hanginggardenstories:

LIKE/ NOT LIKE
by Natalie C. Parker

It’s hard to remember the first time it happened, isn’t it? It’s been said to you, around you, about you so many times that pinning it down to a first time feels as pointless as patterngift (because, really, who cares if you always know how to pair stripes with more stripes?). As soon as you hear the phrase, Good girls don’t, you have a million words, phrases, treatises ready to fill the space that follows. Good girls don’t curse, good girls don’t have sex, good girls don’t shout or drive fast or dream big.

But the one that haunts you is this: good girls don’t use firegift.

It’s not an official rule, and no one would tell you it was, but just the same, they’d repeat the rule-that’s-not-a-rule and look at you with an expression as if to say Not my fault. This is just the way things are.

Gifts arrive sometime in your late teens. You know this. You can sort of judge when it might come based on when your parents’ did, but like your first period, it’s always a surprise. When you were very small, you imagined what it would be like to have firegift. You ran around with the girls and boys in your neighborhood battling villains made of ice or wood or who breathed combustible gasses, and you took all of them down with your own two hands, blessed by firegift. When you were a little older still, you heard the story of girls in other countries who kept their families alive with the simplicity of their gift. You heard the story of the woman saint, given firegift to save an entire people.

But at some point, you realized those were the exceptions. Those were the girls who weren’t like other girls. And their stories were qualified by others.

By the pilgrim girls who didn’t know any better and set fire to an entire colony one hard winter.

By the slave girls who were deemed too dangerous on account of their gifts and were murdered on discovery.

By the immigrant girls, penniless and starving, turned away at the gates.

By the lesbian girls incarcerated and drugged until fire was nothing more than a distant memory.

That doesn’t happen any more. At least, not in the same way. In today’s world, a girl with firegift can have a mostly normal life. She can go to school, get a job, find love, but she won’t ever be quite like other girls.

You know about those girls. They are sharper, they are stolen kisses and cigarettes and combat boots. They are confidence and wicked smiles and tattoos. They do things other girls don’t and maybe that other girls shouldn’t. You’ve heard them say it, Not like other girls. And it felt true, but also like something said about them before it was said by them.

You’ve spent days wondering what you’d do if yours was firegift. Hide it, probably. Join the ranks of “giftless” girls who are pitied, but not ostracized. It’s more common for girls to go giftless than for boys to, and no one thinks twice about it.

No one in your family has firegift. There’s no reason for you to worry over it the way you do, but on a random day in August, as you sit on your bedroom floor picking out the perfect outfit for the first day of your senior year, your hands spark and catch fire. You clap them together immediately.

The first thing you do when the fire is gone is check to make sure you are alone. You are. The second thing you do is look in the mirror to see if anything else about you has changed. It’s a strange impulse. Gifts don’t come with physical changes, but you feel different, so you peer into the mirror to see if anyone might tell by looking at you that you’re no longer like other girls.

Can they?

Probably not.

For a moment, your mind fools you into thinking things are as simple as they were when you were small. You feel the thrum of power in your fingertips, in your very heart, and you are eager to open your hands again and fill them with fire.

Firegift. You have it.

Now, you panic. Your mind fills with stories about good girls and other girls and you wonder where you fit between them. Is there even space between them? You discover you have so many questions and if another gift – any other gift – had been the one you ended up with, you’d have answers. You know exactly how the world opens up for those with numbergift, with earthgift, with musicgift. And for anything you didn’t immediately know you’d be able to Google! Can you Google? Does someone monitor questions about firegift? Will they track you down? Alert your parents?

Downstairs, you hear your parents clattering around in the kitchen, prepping dinner and pouring their evening glass of wine. You try to imagine what it will be like to tell them and see the panic and sorrow on their faces. You try to imagine what life will be like now that you’re not like other girls.

And then you stop. You look at your hands. You palms are open, empty. They are marked by the same lines that have always been there, your thumbs are disproportionately shorter than the rest of your fingers, and the underside of the knuckle on the middle finger of your left hand is scarred from a childhood fight against an imagined ice villain. These are the same hands you’ve always hand. You are the same girl you’ve always been.

And that’s when you understand. The girls who are not like other girls were created by the same stories that told you what good girls are and what they aren’t.

You have firegift. And you are exactly like other girls.

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Natalie C. Parker is the author of the Southern Gothic duology Beware the Wild, which was a 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection, and Behold the Bones (HarperTeen). She is also the editor of Three Sides of a Heart, a young adult anthology on love triangles publishing from HarperTeen, Dec. 19, 2017. She is the founder of Madcap Retreats, an organization offering a yearly calendar of writing retreats and workshops.

Click here for more Hanging Garden Stories by Natalie.

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