Girl Unwrapped by Gabriella Goliger

a small yellow ball behind her head. It’s a trick that came to her some time ago in the dentist’s chair when the whine of the drill was so unbearable she just had to escape. Suddenly, amazingly, she could, she did. Now she continues to stare at Arnold with deadly calm, letting him know she can wait him out. The gleeful certainty in his face becomes confusion, his eyes drop, his grip loosens. Finally he rolls off her, with an embarrassed shrug. When she’s on her feet again, he claps her back to show there are no hard feelings. She’s one of his men, after all.
    “Anyway, even if girls do pee blood when they grow up, that won’t happen to me,” Toni crows. “I’m not like other girls.”
    “That’s true, you aren’t,” Arnold admits, but there’s an unsettled question in his voice.
    The game of Indians and Settlers begins, a game of stealth and strategy, of hiding, searching, and killing with pointed-finger guns. The boys whoop as they give chase through the underbrush. The woods resound with yells and mouth explosions, the snap of twigs, the splash of rocks in the shallow pond. Everyone except Toni is caught and killed and freed and killed again. None of the boys can hide as well as she does. They give themselves away, almost immediately, with an impatient grunt, the need to taunt their pursuers. They never want to stay hidden for very long, whereas Toni does. Stretching out on the ground behind a log, she covers herself with branches and disappears. She becomes a thing, hard, impenetrable, unmoving, just like the dead tree that shelters her. She knows that once, long ago, her father flattened himself into a paper-doll figure and lay, barely breathing, under a tumbled heap of books in the attic of his shop while the Nazis crashed around in the room below. Papa, too, knew how to leave his body.
    In the distance, she hears her name.
    “Toni! Toni! We’re going home without you.”
    The calls become fainter and fainter. She falls into a great, deep, tranquil silence that wraps itself around her like an eiderdown quilt. Dampness from the ground seeps through her trousers, bugs crawl about, but she is happy and busy within herself. All that exists is this little patch of earth beneath her elbow. Look at last-year’s leaves that have been disintegrating into the forest floor. They are stiff, stark skeletons, intricately branched. Look how one leaf vein connects to another and how they spread out to mirror the shape of the full-blown tree.
    “Toni! Toni!”
    An anguished voice punctures her dream world. Peeking through the brush, she spies a hat, a long lean figure, and a grimacing, ashen face.
    “Hi, Papa,” she says sheepishly.
    He sucks in his breath with a strangled sound. His eyes hold horror. They are fixed upon her face, but it’s not his Toni he sees. There’s no daughter here, no precious little girl. Instead, he sees a sight so dreadful it eats him up from inside.
    “Wha … what?” he gasps. He points a long shaking finger. “What have you done to yourself?”
    She touches her face and her hand turns red. She sees what he sees: blood, gore, mutilation.
    “It’s okay, Papa. It’s just the lipstick. We put it on our faces for war paint.”
    She wipes her face with her arm to demonstrate the truth of her words. They walk out of the woods together in shamed, crushing silence. How could she kill her papa yet again?

chapter 5
    The landlord wants to raise the rent by five dollars, and the Nutkevitches next door are on the move—two facts that send Lisa into a rage. How dare that skinflint ask more for an apartment with gaps, cracks, rust stains, pipes that groan like old men complaining, and windows with broken pulleys that could crash down and chop off your head?
    How dare the Nutkevitches find their dream house in the suburbs first? Lisa learned about their neighbours’ happy prospects after running into Mrs Nutkevitch at the produce section of Steinberg’s. Mr Nutkevitch—a shoichet , a