Hot dogs or legs?

I was only 13, so no one believed me about the bats. 

Mom said, “Sara, bats don't live in trees. Don't be silly.”

I knew she was objectively wrong. Wikipedia said so. And a whole colony nested in the crepe myrtle outside my window. At night, skeletal branches tapped the glass, bending under the bats’ weight. Their green eyes glowed through the bug screen. They watched me. I couldn’t sleep.

I was in ninth grade, much too old to recruit parents in the fight against night terrors. So for a week, no sleep, just me tucked stiff, sore, unmoving, and awake under a Disney princess comforter. 5 or 6 or sometimes 12 brown-furred big-eared, pig-nosed faces pressed against the glass. 

School turned grey. Teacher-voices blurred like dolphin chatter does behind inches of aquarium acrylic glass. My mom had her email hooked up to Infinite Campus, the school grading system, and soon her phone pinged with my F's. I got a 25 on a Math test, and that got her worried. 

Monday morning, she sat me down at the kitchen island. Its faux granite surface fizzled like TV static in my sleep-starved eyes.

Her voice came from a far-off cave: “How can we fix this?” 

On the island, a Mr Coffee gurgled, steamed, wafted the dirt-scent of Folgers. I pointed. Mom poured me a mug. I gagged on hot, bitter motor oil. But the fog in my forehead cleared just a bit. 

After school, Mom took me for groceries. Glass bottles of cold milky sugar-coffee stood on display in cardboard four-packs. I don't drink Starbucks anymore, because why the fuck are they targeting employees for unionizing and suing their unions for being pro-Palestine, and also their beans are burnt on purpose, but I didn't know that then, and made mom buy eight bottles. We got bags of white tortillas and shredded, starched cheese. I'd use them for my midnight snack: though we weren't allowed to eat after 6pm, most evenings I'd sneak to the kitchen, microwave my quesadillas, scarf them in my room, then hide the plate beneath my bed. 

That night, I tiptoed back with my steamy tortilla, sat on the carpet flooring. The myrtle tree's shadow danced on my wall. Cars rolled in the not-quite-darkness of suburban floodlights and streetlamps. The bats watched me. I couldn't eat. My nausea brewed beneath their green pin-prick eyes. The next morning, the quesadilla was intact and crusted-over under my bed. I took an icy sweating Starbucks bottle en route to the school bus. 

At the bus stop, just me and Mercy, shivering in purple dusk. We had nothing in common but our neighborhood and grade level. She’d lean on her peeling trombone case and thumb an already-cracked iPhone. I'd plug SkullCandy earbuds into my clip-on MP3 player and try to move as little as possible. She'd heard Breaking Benjamin and Seether and Three Days Grace and other Depressed 30-Something Man music leak from from my earbuds, and told me this was respectable. I in turn was impressed by her encyclopedic collection of iFunny memes. She'd tap me on the shoulders sometimes to share a screenshot.  

“Look at this,” she'd grunt. Often it was an image of the baby with one fist up, sandwiched between walls of white text. I always laughed, but didn't always get it. I didn't have a phone yet, and sometimes had to Google memes’ meanings on Mom's laptop. 

I was in high school, but Mom still packed my lunch. At the bus stop, my vinyl lunchbox soaked dew from long grass. Mercy and I stood with our bellies to the road. Since the bats and insomnia, I'd started swaying on my feet, like an inflatable tube man greeting cars whipping past. 

At school, at lunch, I sat alone. Well, there were bodies on both sides, but all turned away from me. Not in a mean way. I just had nothing to say. Our tables were the long foldable laminated-faux-wood kind with attached stools. I opened my lunchbox to a lukewarm cheese stick, bruised clementines, a dented PB&J. I shifted on my stool. I felt my thighs stick then unstick. I felt the persistent fannypack of baby fat still clinging to my stomach. I felt the soft bits of my forearms. Imagined bat eyes biting me. No, I wouldn’t eat. 

So I started telling Mom I was old enough to pack my own lunch, thank you. In the lunchbox, one iced coffee. Dinner I’d push back past 6pm, locked in my room, dripping nervous sweat into math equations under the unblinking gaze of bats, claiming through the closed door that I wasn’t hungry and busy with homework anyway. At night, the starving enraged animal of my body prowled on carpet floors, tip-toed past the shedding sofa, slunk between fake potted palms to the fridge, in a trance, squinting against its bright white light, and it, my body, tore tortillas into strips and stuffed fists full of shredded cheese, and swallowed it all, hardly chewing, until starch flaked my shirts and hot shame settled in my stomach and I crawled back to my room, to the cold disapproval of my bats. 

One morning, sunlight weaved in orange ribbons. Pink clouds, bruise-blue skies. Our townhouses bumped into the graveyard off Lavista Way. Our school bus would pull up next to the hill of tombstones. Mercy walked up in her skin-tight black Hello Kitty tee, with fishnet gloves rising to the sleeves. 

“Look at this one,” she said, showing her phone. A picture of two thin tanned thighs leaning in at an angle by the pool. The caption: “hot dogs or legs?” 

“I don’t get it,” I mumbled. 

“They kinda look like hot dogs, right? Like the color and everything. There’s like a whole bunch of different ones, where sometimes people take pictures of actual hot dogs by the pool, and sometimes they’ll put ketchup and mustard on what’s like obviously legs. It’s pretty funny.” 

She scrutinized my skinny jeans, tucked into Ugg boots with the bows vertical up the back. 

“You know,” she said, “In the summer, you probably could take a picture like that. You have a thigh gap, almost. That’s really cool. Sigh.” 

She said that, sigh, out loud, instead of actually doing it. She’d never said so much to me before. I wanted, suddenly, to tell her about the bats. She opened her mouth first: 

“You know, my mom was telling me to be careful walking to the bus. There’s some guy who’s always prowling around here now. He hasn’t like done anything yet, but just be careful. I’m telling you, like, woman to woman. You know?” 

I nodded. 

The benefit of not eating: I could kinda sleep. Around 7pm, with the final quadratic squared away in shaky pencil, I’d lie in bed, limbs too leaden to peel off the skinny jeans, and I’d pass out, literally. Dim, dreamless sleep. 

Sunday, I was unconscious for 12 straight hours. I dug myself from beneath the comforter, a weed pulled by my own hand. To the kitchen, for water. Mom watched me from the island. 

“Your father and I were talking,” she said, eyes darting to my birds’ nest of hair, “And what if we got you a smartphone? It might help with the math grade. There are, um, apps.” 

My brain was a dusted sponge drained of moisture. It held no words. Only sensations. I rubbed one hand over and over the other, finger thumbing bone bone b one. A blast of air-conditioning goose-pimpled my thighs and swooosh the air flew between my legs between the gap. 

“Phone. Is good.” I walked back.

To my back, Mom said, “You look really pretty these days.”

On my new phone, I downloaded my favorite albums on Google Play Music. I’d put the phone on carpet flooring, sound on full, and sway with the crepe myrtle to My Chemical Romance. The bats liked it. I watched YouTube tutorials for cat-eye liner. I practiced the black swoops on my eyelids in the windows’ reflection. I slid into my favorite off-the-shoulder shirts, protruding the dark angle of my collar bones. I danced and blew kisses and sang and twisted my hair up and down in the yellow light of my one lamp, and this made the bats very very happy. They loved my performances. 

I took pictures of myself. Above, below, in profile. Three-fourths twisted too far made me ugly. I calculated the perfect degree to hold my chin. I downloaded Instagram. I tacked up my pictures in the ether. I found Mercy, and read all her memes. In bed, bathed in blue light, my brain lit up. Sigh. Content. Rather, content. I didn’t mind the tree scraping the glass outside. I didn’t care about the sick glowing moon. I couldn’t hear the bat-squeaks. I fell asleep. 

It was a weekend when I woke with bruises. You get those sometimes, a spot overnight. But these were constellations blooming on my arms and legs. Teeny, purple-green, painful to touch. I’d left my window open just a crack. 

It was a weekday, when, walking from the bus, I saw a stump outside my window. Parked beside it was a service truck of bone-thin logs. Mercy walked several paces in front of me. I called out: “Hey, what’s up with these servicepeople?”

Mercy turned around. “My mom said management is putting more security cameras up. They’re worried about like crime. Like remember that guy I was telling you about who just keeps walking around at night?”

Indeed, in place of the crepe myrtle,  a metal pole sprouted. From it, they hung a security camera like a hawk’s beak. It stared straight into my window. 

“They’ll turn it around,” said Mom. “They’re still in the installing process. Obviously they’ll have it facing the street. Don’t be silly.”

Weeks passed, and the hawk still pointed its grey finger into my room. The little pinprick green eye winked every night. I never knew who was on the other side. I do know I never slept well in that house again.