One Hundred and Two:

ONE HUNDRED AND TWO:

Liz

“The girl’s nothing but skin and bone.” Laughter, the electric crackle of the wicker chair under his weight. “I’ve seen scarecrows with more stuffing.” Liz shied away, dug her toes into the lawn and closed her eyes. In the dark—the smell of grass and cooked onions, the wind growling until her father’s voice faded away.

Safe.

At fourteen, her mother measured Liz at five feet against the kitchen doorframe. “God’s stretching you like taffy,” Reggie said, tucking the permanent marker into her blouse pocket. “I’m going to have to put a brick on your head to slow you down.” A shy smile on Liz’s face as her mother ruffled her bangs. “Out you go.” She gestured towards the back door, a hand on the seat of her daughter’s overalls to get her moving, and within seconds Liz was outside with two tennis rackets in hand. She gave one to her younger brother.

“Here you go, weed.”

“That ain’t my name,” he spat back. “It’s Jed and you know it.”

“Yeah well, ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word, so why should I call you anything when you can’t speak any proper English? Don’t they teach you anything at school?” The two siblings glared at each other, their slight shadows long across the ground.

“Yeah well, you’re skinny. So how’s about we just do this, okay?”

They spent the afternoon playing tennis with mandarins plucked straight from the tree. Exhausted, they lay surrounded by a litter of exploded orange grenades, each wearing beards of citrus and dirt. Liz was happy.

Her father threw the back door open, picked a dripping racket up off the grass, and smashed it across her face. It made a hollow boing-ing sound, like something from a cartoon. “God damn it, Liz,” he said. “Look what you did to that bloody tree!”

Jed leapt to his feet and stumbled across the yard on shaking legs, unaware of his screams. He disappeared among the trees and continued to run, hating himself for not staying to defend his sister. Hidden in twilight and the branches of a dying eucalyptus, Jed collapsed, crying, and wondered why Liz had been punished and he had not.

***

Summer, 1979. Liz fumbled with the fly of her boyfriend’s denims in the front seat of his Mercury Cougar. The Knack’s My Sharona whispered through veils of static on the radio. She noticed his faint smile, green in the glow from the dash. Her body tingled, the hair on her arms dancing. In his smile, she saw a chance for happiness with someone who maybe loved her. Maybe was enough.

He leaned forward, imitation leather seats whining as he kissed her. When their lips drew apart, Liz could still taste his tongue. Juicy Fruit and sour lemonade.

The following day she found her father weeping into his hands, bent double in his favorite chair. “Daddy?”

Wes turned to study his daughter. “You break me, Liz.” The bones in his neck cracked. He sat upright, not looking at her, and said she would never see that boy again. She didn’t.

***

The notches on the kitchen doorframe scaled higher and higher.

Friends came and went. Liz was a good student, nothing extraordinary. She got top marks when it came to hiding bruises from teachers’ prying eyes.

***

The Frost residence was a two-storied house on an open property in the Hunter Valley. The nearest neighbors were a mile and a half away. Oven-hot in summer, freezing come the colder months, Liz knew every creak of the staircase, each loose floorboard its own alarm bell. She couldn’t step onto the veranda without her father, Wes, grabbing her by the wrist and yanking her back inside.

“Why won’t you let me go, Dad? I’m nineteen. I’m not an idiot.”

He stood over her, pushed in close. His breath smelled of dead mice. Somewhere in him she knew there was sadness, could hear it in his warnings. “I want you to go, but you know you can’t. It’s not you I don’t trust.”

She bought her first car at twenty-two and that grip on her wrist loosened. Wes aged overnight. Liz drove for the sake of driving. She had nowhere to go.

All roads led home.

Liz eyed the mirror on the rear of her bedroom door.

Yeah, I’m skinny. Too tall? Hell, maybe.

Then again, she could be all the things people said she was. If she gave in to it.

Sparse clearings behind the thicket of trees at the end of their yard. She walked through them some early mornings, watched frost melt from the branches and dropping onto her nose. Into her mouth. Cool on her tongue.

Here she lay with ghosts.

The ghost of a girl who refused to let herself grow into something she didn’t want to be; the ghost of the teenager who hoped for happiness holding hands with a woman who also never existed and was only aspired to. Liz was happy in the clearing. But each morning brought with it spiders waiting to spin fresh webs, ushered snakes out of hibernation. The scrub came with risks, and not even her ghosts could keep Liz safe. Here, among trees that resembled piled skeletons, watched by kangaroos foraging for berries, next to the remains of a dead fox with a tawny pelt writhing with maggots, Liz’s ghosts took her by the hand. Time to leave this place. She walked to the house with pangs of dread in her gut and twigs in her hair. Nothing lasted.

***

Liz Frost was born on the sixteenth of August, 1963, with her umbilical cord tight around her neck. She fought from the start. On November 12th, 1995, at seven forty in the morning, she sat on her bed, put a gun in her mouth and closed her eyes.

The day began.