Hedges

Grace touches grass like it is earth’s gray matter. Wishes her own head could be like this. Wishes for flowers to sprout from her scalp. Instead, she has lice the size of white kidney beans and blonde mossy hair. She has birth marks stained across her neck that resemble low clouds. Somehow always shifting, a menagerie on the loose. She scratches them in her sleep. Talks to them too. There is never a clear day, she says, as she continues petting the ground.

Because the grass she touches is barely grass at all, her skin gets confused. Misinterprets dirt for turf. Not really dirt anyway, more like a patch of soil with some green food coloring. It’s part of a bigger system, cloth cut from the same fabric as Central Park, and she walks through it every day to get to lycée. A school for bilingual kids with myriad talents and allergens and nascent disorders.

At school, she watches boys play soccer. Hears them talk about “ripping” and “getting” and “shredding.” Some sort of plot for mass murder, she thinks.

She also thinks Crystal Palace is a real place. That’s another thing the boys like to talk about. So when Adrian—Adrian from the eighth grade—asks her to hang out, she looks at him with muted nonchalance.

“Sure. How about at Crystal Palace?”

The story spreads quick like E. coli. Makes its way through the lunch tables. Food remains uneaten. Grace remains calm. Because who cares? It’s only three days after 9/11.

Grace has a blocked sinus that day. Food still tastes okay, but her brain has to work harder—she has to rely on memory, on visuals, not her taste buds. She assumes the older girls at school must have the same issue. That’s why they never eat their food. The walls are plagued with all sorts of viruses.

When Adrian and her finally hang out, at an ice cream shop on 74th, he asks her if she has any siblings. Any older sisters, actually.

“No.”

“So you’re an only child?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

What? Grace wants to ask, but Adrian is already talking about his own brother (Philippe). Goes on to say how much he misses him now that he’s in college. How surprising it is that his parents let him go to Brown. Given, you know, they are so c-word.

“Cunts?”

“Woah Grace, no. Conservatives.”

She’s not sure why, but unconsciously she calculates the age gap between herself and Philippe. Six years is completely okay once she passes the threshold of puberty and can legally drive. Six years is probably better, because by the time she graduates college, he would have already drained out the city’s distractions and can show her the world instead. By then, Philippe would be close to thirty and ready for children. She can practically skip her twenties, a tumultuous time, her mom says, and go straight to being a mom.

Grace really wants to go to Brown. Grace is twelve.

Twelve but only-children tend to mature quicker which is probably why she feels herself already outgrowing Adrian. She stares at him licking the edge of his cone. Ew, she thinks.

Maybe she’ll feel differently once she’s thirteen. She doesn’t want to though. She wants to stay exactly her age and get away with things exactly this way. She hasn’t reached a state of proper budding (bleeding) but already misses her youth. Already knows once her angst kicks in, it will leak into depression. Depression into suicide. It’s a slippery slope, she thinks. Ew, she thinks.

If Grace was born as grass, she would never have to search for a soulmate. That’s something Luna (her nanny) says a lot. Soul mate, soul mate. Destiny and fate and cosmic alignment. Trusting the process and rearranging her aura.

“Don’t you have hobbies?” Grace asks.

“Don’t you have parents,” Luna responds.

A flora, a granite, a slab of cold marble. Anything but being human, Grace wishes.

“But you’re so pretty,” Luna tells Grace all the time. Maybe saying it enough will squeeze the truth out of itself, no longer making it fact. “Probably one of the prettiest in your grade.”

Yeah, probably. Why else would Adrian ask to hang out again? When he does, Grace declines. She would rather spend the hour after school roaming around the park. Or catching a pink dolphin in the sunset. Or counting dust bunnies in the sky. Or sleeping on an engraved bench next to the invisible mice. You must feed them like how you feed pigeons or else they’ll grow slow and warped and come out half-baked. These mice are what pigeons play with when they aren’t murdering bread. They have their own language.

Adrian’s eyes flit back and forth, attempting to see whatever Grace is seeing.

“These are our years,” she says. “Some of this will cease to exist in the surge of a season.”

“What?” Adrian asks. “What?”

Doesn’t matter. Grace has no interest holding his hand through her mind. Her mind is busy digesting—chewing down chunks of new feelings. Feelings that are weighing her lobes down, starting to cause some sagging. Bending her vision too, because where have the mice gone?

Something inside her has begun “ripping” and “getting” and “shredding.” Maybe this is what the boys meant. She’s had her suspicions ever since the grass felt harder this morning. She wants to relish these last moments.

“See you tomorrow,” she says.

“Okay, see you.”

He watches her sink into the sienna foliage and wonders if she’ll ever come back.



Isabelle Yang is a writer from California living in New York City.