CW: implied child abuse, body shaming and bullying, mental illness and ableism, physical disability and ableism, bodily harm.
In Sunnyhaven, we were all equally unique—and we’d been that way for years, the morning the New Girl arrived.
Now, any of us would’ve admitted it: Sunnyhaven wasn’t perfect. There were no public parks or pools, no families walking their dogs down ash-lined greenbelts. We were short on hairbrushes. Most of us went shoeless. We were down to three pink convertibles, and one of them had lost a wheel.
It was no suburban oasis, of course. It was literally a dump—our own little corner of the landfill that opened eight years back, far to the west of the city. To get there, you had to climb off the garbage truck intact, kick your way out of whatever bag or bin or box they’d stuffed you into. You had to hold yourself upright, smile, skirt the gray-faced guard hound, the growling daylight tractors, the enormous machine crushing SUVs flat as shag rugs. And then you had to find the northeast corner, three mounds to the west of the fence, where they chuck the broken refrigerators and washing machines.
But if you made it that far, then you’d arrived—in Sunnyhaven!—whatever shape you were in.
And honestly—the shapes. Lucia, for example. A true California girl: shared between five daughters, all under thirteen, all living together in a four-bedroom rented house. Eyeliner Sharpied thick and black, wide as a twelve-lane freeway. Shock of knotted hair painted black to match, with one vomit-green streak down the front. They took her to a beach, built her a castle out of soda bottles and fish-scented sand, then left her alone in the sun.
And there was Christine. A hush-hush hand-me-down from a much-beloved aunt, along with a box of old lipsticks and shadows. Flawless, cherished, as if she’d never left her box. But children aren’t skilled at secrets, and the parents found out. A toy like that isn’t for boys, they said, and out Christine went. So Christine’s vintage paisley mini-dress had a tear down the side, and her makeup had faded with sunlight and age. But her hair? Still perfect, brushed soft as cornsilk.
Or Belle, hunched in her black Whirlpool mini-fridge, not far inside the tin-can front gates of Sunnyhaven. Hair snipped clean to her scalp, nothing left but weedy clumps. Right hand melted black to the wrist. No clothes to her name, and even though we all wore the same size, she wouldn’t take anyone else’s. Wrapped herself in a Cheetos bag, sat on the edge of that fridge, and smoked tobacco plucked from cigarette butts she found in the heaps of garbage surrounding Sunnyhaven.
We told her it was bad for her. She just laughed. We’re pretty sure it was a laugh, anyway. Maybe she was choking.
Belle wouldn’t tell us where she was from.
And that was okay! Just fine, really. She was still one of us. We were all exceptional in Sunnyhaven. Differently broken, differently odd, but our differences made us all alike in the end.
And we accepted each other, whatever state we were in.
• • • •
So when the New Girl arrived, we welcomed her too.
Christine saw her first. Maybe it was New Girl’s head that caught her eye—no hair to speak of. Bald, but not like Belle. Not snipped away. More like the hair had never existed. Brown droplets flecked her scalp, but otherwise, her head was a glossy, glassy white, reflecting the morning sun like a toilet bowl.
And sweet Malibu sunlight, that head.
At least twice the size of her soft-rag body. An enormous, great-eyed globe tacked atop a muslin dress crusted blackish-brown along the back hem. A brittle monstrosity of a head, thread-fine white cracks lacing its surface, blinkless blue eyes ogling our tidy little mound of Sunnyhaven, as if it had finally found its destination.
Maybe if Christine hadn’t seen her—if Christine hadn’t let a half-shriek escape before swallowing it silent—the New Girl might have stumbled on by. She might have ended up with the discarded Christmas trees instead, or among the mold-filled Tupperware and food refuse, or even swallowed by the guard dog.
But she didn’t. She came to us.
We—almost all of us, in fact—wanted to invite her in. We really did. It’s hard to know what to say, though, to someone like that. Especially when you’re caught off-guard.
But we did invite her in. We were all different, after all. The New Girl was just . . . more different than most.
It was Belle who finally opened the gate.
• • • •
We couldn’t get a word out of her. Not at first. Nothing any of us could understand, anyway.
That made a few girls uncomfortable. We’re all sociable here—even Belle, in her own crabby way. We don’t like to keep secrets. Friends don’t keep secrets. And there was the New Girl, lips ladybug-red and just as tiny, and saying nothing at all. Not a peep.
Lucia speaks Spanish, and one of the girls suggested maybe the New Girl might need a translator, and so Lucia gave her best pageant smile and said “Oye, guapa. No te preocupes. Eres bienvenida aquí. Todo el mundo es bienvenido aquí! Pero ¿quién eres? ¿De dónde eres?”
Nothing.
“Try it again, but slower,” said Christine. “And use smaller words.”
The lips stayed closed, tighter than ever. But for the first time any of us had seen, the New Girl blinked.
We all gasped at once. Murmurs of unrestrained delight rippled through the crowd.
“She’s alive, then,” we said.
“I was worried,” we sighed.
“She’ll talk soon, I know it. She’s just shy.”
“Ask her a question—who did she belong to? Wait, no—how big was her townhouse? Was it a castle? Was it pink?”
Belle dropped the last of a hand-rolled cigarette into the muck outside the Whirlpool, kicked it, then turned her back and walked away.
• • • •
We all tried so hard not to stare. Staring is rude. We’re all different and when you stare, you make a girl feel like she stands out in the worst way possible. Like she’s an outsider. Like she doesn’t belong.
But the New Girl . . . she made it tough. That too-small ladybug-mouth, those spider-leg lashes. Like her features might creepy-crawl right off her face. We all tried, but we all looked anyway because we didn’t want to be rude and not hear her, if—when—she spoke.
The next morning, about twenty of us—not all of us here in Sunnyhaven, but most—had gathered around Belle’s Whirlpool, where the new girl slouched in a pool of rainwater in the corner of the bottom shelf. We gawked, caught ourselves, blushed, turned away, struggled for glimpses from the corners of our eyes.
Belle sat cross-legged at the Whirlpool’s edge and stared straight into the New Girl’s face.
We were all a little embarrassed for Belle. We understood her, of course. But still.
“Well,” Belle said at last, “welcome to Sunnyhaven, I guess.” Belle’s voice was raw, like a dog had chewed her throat. And who knows—maybe it had. She swept her left arm out with a manic grin. “We’ve probably got a shoebox you can sleep in, or—”
“There’s a steel trash bin, with a lid,” said Christine. Jaws dropped; a few of us stared. Christine flushed. “For sleeping, I mean. Obviously.”
“Right,” Belle continued, “a bin. Or a coffeepot. Someplace you can make your own. And we’ve got a couple cars, a playhouse—”
“Will she even fit in the playhouse?” Christine asked. “Because her—her you know what, it’s so—”
“—and loads of shoes,” Belle continued, “but good luck finding a matching pair.” She tilted her head. Her eyes skimmed the New Girl’s dress. It was a shade that aspired to white, once upon a time, but had settled instead for beige, stumbled through a patch of gruesome yellow flowers, and ultimately collapsed into filth. The New Girl’s hands were rounded mitts, fingers defined only by a row of stitches, jutting out of her dress from elastic-bound wrists. “We’ll get you some fresh clothes, too.”
“I really don’t think she’ll fit into—”
Belle turned and glared Christine down. What was left of Belle’s hair is gold as anyone’s, but it stood up in spikes and when she scowled like that, it was easy to feel like she wasn’t one of us at all. Like she was shaped from something darker.
Christine faded backward, into the crowd.
“We’ll get you a new dress, okay? We’ll patch something together.”
The ladybug lips parted, and out came a whistle, the tiniest possible gasp.
All of us inhaled at once. Even Belle.
“It’s sewn in place,” said the New Girl. Her voice was high—not higher than ours, at least—but brittle, like wind seeping through a cracked window at night. “I can’t take it off.”
Belle scooted across the Whirlpool’s bottom shelf until she sat, still cross-legged, facing the New Girl directly. She took the New Girl’s hand. It was unwieldy, coarse, and at least four times the size of Belle’s. But Belle tugged at the dress’s ruffled cuff, felt her way to the pleated wrist, and folded it back.
What looked from the outside like elastic was, in fact, a roughshod row of stitches securing the dress to the New Girl’s wrist.
Christine squealed and put her hand to her face, her eyes wide. Lucia folded one arm across her chest, clutching her heart, a look of deep sympathy in her eyes.
And Belle said, “Well, shit.” She turned the hand over, examining the stitching. “We’ll figure this out, okay? We’ll get you cleaned up. If there’s one thing we’ve got truckloads of here, it’s clothes.”
We all nodded, we all murmured agreement. Yes, we declared, our soprano chorus clear as church bells. We’ll figure this out. Some of us were missing hair; some of us were missing legs. And now one of us had her clothing sewn to her body, as if it were part of her, as if she carried a filthy flower-print muslin curse.
We waited for the New Girl to thank us, but the ladybug lips stayed shut.
• • • •
Christine managed to gather seven vivid pink gowns, all roughly the same shade, all glossy and satiny and none of them stained or too badly torn. She—along with a few of the others—set to picking apart the seams, laying out the pieces. The plan was to sew them together again into a tidy presentable shift, once we knew the New Girl’s size.
Lucia found a shard of glass, at Belle’s request. The glass was bottle-brown, the same color as the New Girl’s wrist.
When Belle approached, holding it out, the New Girl whimpered and pulled away.
But Belle sat down with a lit cigarette hanging from her mouth and pulled the New Girl’s hand into her lap. “Look,” she says, “I know this place can be scary at first.” She gestured with her chin out the Whirlpool, toward the heaps of tireless, flattened cars, crumpled milk jugs, rain-wilted cardboard sheafs bound in twine. “Sunnyhaven, I mean. No one’s really happy to wind up here.” She folded the cuff of the New Girl’s dress back, exposing yellowed stitches, squeezed the New Girl’s hand, then aimed the edge of the glass at a stitch.
The stitch snapped clean, two tiny broken strands of thread peeking out of either end.
The whistle-voice rose. “But I am happy to be here. It’s . . . better here. Nice.”
Belle looked up. “You serious?”
The great blue eyes stared back. “Yes.”
Belle pulled a long drag from her cigarette and tapped the ash off onto the Whirlpool’s floor. “Well, then. Welcome to Sunnyhaven.” She sawed into the next thread. It snapped, then several more pulled loose, and soon we could all see the New Girl’s bare arm beneath.
Christine shrieked.
Under that seam was yet another row of tiny tight stitches, binding the New Girl’s wrist to her forearm.
And her forearm, thick and limp and damp, was made of brown-stained muslin fabric dotted over with yellow flowers.
The very same as her dress.
• • • •
Lucia volunteered to take the New Girl’s measurements. She learned this from watching the oldest of the five girls she lived with, who had learned it from her aunt, she told the New Girl as she wrapped an unraveling segment of twine around her bare chest—careful not to touch her floral skin, or the seam at her waist joining her brown canvas legs to her torso.
“Bust, four and three quarters,” she said.
“Got it,” Christine answered. With a single pristine fingertip, she recorded the measurement in the grime on the wall of the Whirpool.
Lucia slid the twine downward, toward the New Girl’s middle. She winced at the sight of the jagged mid-body seam that separated her torso from her legs; it looked for all the world like the New Girl had been sawed in half and only haphazardly reassembled. “Is it okay if I—”
“You can touch it,” whistled the New Girl. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Lucia stared for a moment, then pulled the twine tight. “You have a nice voice,” she said, but she didn’t look at the New Girl’s face. “Waist is four and . . . four and three quarters.”
“Wait,” said Christine, “is that bust or waist?”
“Both.”
“For real?”
Lucia ignored her and wiggled the twine around the New Girl, toward the upper part of her legs—where, on one of us, she might have found a flare of hips. “You should come out for a tour,” she told the New Girl. “Everyone’s so lovely here. We share almost everything. Some of us came here with more than others, so it’s nice. Christine here, she even had two identical nurse’s uniforms!” She squinted at the measurements marked on the twine, bit her lip, then looked back up at the New Girl. “And when it rains, we come here, inside the Whirlpool, and we close the door and tell stories about where we lived, before. All the incredible things we saw.”
“That does sound nice,” said the New Girl.
Lucia let the twine fall loose.
“Hips?” asked Christine.
Lucia ignored her. “If you’re okay with me asking . . . where are you from? Who did you belong to?”
The New Girl didn’t answer.
“That’s okay, you can tell us later. I’m sure you have stories. We’d all love to hear them.”
Christine coughed. “Hips?”
“Four and three quarters,” said Lucia.
Christine smiled at the New Girl, but her smile was a little different this time, as if a shadow had crossed it. “Four and three quarters all the way down. Hell of a figure, New Girl,” she said.
• • • •
The New Girl rarely moved from the furthest corner inside the Whirlpool, her back to us as we peered around the corner to catch a glimpse of her. She kept her enormous porcelain eyes cast downward, her body slumped and still even as the stagnant rainwater pooled below her soaked through the blunt seam at the end of her club-like legs.
In the other inside corner—the uphill, dry corner—sat Lucia, hand-stitching patches of pink satin together and humming.
Belle stayed outside, staring out of Sunnyhaven, her eyes on the distant aluminum fence, on the flat brown fields barely visible beyond. It was a sunshine day, a beach and barbecue day. If there were an ocean, we’d have donned bikinis. If there were unbroken lounge chairs, we’d have kicked out our legs and let our plastic skins fade in the sun.
And if there had been a highway out of Sunnyhaven and back to our earlier worlds, we’d have all piled into our three pink convertibles and driven ’til we found our tree-lined avenues again, our greenbelts, our place.
Even Belle, we guessed, wherever she was from.
Belle swung around the side of the Whirlpool and hopped inside. “Hey New Girl,” she said, “you ever ride in a convertible?”
• • • •
We waved makeshift flags and cheered as Belle pulled the convertible up to the gate.
The New Girl barely fit in the passenger seat. We held our breath as she first crammed her wide-seamed feet into the wheel well, then folded her knees into enormous brown lumps that grazed her chest. She wiggled, settling herself, and the motion sent her head teetering like an egg over the dashboard.
“Are you sure you’re comfortable like that?” asked Belle. “We can do something else, if you—”
“No,” said the New Girl. “I feel fine.”
There was a hint of singsong to her birdlike voice. If she was frightened, she didn’t show it.
Belle was supposed to drive, but then Christine pointed out that the convertible belonged to her, as did the only other one that still had all four wheels, and anyway Belle only had one working hand and what good would it do to crash the car on the New Girl’s very first ride?
Belle glared, but yielded and took the backseat. Christine, grinning in her best pink-and-olive paisley minidress, slipped behind the wheel and turned over the engine.
She gave the New Girl a shadow-smile and asked, “So, do you like to go fast?”
The New Girl roller her head to the left. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never thought about it.”
Christine stared. “You’ve never even thought about it? Like, ever?” She laughed. “You know, you’ve got so much space in that head. What do you do with it all?”
Belle, in the backseat, smacked Christine’s shoulder.
Christine heaved a sigh. “We’ll go slow, then,” she said. “To start.”
Sunnyhaven was never a big place. One great mound, with the Whirlpool lodged in its north face and a rough path among the milk crates and coffee cans we’d remodeled into homes. A five-high stack of shredded tires separated us from the mounds to the south. A road—all dirt, rutted deep by truck wheels and tractors—encircled the whole of our little town before winding off through the heaps of garbage beyond.
But the landfill itself extended nearly to the horizons, all but infinite.
We lined the path as Christine rolled the convertible out through the tin front gate. We climbed our mound, waved shredded blouses and bright knots of ribbon, and looked down on the scene from above.
None of us could remember a day so clear, an event quite so new and exciting.
The New Girl turned her head to her right, slowly, then upward, her eyes meeting ours. Her spider-lashes flashed, but her ladybug lips did not smile. She did not wave back.
Christine took a left, onto the dirt road, sending a puff of dust billowing behind the car. She gave the New Girl a beauty-queen smile. “You still haven’t told us where you’re from,” she said. “I’m guessing . . . Iowa.”
Belle, in the backseat, rolled her eyes. “Leave it alone, Christine.”
“Missouri?”
“Christine.”
“What? She seems like the farm-girl type, doesn’t she? Like she’s hardly left the weeds.” Christine pressed her arched green plastic stiletto into the gas; the convertible picked up speed. She gave the New Girl an up-and-down glance. “Definitely not the city type.”
“No,” the New Girl said, “I’m not from a city.” Her whispery voice wilted under the engine’s growl.
“Where then? Come on. What kind of insects are you hiding inside that body of yours? Grasshoppers? Weevils?” Christine threw back her head in a high, glittering laugh. “We share everything around here, so please tell me you don’t have fleas.”
The car hit a rut and bounced hard. The New Girl’s head lashed sideways and slammed into the pink plastic doorframe.
She righted herself, unharmed, without so much as a blink.
“Christine,” snapped Belle. “Cut it the fuck out.”
The New Girl’s ladybug lips parted and a wisp of sound fluttered out, hollow and deeper than before.
Christine ignored her. She pressed the gas instead, splashing the car through a shallow puddle and splattering mud across the New Girl’s face.
The New Girl’s mouth widened. Her head turned like a doorknob toward Christine.
“What’d you say, New Girl? I’m sorry, but you just don’t make any sense.”
Another flutter of words, louder still.
From the backseat, Belle shouted, “Christine, stop the fucking car.”
“Come on, New Girl, tell us. Who threw you away? I mean, we can all see why they did it. But who would even choose you to begin with?” Christine’s face was all shadow now, eyes narrowed, no smile at all. “Do you even know what it means to have friends? To share?”
The New Girl turned her great blue eyes on Christine. Her tiny mouth opened wide as a child’s fist, wide enough to consume her face.
Within was a pit blacker than anything hiding in the whole of that enormous dump.
We heard every word that came from the New Girl, fierce as a chained dog’s snarl, deep as a storm drenching the land for miles around.
“I know how to share,” she howled.
• • • •
Some of us turned away before it happened. We couldn’t bear to watch.
Christine squealed; the convertible swerved, hit a rock, and sailed through the air. Belle was flung out of the backseat. With her arms held up to the blue sky, she almost looked like she was diving into a clean, crystalline freshwater pool—except she landed face-down in mud, beside a rotting microwave dinner tray.
The convertible hit the ground sideways, then rolled twice.
The first time, Christine was bent backward at the hips, crushed under the car’s open frame. The New Girl stayed in place, stuffed tight into the passenger seat.
The second roll left Christine in the dirt, both her legs jackknifed backward, nearly broken off entirely.
But the New Girl—as the car rolled her knees unfolded, her body burst free, and the full weight of her head struck a stone. A small stone, but jagged, sharp. Enough to open a crack through the blue of her right eye.
The eye did not close, or even blink.
For the longest time she simply lay there, still, while behind her Belle flailed free of the mud and Christine lay whimpering but motionless, disturbingly still. From the top of the mound, Lucia clambered downward, shouting for everyone to hurry and help.
A few of us, numb and slow, even followed her.
But then the New Girl tucked her broad hands under chest and tried to lift her head.
And a single, thick shard of her skull fell away.
• • • •
Some of us covered our eyes. Could you blame us? We’d been precious, once. Delicate. Carried to bed each night by a loving child in a grand house on an oak-lined street where evil was so impossibly rare that when it did peep through a window or slither through an unlocked door, it was easily discounted, dismissed.
We were not made to see such things.
Others among us . . . we watched. We couldn’t bring ourselves to look away.
But all of us—every last one of us who shared that little mound of Sunnyhaven that day—all of us witnessed. We felt the hollow mold of her mind fall open. We learned precisely how the New Girl was made.
For that brief, sweat-cold moment, all of us understood.
And then the wind picked up, and all the blue fled the sky.
• • • •
Lucia, already nearing the bottom of the Sunnyhaven mound, fell backward and landed hard among scattered cardboard. Christine struggled to right herself, but her legs wouldn’t fold back under her body and she resorted to crawling, scuttling arm-over-arm like a cricket half-crushed by a cat. She made it several feet and then started to dig, clawing at the dirt and shrieking.
But the needle-sharp screams swarming outward from the New Girl’s hollow head grew until they carved the thoughts from our heads, bled the blue from our eyes. Anguish clotted ash-black in our lungs. Desolation chased us down.
We couldn’t see.
We couldn’t breathe.
In the sudden dark, most of us fled alone, lost ourselves in the outlying mounds and scattered trash. But some of us caught each other’s arms and hands, fled in groups, held on tight.
None of us made it very far, of course. We were only toys, after all. We huddled inside tin cans and computer cases, wriggled into the gaps between engines and wiring.
We waited. Silent, we bore witness.
In time, the sun settled back over Sunnyhaven, and we could breathe again.
• • • •
The New Girl lay on her back, her lower body still trapped in the convertible, her left eye winking occasionally even while her right half-eye gaped.
Belle shifted onto her hands and knees, then onto her feet. She unwrapped her Cheetos bag from her body, shook it out, then tied it around herself again, inside out, so it shimmered silver as a cocktail gown. She walked with a limp but made it to the convertible without too much effort.
The fragment of the New Girl’s skull rested several inches away, but the rest of her head was intact. The interior was empty, hollow. Nothing to see anymore but an empty curve of unglazed porcelain.
Belle folded herself cross-legged at the New Girl’s side.
“I’m sorry,” whistled the New Girl.
“Don’t be.”
“No, I am sorry. I don’t belong here.”
Belle sighed. “If I belong here, so do you.”
“But I scared them away.” Her birdlike voice had an edge to it, as if she might cry if she hadn’t been long ago drained of tears. “They’re gone. All of them.”
Belle laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all. A choke. “Yeah. They weren’t cut out for that kind of . . .” She trailed off, but after a long moment added, “for what you had to share.”
To the west, tractors roared; to the south, the echo of shearing steel and crunching plastic suggested another abandoned car had been crushed unrecognizable, to be lost in the stacks of trash forever.
Belle asked, “Do you know what happened to her, after . . . after all that? To your kid, I mean?”
The New Girl didn’t answer at first. Her single intact eye, locked on the bare white sun, blinked twice. At last, she simply said, “No.”
“Same,” said Belle, her voice so low and raw even the New Girl could hardly understand it. She laid the blackened remnant of her right hand on the New Girl’s stained and fingerless fabric arm and left it there.
“Let’s get you out of there,” she said at last, “and back to Sunnyhaven. We’ll see who’s left, what we’ve got lying around. We’ll see what we can fix.”
