There’s Something So Deeply Human About That by Christina Tudor
In “There’s Something So Deeply Human About That” by Christina Tudor, we’re invited into the haven of a teenage girl’s sleepover—temporary tattoos, gossip, and wine sweetened with Skittles. When one of the girls, whose air of tragedy both repulses and attracts, drifts away from the clique’s bubble and up onto the roof, the narrator and the reader follow her. As Tudor details in her author’s note, the roof serves both “as a setting and as a metaphor.” Perched out there, these girls struggle to find the balance in the liminal state between girlhood and womanhood, between the perils and protection of friendship and adolescence. Tudor treats girlhood with reverence and respect, interrogating the multitude of complex and contradictory emotions that make up youthful female friendships. As she expands in her author’s note, “grief and sadness often sit side by side with loneliness, longing, and rage.” With her refusal to simplify the undulating, complicated emotions of her adolescent characters, Tudor reaffirms the humanity in the pleasures and pains of growing up. —CRAFT
Rumors swirled around Mari like a second shadow. Rumors that her mother had abandoned her at a gas station, left her strapped in a booster seat in the back of the car with the keys in the ignition. That her father tracked her mother down at a hotel just outside city limits. Not very far away at all. And that’s where he found her body. C-shaped and withered like birchbark. Of course it was hard for Mari to escape the glow of tragedy circling her like crows picking at a dead deer on the side of the highway. Sometimes I wonder if I was only friends with Mari because I wanted to save her. Because sometimes she felt hollowed out like a scarecrow. And sometimes I watched a phantom version of myself, conjured up during daydreams, a version that ran over to that car and freed her from where she was left behind.
What was it like, we wanted to know, once we learned Mari had gone the furthest with a boy. Five of us sitting in a circle on the living room floor at the tail end of Brenda’s sixteenth birthday slumber party. Skittles staining our palms, wine stolen from the garage refrigerator staining our teeth. I imagine now that Mari taught each of us in our own way how fun it is to break the rules. Mari wore a spaghetti-strapped tank top and skimpy pajama shorts with lace at the bottom that looked like pink cobwebs. Mari shrugged, never wanting to give much away. Mari liked to drain her skittles of color. Spat them, white and mushy, into her palm.
What was it like, we wanted to know, because we didn’t know much about Mari’s boyfriends, only that they’d fumbled with her hot pink bra straps, only that they were usually older, and one of them threw a beer bottle at the wall when she’d finally ended it.
Brenda had cracked open a bracelet-making kit between the five of us and we strung friendship bracelets together. Mine fell apart after I’d only assembled the M-A- because she’d shoved me when I’d called her Mari the Boy Magnet like it was her superhero name—and god, why did I say that? I guess I wanted to hurt Mari’s feelings because everyone had a thing for Mari and I’d never even been kissed. Fuck you, she’d hissed into my ear, shoving my shoulder. I dropped the beads into the diamond my knees made on the floor.
Brenda shushed us, told us her mom and little brother were upstairs sleeping and that’s when we all got quiet because there was an unspoken rule to never mention mothers in front of Mari. We lowered our voices and took turns pressing temporary tattoos into each other’s skin. I held a cold rag against Mari’s shoulder, and then, after she joked that she wanted a tramp stamp, helped imprint a tiny blue bird onto her lower back while she lifted her tank top. Maybe I should have said something about the bruises, purple like storm clouds. After I peeled off the tattoo paper, she leaned back onto her sticky, skittle-stained palms, her hair trailing over my knees.
I can’t remember who fell asleep first. I don’t know what time it was when I woke up and Mari wasn’t there, leaving a gap in the circle our bodies made. I searched for her in the backyard, in the basement, in the garage—nothing—before I went to check upstairs. Brenda’s bedroom was pale pink with her name stenciled into the wall above the bed. A mobile of moons dangled in the doorway.
Mari had crawled out from Brenda’s attic bedroom onto the roof. Her shirt was still rolled up. I must not have pressed the washcloth evenly into the temporary tattoo because there was a stretch of bare skin straight through the bird’s neck and beak.
She scooted over when she saw me. I asked what she was doing out there and she said that nighttime, when the whole world’s asleep, that was her favorite. You know, she said, I know what my mother said before she left.
Left. Ran away. Disappeared.
She said she just wanted some silence. That it felt like there was a leaf blower on in her brain all the time. I nodded. I don’t even blame her, Mari told me. Because there was something so deeply human about that. I remember nodding again, wishing I could think of something comforting to say, like I’m glad we’re friends and that I think she deserves a better boyfriend, one who doesn’t leave marks. I’m sorry, I said instead. And she said everyone’s always so fucking sorry and that she wanted to be left alone again. That’s when she stood up quickly. That’s when she stumbled. And before I reached out to steady her, before she slipped through my fingers, before she crawled back through the window, I thought I could hold on and make her stay.
CHRISTINA TUDOR is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction has been featured in SmokeLong Quarterly, matchbook, HAD, Flash Frog, The Citron Review, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. Her debut chapbook, CALL MY BODY A CAUTIONARY TALE, will be published by Thirty West this fall. Find her on Instagram @christinaltudor and Bluesky @christinaltudor.bsky.social.
Featured image by Karolina Grabowska, courtesy of Unsplash.
