By Jaclyn Port

CW: reference to sex and suicide

Juliet is the best Shakespeare dead girl. Stabbing yourself to death shows commitment and initiative. And she did it out of love, which is how we swear to do it if the opportunity presents itself. Ophelia is the second best. Drowning off-stage is a bit passive and anti-climatic. But doing so while in the depths of insanity? If we can’t die for love, then we want a shroud of yellow wallpaper. 

Jessica is the third-best Shakespeare dead girl. She sat in front of us—us being Polly, Ruth, and Stephy—in English class and read the lines for Desdemona when we studied Othello. And she showed true dedication to the part by getting murdered by her stepfather and stuffed in a mattress. That would be our third choice. It nets a full-page spread in the yearbook, a tearful homeroom teacher who needs to break the news, and press coverage if you’re major and your name can be printed. Though, of us, only Stephy has a stepfather and as far as we can tell he likes her too much. 

And, besides, we want to die as minors. Because no matter how you go, if you’re young, it’s tragic. Society failed us. Who raised those girls? 

And girls will be girls. They tell us to go outside and touch grass but it’s too hot. They tell us to take our studies seriously so we do, we read every book we’re assigned. They think we can’t get up to much trouble, spending all our time in our rooms, but we don’t even need to leave the house to do things that would furrow their brows. Have you seen the internet? 

And have you seen schools these days? They send bad girls to a good school—a charter, strict, traditional— in hopes of fixing them, but that just makes it harder for us to be better. You see, our school dress code is don’t be a slut and boys can’t be sluts. We tried to complain that their hairy calves distract us but we are just told to kneel, to see if our skirts touched the ground. But if you were to spend all day on your hands and knees, begging for forgiveness, would you want your hem to get dirty?

And how good could we be in a school where we still have to sit hunched under desks, looking up at the gum our knees bump against during lessons, waiting for the all-clear announcement? Listening to the grey air filter box humming in the corner, passing around a battered copy of Macbeth, whispering she dies in this one too. We were told where to find our idols and we did. 

And we’re told that girls these days are boy crazy and we are. A boy leans over Stephy at her locker, and we go oooooooh, so he takes her by the elbow away from us and we follow as if we’re led by a leash. Because if you date one of us, then you date all of us looking out for each other. Looking for how we’ll die. You have to promise to break our hearts. If you’re good, you can lead us anywhere. If you promise not to call us back, we’ll let you take us to that park. But are you really up to the task? Do you understand the methodology of madness? Have you ranked your top three deaths? If you shave with a safety razor, are you really the best a man can be?

We won’t amount to anything. We’re only good at retelling stories. Hamlet drowned too. Mary left Joseph because how did she get pregnant? Jessica is alive and at a school for teen mothers, because why should she get to escape before us?

Parents have kids just so they can retell the story of their lives back to themselves, but better. This is why they watched us so carefully as we wobbled down the street on a bicycle for the first time. They wanted to make sure we fell and scraped our knees because they had done the same. This is why they yell at us when we decide we prefer the blood of a good fight. They’ll show us an ass whooping. There’s no harm in tough love. They got it growing up and they turned out just fine. 

We stay up all night on the internet because we want to retell our stories back to ourselves. We change our names and change our hair because we thought we would try different ways of being alive first. We study the assigned texts so we can find the best way to die. 

Polly prefers to bruise her knees on the church floor, behind the fourth pew, or the fifth if she is too drunk to count. She never puts down the kneeler, says she feels God better with the grit embedded in her skin, likes the scandalous marks it leaves and how it makes the good girls sneer. But she is honest to god praying, asking for an aneurysm because suicide is a sin and she wants to make sure she dies pretty. What do you think good girls do? 

Ruth is named from the Bible because her parents want her to know how to serve. To know loyalty. Though they don’t want to teach her that themselves. She lives with her grandparents. She waits tables at her aunt’s restaurant and shares her tips with the kitchen. To make it fair, she shares the kitchen with us, letting us in at 2am. We disable the smoke detector and burn things on the stove. Not ourselves, that’s an ugly way to go, though we did discuss letting the whole place fill with gas and lighting one last cigarette. At 2am, do you know where your daughter is?

Stephy’s stepfather wanted to be a preacher, but it’s like being a pilot without 20/20 vision, he just couldn’t do it, you know? He plays old albums for us, says “I can’t believe you’ve never listened to R. Kelly,” and we say we’ve heard lots of things about him, but we guess that’s not the same because he makes us sit and listen anyways as he folds Stephy’s laundry. Later he sits on the couch next to her and he puts his hand on her knee and we all go oooooh and he takes it off. Is it really those girls who are the first to die? 

We think God speaks through us. We think this is harder than we thought it was going to be. We don’t think we’re all going to make it.

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Jaclyn Port is a Canadian writer currently living and teaching in China. She has work previously published in Downtime Review, Flash Fiction Magazine and Corvid Queen. You can find more of her writing at https://jaclynportwrites.carrd.co/