I remember, my grandmother used to call me doll, in her Southern accent, standing over me in those sun-soaked mornings at her house, when the light filtered through the pink cotton curtains and painted everything in rose, and the house smelt like cinnamon and oranges. I was sent there, after The Event, as I called it, nineteen with lanky legs and a chest too broad for my liking. She cut my hair, calling it a country hick mullet, and would not let me in the kitchen.

I do not believe she hated me.

She loved me, and she loved God, and the Devil was inside her, telling her it was inside me, wearing my father's old clothes, two sizes too big on my skinny frame. She called my glasses too feminine, and would not let me wear them, on my mother's orders. I called her on the landline the day I arrived, and then never again. It wasn't a pleasant conversation. When the sun rose, and she placed a home-cooked breakfast, bacon, eggs and grits, hashbrowns and a cup of coffee, all delicious, because it was Nana's cooking, and she still loved me, she told me she had applied for a job on my behalf.

I arrived at the lumber mill with the sun smearing my already failing retinas into bright puddles of light. The paper bag in my hand held a corned beef sandwich and an apple, a can of soda jostling around inside as if setting me up for certain embarrassment later in the day. A large man exited the mill, arms bursting with muscle, and he waved me over with all the authority of a cop. I trudged over.

"You the new hire?"

I nodded. "Name's El-"

"Elliot Hanson, I know 'ya. You Gertie's boy?"

I swallowed. "Grandson." The word slid past my lips like sandpaper.

"Well, I'm not sure what she was thinking. You ain't hauling shit with noodle arms like yours," he grasped my bicep suddenly, laughing all the while. "I'm Hank."

"Hi, Hank."

Hank sighed, and waved me inside. "Alright, son. I'll put you on some easy work for now. You'll be with Robin," he led me to a desk with a girl stood at it, bundling lumber into piles for shipment, and left me there.

"Hey, new blood. What's your name?" She asked, her strawberry blonde hair specked with sawdust. Her hands were calloused as they deftly wound a zip-tie around another bundle. It struck me suddenly that she may have been the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

I looked down as I said it, already fiddling with the plastic tail of a zip-tie. "Ella."

Robin chuckled lightly, and in that moment, since the event, all the soul I thought had drained out of me flew back to me.

"Ella, huh?"

"No, I-" I started, quietly tripping over my words. "El. El is fine."

Robin's eyes lingered a beat too long, long enough that I could feel sweat forming beneath the cotton of my two-sized too big shirt. "El, then." She flicked her chin at the pile beside her. "Grab that end."

I did as I was told. The lumber was rough under my palms, seams of bark still clinging in places, and the two of us hefted the plank onto the stack together. It wasn't heavy, not really, but my noodle arms strained anyway. Hank's words, already lodged somewhere behind my ribs, and as I was soon to learn, there would be many more words to come, sticking to much more painful places.

"You're stronger than you look," Robin said, and I couldn't tell if she meant it or if she was just being kind.

"Yeah, well. Been carrying suitcases my whole life," I said, and she laughed again, that same easy sound, like it cost her nothing.

We fell into a rhythm. She'd hand me the zip-ties, I'd feed them through, cinch them tight, and she'd stack. The sawdust hung gold in the light slanting through the high windows, and somewhere behind us a saw screamed through wood, and Hank's voice barked something at somebody else. It was loud, and hot, and my shirt, even with the collar gaping at my throat like a too-loose noose, stuck to my back within the hour.

"So," Robin said, not looking at me, focused on the next bundle. "Gertie's your grandma."

"Yeah."

"She's somethin'." Robin said it carefully, the way you'd test ice on a pond. "She come to church with my mama sometimes, Mavis Kennedy? Prays real loud."

I didn't answer that. I picked at the zip-tie tail instead, the plastic biting a thin red line into my thumb.

"You don't gotta talk about it," Robin said, softer now, and I felt her glance flick over to me and away, quick, like she was giving me room to breathe. "I just...you looked kinda far off, when Hank was talking. Like you were somewhere else."

"I was thinking about the corned beef sandwich in my bag," I lied, and she snorted.

"Liar."

"Yeah," I admitted. "Liar."

The whistle blew for break not long after, a shriek that cut through the saw-noise and sent men filing toward the shade of the loading dock. Robin wiped her hands on her jeans and jerked her head toward the door. "C'mon. You can eat that sad little sandwich next to me instead of alone."

I followed her out into the white heat of noon. She would later be the first person to give The Event a name. She called it dismemberment.

I had been working at that mill for over two weeks, gruelling work under the heat of summer, finally graduated from bundling lumber to cutting it. I felt guilty then, accepted into ranks of men, and abandoning Robin at her lone table, a strawberry-blonde beacon in a room of sweaty browns and greys. I came home ever day with the wail of the machinery in my head, saw hollering in my ears even as I pushed peas and potatoes around my china plate under Nana's gaze. She did not ask me much, outside of that polite small talk where she skated around any meaningful discussion. She asked about the mill, the machinery I'd learned to work, if any of the guys had invited me out.

I told her that they had not.

That much was true, but the guilt of the lie did not hit me until after dinner, one Wednesday night, when the wind was knocking at the windows, and she led me out to the front room. She grabbed me by my shoulders, and though it was tender, I had to shut my eyes to pretend it wasn't another arrestation. She pointed up, at a photo above the mantelpiece, I had seen every year in my childhood but never looked at. It was grandpa, who Nana called a good man, smiling his gap-tooth grin. In one hand he held his hunting rifle. The other, he rested on the stiffened, bristle-haired flank of a deer, rendered in black-and white. She sighed then, pulled back to look at me in my father's shirt, and said he would have taken you hunting, too. A man's rite of passage.

I invited Robin over that next evening, when Nana was out at her friend Barbara's. I had only once had a girl over before long before The Event, when I had stuffed my wooden-plank body into boxers and basketball shorts, and stuffed that body into the waiting pockets of blonde-haired mirror images, all the while hoping that sweat through osmosis would act like an alchemist's solution. I had not once withdrawn feeling satisfied, and I was certain that both Emma May and Jenny Walters had faked it for my benefit, wailing like cicadas in the night, with none of the shed skin to show for it.

Robin arrived at my doorstep in jeans and a flannel, shirt stained and hair pinned back by a thin, yellow Alice band. I had greeted her in my aunt's old jeans, and again, my father's too-big shirt, because I felt that I would be best not to overdo anything. I welcomed her in with a shaking hand, and fixed her a tall glass of sweet tea as she sat on my Nana's couch. The air smelt like oranges, and was stagnant as swamp water. She did not expect it, and that was the first shock. I had told her, in confidence of the heat blanketing us under the static TV spitting out evangelical nonsense and infomercials intermittently that she worked with so many guys, and no one had looked at her twice? She replied they think I'm bulldyke, and that was that. I did not ask are you, for fear of breaking the spell, the way she said it at speaking volume, as if it was not to be hidden, and for the first time in my short life, I wondered if the word could ever be spoken like that.

She asked again, if I wanted to talk about it. The Event hung above us both, marking this stranger with its searing intensity as it held me, and she waited, sweet tea sweating on the table in front of us. I told her honestly, and at that, she placed her lips onto mine. It was only an hour later when we lay across my Nana's couch that it hit me that, yes she was, and the answer was still clinging to my skin and hers. My eyes were blurry from joy and from my failing eyes, and I told her when she went to shower about the glasses atop the medicine cabinet, she returned minutes later, back in her torn flannel, pressing the arms against my ears, through my hair, and clarity overcame me.

She looked at me with her cheeks flushed the same shade as her hair, and I could almost count the freckles dotting her face, as she ran her fingers across my collarbone. I wanted to flinch at the action, but she flinched first, looking at the clock, saying that her mama would want her home. She did not ask about mine. She understood too, that dismemberment meant that both parts were severed, and would not meet again.

I learnt that Robin did not return home to a peaceful house that night in the morning. She had showed up in a leather jacket too thick for the sweaty air of the mill, sleeves pulled right up the way that Hank would've banned if she were working any of the machines. Get sucked right into that blade, you would, he'd say, pointing out another man on the production line with a missing finger as proof. I met her on lunch, and she held out an ice-cold can of soda to me, in a way that I could see her sleeve ride up. At the base of her hand, where her wrist began, sat a red ring, angry and glossy, like a cigarette burn.

She caught me staring immediately. "My Ma."

I felt my mouth dry up. "Your Ma?"

She shrugged. "Missed curfew."

"Robin, I'm so sorry, I-"

She held up a hand to silence me. "Not your fault. She would've found another excuse if it wasn't curfew." She shouldered off the jacket then, revealing her upper back, scarcely hidden by her spaghetti strap top. The pale flesh was marked by an intricate spider web of scars, some thick, some thin, all greying shades of pink, a massive constellation that I hadn't noticed when I had my hands all over her last night. "Go on," she said. "You can touch it."

I did, reaching my too-fat fingers out to run them across the lines, expecting to find raised lines like a manuscript of Braille, lash-marks, angry and throbbing. I only found smooth skin.

"Yeah, I scrub the hell out of it every night. Stops the scars from forming proper." Her voice was casual, so casual that it hurt something deep inside of me.

"Robin, I-"

"Ella," she said, and the two syllables felt foreign when addressed to me, so much that I blinked back at her before she extended a hand and motioned me to sit beside her. "El."

I sat, and she snorted. "Don't pretend you've got it any better."

"My folks might not...they don't...I don't have scars like that, Robin."

"Yeah, well, you ain't bulldyke," she said, and the word landed again, like a stone in my gut. "Or are you?" She turned to me with one eyebrow raised.

My stomach turned. "Robin--"

She smiled. "Only joking."

She got me into her car after work ended, both of us bundled into the front of her breaking down truck. She helped me climb onto the hood, citing my noodle arms as reason for such womanly chivalry, and finally made me smile at the words, which I appreciated more than anything. We pitched up at the creek on the edge of town, a small wooden footbridge laying in the distance, like something out of a kid's book. She kicked off her sneakers, shaking sawdust from them, and rolled up her jeans. For once, I didn't mind the mosquitoes biting at the thick meat of my calves, though I knew I would soon, when the wounds became rubbed raw and bloody, agitated by the sweat tracking through them under the heat of the mill tomorrow morning.

Then, she reached into her bag, and produced another set of squashed sandwiches, and a long log of cake.

"Ma made too much again," Robin said, by way of explanation. "She does that when she's feeling guilty."

She unwrapped the sandwiches, wax paper crinkling, and handed me the fatter of the two. I peeled back the bread to reveal ham and something orange that might've been cheese. I ate it anyway. It was better than my own soggy corned beef had been in weeks, going warm in its paper bag under the truck seat.

"You doing alright?" She asked.

I picked a piece of crust off instead of answering right away. The creek moved past below us, carrying a leaf that was too yellow for July, and somewhere further down the bank a bullfrog hummed its mating call.

"I keep waiting for something to go wrong," I admitted finally. "Been two weeks and nothing's gone wrong yet. Nana hasn't said anything. Hank hasn't said anything. You--You didn't make it weird. After last night. Most people would've made it weird."

Robin snorted, wiping a crumb off her chin with the back of her hand. "Nice of you to point it out." She broke off a piece of cake, then broke off a bigger piece and handed it over. "Besides. Waiting for the bad thing don't stop it coming. Just means you don't get to enjoy the sandwich while you got it." She grinned, sawdust still caught somewhere in the part of her hair, copper in the late light. "Y'know your problem, El?"

"I'm sure you'll tell me at some point." I lay back beside her, laying my head on her chest. "Just not today, okay?" The smiled softly in response, the metal of the hood ticking as it cooled, her shoulder warm against mine, and for twenty minutes she sat beside me, humming softly.

Then, after a long, sweet while, she pointed out at the water, and said: "Wanna go in?" and didn't wait for an answer.

Almost immediately, she was waist deep in the water, me wading in afterwards. She splashed me, and I smiled, splashing her back and receiving a much louder shriek. Laughing, she cussed me out, peeling the shirt from her torso in one swift motion. The sight of her then almost made me keel over, the flesh blooming where mine did not, and I stilled there in my t-shirt, soaked, and clinging to my wooden-plank shoulders. Her smile didn't drop.

She ran back to her car and held out a bikini top, pink and white striped, the kind of thing I assumed she wouldn't be caught dead wearing. She held it out in question.

"Why do you have that?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Emergency change of clothes. My car's a piece of junk, and the roads out here are long."

She tossed it to me anyways.