The California Girls, an excerpt
fiction by Lacey Jane Henson

We seal ourselves up in my sour-smelling car. Amy goes back to reading her book of mental disorders. I say “she” but it’s not exactly accurate. Amy is a hermaphrodite. I don’t know the details, but you can just tell. Her body is thick and bulky, her voice deep. She chooses the weirdest diseases and reads them aloud – a kind of game. I understand why she does this, but it’s something that goes unsaid between us, running, like a current, beneath our conversation. She turns the pages with her man hands and reads them in her man voice and feels a little bit better. I understand because I feel the same way. She’s a freak, like me.

“Here’s one,” she says. “Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.”

“You feel like . . . you’re constantly being watched?”

“Lesch-Nyhan sufferers,” she reads, “have an uncontrollable desire to engage in self-mutilation.”

“Oh,” I say. “We called them cutters.” I’m thinking of the girls in who drew knives across their upper arms. Behind the high school, on the strip of brown grass where we all smoked, they would roll up their sleeves. Flaunt their puffy, pink scars.
“That’s something else,” Amy says. Lesch-Nyhan, she explains, is way more extreme. If left unrestrained, you might lop off a finger, chew your lips down to the bone. “It’s like your body revolts too,” she says. “You start producing crystals that tear up your organs.”

I can’t imagine this. The logistics, I mean. The syndrome itself seems vaguely familiar. I have a small, insistent impulse to jump, to veer off the road. A tiny voice I hardly ever give into. The difference is that they keep giving in. They can’t help giving in. I wonder if you can see it in their faces somehow. Like maybe they look brave. Or would it be scared?
For some reason, Amy has shut the book and put her elbows on top, holding her chin.

“That’s it?” I say.

She shrugs. “I have to pee.”

“We’re almost there,” I say, even though we have close to an hour. I’ve been driving since we left Illinois, and I’m not stopping again. This whole trip, she has been nothing but demands. Her bladder and her stomach and her needs, needs, needs.

“My dad says El Paso’s the armpit of the world.”

“You’ll fit right in,” I say.

“Ha,” she says.

Amy’s father is a Vietnam vet and she grew up listening to his war stories. He told her that all the freaks lived in California, which is one reason we’re headed there. I went over to their house once for dinner and afterwards we gathered in the living room around the muted TV. Her dad sat alongside the couch in this sagging, blue recliner, drinking beer and talking about some of the places he’d been. I got the feeling it was a frequent occurrence. When Amy was a baby, her family was stationed in El Paso. She wanted to see it, I guess, to give shape, something concrete to ground all those childhood stories. It’s sort of out of the way, but she insisted. I figured we could spend the night there and catch the interstate to San Diego. We’re not exactly pressed for time.