CADY

Buddy's eyeliner tutorial

“People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like ‘be realistic.”

Now, whenever she thinks of it, she if confused about what she did and didn't cause. She if confused about desire, and her own desirability. She is confused about her own sexuality. It should be hers to wield as she wishes, she knows this, but why - even if she isn't wielding it, exactly, even if she's just being herself - is there the sense of a shameful invitation, or even an invitation at all? She knows she should be able to invite if she want to invite, to say no if she wants to say no, yes if she wants to say yes, to allure or not allure, to just simply feel good about what her body is and does and how it looks. She is supposed to be sure and confident about those things, but how can she possibly be sure and confident about those things? There are so many colliding messages - confidence and shame, power and powerlessness, what she owes others and what is her - that she can't hear what's true.

Danger was confusing. On the one hand, there was her mother, telling her that every street she has to cross, every car ride, every new person was a deathly risk. As a girl, too, she was told that she needed to be on guard against 50 percent of the human race, and she carried that awareness everywhere, ready to make use of it every time a car slowed next to her as she was walking, or she was driven home by the dad after babysitting. Every time she waited at a bus stop or was at a party with boys and alcohol or was just plain alone, she felt the high alert of vigilance. You could forget that some people don't live this way. Part of the population rarely even thinks like this. They just walk around without fear and wait at bus stops and go to parties.