the shed like the letter T , only with a head. She passes out from the pain, and her head droops like a wilted flower.
    I twist open a sample lipstick and smear it on her wrists. She opens her eyes, coming in and out of consciousness. She blinks her blue eyes as I hold her head up. I smear her eyes with lipstick, and she can’t see me anymore. Her head just rolls when I let go.
    The lipstick goes farther than I expected and I don’t need another, except this one is too orange so I use a different one. It’s bright red, and once I’m satisfied with its likeness to blood, I pack up.
    I peek around the corner of the shed and make sure no one is around. I go straight to the nurse’s office. I don’t run, but I do walk fast.
    I tell the nurse I’ve been in the bathroom with diarrhea. I act like I’m embarrassed to say that word: “diarrhea.” She touches my forehead with the back of her hand and takes my temperature. The mercury climbs up to normal, and this