Little Eden
- Margaret Dunn
- Sep 30
- 15 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Outside it was buggy. In a plastic bag I carried window cleaner, oranges, and waxy cold cuts. I’d already split one of the navels and thumbed out a slice, the pith thickening under my nails. I was walking home from the grocer’s, peeling an orange and trying to step on each crack. I glanced back at a crack where a tree root split the pavement and saw him then. Thin, dark-haired, rosacea up his arms and neck. He’d helped me reach a honeydew at the store. Now he was a house down, rubbing himself.
The bag bounced against my hip. King turned into 7th, 7th into Almeda. The directions on my wrist had smeared. No sign for 7th, and he was getting closer. It blurred—yards, split-levels, the same sedan at the curb. My breaths were fast and wet. His were, too.
“What the fuck are you doing?” A girl came off her porch, striding across the lawn. Her T-shirt hung like a nightgown. “Motherfucker,” she yelled. “Put that away.”
I grabbed her hand, crying. In the other, she held a brick—hurled it, breaking a piece on the blacktop. He staggered away. We ran up the steps, looking back. He was gone. A neighbor’s sprinklers kicked on. The brick left a cut of white in the asphalt.
Her name was Judith. She said it like I should already know. I’d say it a lot that summer. Late May, the summer in its infancy. She was thin as a hanger, with tangled brown hair and a gap she licked at as she talked. She made me sit on the tile and hold her little dog. I braided its fur.
“He’s the only decent boy I know,” she said.
Judith walked me home. Told me to use what happened to get a cell phone. “Then we can text.” In a beach bag, she’d tucked a kitchen knife and fingered it when cars passed. The house I was staying in was close by, and she followed me to the door.
“Never be afraid to hit, scream, bite,” she said, her palm damp on my arm. Somewhere, a baby cried. “God gave you teeth. Use them.”
I watched her disappear. The door was unlocked. Inside, the house smelled hot and mildewy. I sat on the carpet to take off my sneakers. The man’s thighs had been white like milk.
My mother cried on the drive to the police station and again in the interview room. The detective gave us water in Dixie cups and asked questions from a checklist. They wanted to know his height, what he was wearing, what I was wearing. Whether I talked to strangers online. Nothing came of it.
We stayed at my uncle’s for the summer—a bungalow outside Asbury Park, a few blocks from the shore, with one mattress and lichen growing in the tile seams. My uncle was living in the city, handling the sale of our Newark place to cover my mother’s debts: the gum-colored Subaru, the leafblowers for a lawn we didn’t have. He called often. I told him we were okay, and we were. We shared the mattress and the t-shirts we slept in. I’d shake her prescription bottle and sometimes thought about trying one, just to see what it was like inside her head. She’d spent the spring at a facility. We didn’t talk about those weeks. Things were better. She liked walking to the pier to pick up trash. I got a babysitting job and fell hard for Judith. A few days after we met, she asked if I wanted to watch some Latino boys play basketball, then came by in the days that followed, too. Judith talked a lot—her voice curling like vapor between us. She hated bugs, cicadas especially, and offered to pierce my ears and cut holes in my jeans. I stood in her bedroom as she snipped the denim with craft scissors. Judith was fifteen, two years older than me, but she said I was an old soul. That’s why we got on like a house on fire.
It all started the night she asked me to take pictures of her. It was so hot we held ice cubes to our temples walking to the beach, Judith collecting shells in a plastic bag tied to her shorts.
She said every Instagram photo was for one person, and hers were for Ian. He was seventeen, with nice eyes but hair cut too close to the scalp. Judith showed me pictures. He drove a two-tone Corolla I saw everywhere—under poplars on Almeda, at 7/11. They’d done things in the backseat and texted sometimes. He replied like words cost a dollar apiece.
Judith wanted to take pictures at my place, but I said my mom had guests over, which wasn’t true. She looked at me like she knew, then said we could go to the beach. The sand was cold, waves coming in like breaths. She pulled off her clothes, toying with her bikini, then handed me her phone. Judith appeared in bursts of light: in the shallows, on her knees, hands in her hair, cheek resting on her shoulder. For a moment, she was someone else—lips parted, eyes wet, wanting and wanted.
“How are they?”
“Really good.”
“As long as they’re good enough to post. At some point, I’ll need serious ones.” She sank lower, chin breaking the water. “You know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but felt like I should, so I didn’t ask. Judith insisted I come in. No swimming after dark, but there we were, hair flipped back as the tide pulled and released us. It felt like being held.
That night, I fell into bed with salt still crusted beneath my nails. My mother rubbed my back as Judith’s messages came in—images: Judith in the water, on her knees, mouth parted.
Which pic is best?
For what?
For sharing.
Some afternoons, I looked after a little girl with a lagoon-shaped pool. We’d sit on the steps, watching pollen drift over the surface. Lottie was five or six, her Barbies shoeless and topless. I tried to dress the naked ones, but she liked to make them swim, then leave them drying with their legs raised. One June weekend, as we walked from the patio in swimsuits, a car honked behind the thinning firs—a two-tone Corolla. Ian’s. I crossed my arms, skin cold in the damp nylon. The polka-dot pattern felt cheap, newly clumsy. Lottie kept singing, swinging her Barbie by the ankle.
“Be gentle with her,” I said.
“I’m gentle.”
“Not really.”
“Get your own,” she said.
Usually my mom picked me up, but that day she didn’t answer. Lottie’s father drove me home through the rain. Inside, the kitchen floor was strewn with plates and yellowing paperbacks, rows of aerosol sunscreens. A limp pool inflatable hung from a cabinet, and the tap ran over nothing. Voices drifted from the den. It was cluttered with things that belonged elsewhere, too: brass lamps, ashtrays, quilts. Pill bottles lining the mantle beside raw, blue cleaning fluids. The walls were patterned with squares where something had hung. Judith knelt on the sofa. She laughed when she saw me.
“Why are you drenched?” she said. “Don’t you touch anything.”
My mother murmured hello, stepping over some rugs to kiss my cheek. Her undershirt wrinkled, nipples showing through.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Judith.
“Need your help cutting bangs. Want a new profile pic.”
“I was at work.”
“I know.”
“She’s helping me swap some furniture.” My mother’s eyes shift from thing to thing. “We can make it more harmonious, feng shui—”
“I just saw Ian, like a block over,” I said. “Bet he’s still there if you wanna walk by.”
“Shut up. Take me.”
The rain had stopped. Judith was humming and everything felt naked. At the yard with lawn flamingos, I told her he must’ve left. She pressed her tongue to her teeth.
“You’re such a liar. You almost got me.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry. Double down. That’s how you get away with things.”
“Ian was here,” I said. “I just saw him.”
“There you go.”
I walked her halfway home so we both had a better chance of not getting abducted.
Before parting, she made me run through sprinklers. Breathless, she stopped to look at herself in a car window, wringing water from her hair.
“Your mom’s nice,” she said. “I liked her.”
“She’s got stuff in her head,” I said. “People can be mean about it. Girls at my school.”
“Whores, then.”
The weeks fell into one another. In late June, my mother got a job with an insurance company, started coming home in burgundy tights, sitting in front of the TV, dabbing nail polish over runs. Sometimes she fell asleep like that. The bipolar still bled through, she said. The meds made her tired, but the episodes were milder. I started sleeping at Judith’s some nights. Her mother stayed in the city, but her father was tall and always yelling—she’d tracked sand in, posted a photo with too much skin. Used his razor to shave her legs. One night, he found silky lingerie she’d taken from her mother and raged, shoving a fork into the garbage disposal to scare her. In her bedroom, I picked at the comforter, trying not to listen. She slipped in a few minutes later, lying down beside me.
“Christ, sorry about that.” She pulled at a strip of skin on her cuticle, then pressed the cut to her mouth. “He needs those downers your mom takes. Something to make him chill out.”
The yelling started again. Her dad told me to call my mother, who came to get me in rainboots and boxers. It took her a second—she’d been in bed, she said. I walked home in the street, her on the sidewalk. At the house, I pretended to fall asleep on the couch with the TV still going. At some point, she tried to carry me to bed, but I pushed her hands away.
The next night, I was back at Judith’s. We dressed her dog in scarves and let him lick peach schnapps from our fingers. She’d nicked the bottle from the liquor cabinet, and we passed it back and forth under the sheets, the florals hanging over us like a tent. After a while, everything seemed to hum.
“You think I’m pretty?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“I think I am, too.” Her breath was sugary. “Someone told me I am. Not my mom or someone who’d say it anyway—someone who’d say if I wasn’t.”
“Who?”
“Ian. You want to see the texts?”
I knew Ian only from the photos Judith showed me, the glimpses of his Corolla around town. It wasn’t until July—the weekend after the schnapps—that I met him. A fishing expo was going on at the boardwalk. A trout hung from a rope on the stage. Judith made me pose next to it, the fish’s belly slick in the flash. She was all teeth. In the bathroom, she tied her top tighter around her ribs, then did mine the same way. We drank vodka while hunched over the sink. It was warm going in, hot going down. Judith rubbed my back as I spit it back up.
Down on the beach, they’d lit up a bonfire. People were talking and drinking; someone threw a chair into the flames. I watched it crack and fold, the heat tightening my skin. Judith was chatting with people. Her arms draped over me, then not. There are holes in the night, in the order of things, but at some point, Ian was there. He was talking and I was saying things back, focused more on how the words sounded than what they meant.
“You’re taller than I thought,” I said. “I’ve seen pictures. You’re taller in real life.”
“You’re funny,” he said. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re funny?”
“No one.”
He laughed. I couldn’t look at his eyes so I watched his throat instead. There was a knot there, like a fist stuck halfway down.
“Come here,” he said. “I want to tell you something.”
He leaned in, and for a second I felt the warmth of him—then his tongue, wet over my ear. The blood was loud as I stumbled off to find Judith, the whole beach at a tilt. She and some boys were drawing dicks in the sand with driftwood. I sat down, holding myself. They were laughing as bits of lit ash wafted up around them, and I was thinking of that man and his thighs. The look on his face, what he did with his hands. He’d said I had a nice smile, standing there in the aisle of the grocery store. I’d said thanks. You do too.
Judith was suddenly all around me—above, beside, settling in the sand with her bare leg against mine, a rasp of unshaved hair grazing my skin. She wore someone else’s sweatshirt: its sleeves long, flapping in the wind. Some boy trailed behind her—braces, all limbs.
“So did you use Photoshop or something?” he asked her, the vape flashing in the dark below his lips.
“On what?”
“Your pictures,” he said. “You’ve got some mosquito bite tits.”
Judith had sent Ian pictures. Not the ones we took together, but ones she’d taken alone: crouched in front of her mirror, legs parted on the carpet. Something lacy of her mother’s pulled up around her thighs, her mouth slightly open. Ian said she was pretty. Then he showed the pictures to other boys to see if they agreed.
In the days after the bonfire, Judith barely left the house. When she did, she’d sit under the poplars with her hood up, buying cigarettes off the landscapers, picking at the moles on her chest until they bled. I pressed tissues to her skin. She said people were staring, that they were talking about her. I told her they weren’t, but didn’t know if it was true.
Late in July, I convinced her to come babysitting. She sat poolside with one leg in the water, eating a popsicle while Lottie and I swam.
“You want to come in?” I asked.
“No.”
“Doesn’t that hurt? Biting it like that?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It hurts.”
After a while, I hoisted myself out to sit beside her. Lottie lay in the grass singing to
herself.
“Why did this happen to me?” Judith asked.
“I don’t know.”
Her fingers were stained blue from the popsicle. She was holding one of Lottie’s Barbies, bending its legs backwards.
“I saw how he touched you that night,” she said.
“Jude, I never—”
“I know. I’m not mad at you for being pretty.”
“Tell me how to help,” I said. “Let me help.”
“Kill him.”
“I’m being serious.”
Judith looked up at the sun.
It was early August. The naked ladies were blooming, and wasps hovered over anything sweet—soda cans and slices of melon. In the bathroom, I curled my hair and drank vodka and lemon juice from a plastic mug, watching my reflection change. At some point, I noticed my mother watching me in the doorway. Her veins showed through her stockings, through the skin of her arms.
“Your eyeshadow looks good,” she said finally. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Online.”
She smiled a little. “My growing girl. Plans tonight?”
“Helping Judith with something.”
“Maybe tomorrow we go somewhere fancy. Just the two of us.”
I wound the last section of my hair around the wand, the heat throbbing at my neck, and didn’t look at her.
“You don’t want to?” she asked.
I watched the curl release, too loose. It smoked faintly and dropped to my shoulder.
“I just don’t believe it,” I said. “You don’t even get out of bed.”
When I turned, she hadn’t moved—one hand at her throat like she was holding something down, the other scratching at some peeling paint on the doorway.
I yanked the iron from the socket. “Do you need anything else?”
My thighs kept sticking to the passenger seat of the Corolla. Inside it smelled almost sour, like damp swimsuits. Ian asked if I was cool to stop at a kickback. His friends were there, he said. He drove one-handed, the other twisting the radio knob. Stations kept cutting into each other. I peeled my legs from the seat every few minutes.
“Surprised you texted, to be honest,” he said, lowering the volume. “Thought you and Jude were tight.”
“She doesn’t care. She’s seeing someone else.”
“Good shit, then.”
Through the windshield, the streets softened in evening light. Ian talked about who’d be there, this one girl everyone called The Hole. He didn’t. It was cruel, he said, and I agreed.
Judith had prepped me on what to say and how to be. There’d be a window, she said—a few seconds when he was out of the car. I’d hide the baggies in the back of the glove compartment, then make an excuse to leave. My stomach hurts, I’d say. My mother is wrong in the head. The wristlet sat by my feet, everything inside. Little sandwich baggies, stuffed with her Lithium, Xanax, and Klonopin.
At a red light, Ian grabbed a six-pack from the back seat. It was a kind I’d never seen before, with melting graphics, a snake curling among the letters. Liquid courage, Judith had texted. I drank one, working the pop tab back and forth until it broke, then had another.
“Christ, you know how to hang,” Ian said.
The kickback was in someone’s yard. The ground was layered with quilts and damp beach towels that clung to the grass. The people there were Ian’s age—older, looser. A handful of guys, two sunburnt girls. They looked up when we arrived, then at each other, with one girl whispering to the other as we dropped onto a corner of the blanket. It smelled like weed, the tang of citronella. Someone passed me a Solo cup full of something clear, then a blunt. It looked like it was wilting. I held for too long and then exhaled too fast. No one said much to me. I chewed the rim of my cup and tried to figure out which girl was The Hole. I laughed at what Ian said without catching all of it. My cup emptied fast. I didn’t know where to put my hands.
After a while, I told Ian I was cold. I said I’d left my sweatshirt in the Corolla, needed the keys to grab it.
“I’ll come with.”
I said it was fine, but he was already standing. He walked close enough that our elbows brushed, and we crunched together down the gravel drive. At the curb, he cracked open another beer and handed it to me.
“You ever shotgun one?” he asked.
I shook my head. He pulled a key from his pocket, knifing the side of the can. The liquid hissed. I tried to follow what he showed me—mouth to the puncture, tilt, swallow—but I choked halfway through, coughing as it streamed down my neck.
Ian laughed. “You’re okay,” he said, pressing his sleeve to my throat. “You’re okay.”
Later I was in the bathroom—my lips below the faucet, drinking. I fell against the mirror and wiped the droplets from my mouth, then looked hard at my eyes, the flecks in them, and said aloud to pull it together. Back outside, the sky had bruised. It was purple and swollen and I sat down on the beach towels, our corner now rumpled and off-center, shifted by others coming and going. New, long-haired boys sat with their legs spread. Someone was clapping and one of the girls was touching my hair, brushing it from my face.
“She’s drunk,” she said. “You okay?”
I was saying I’m fine, yes, thank you. Thank you.
We were in the car, and I was asking to go home. The headlights slowed in front of a fence, a thicket of trees, then shut off. In the distance, I could see a yellow light—the kind of traffic signal that just blinks. Then his weight was on me, the heaviness of his thighs, and the pressure. His beard against my skin, the heat and smell. After a while, I let my hands go limp and counted the blinks of the stoplight through the trees.
Then it was my house, my uncle’s, and the car slowing again. It all hurt. Then he was opening the passenger door, helping me do up my shorts. I watched his fingers pull the metal button through the cut in the denim and opened my eyes to see the brown, chevron pattern of the couch in the den. It was morning, the light cold. Two missed calls from Judith, nine from my mother.
Those next few days, we waited. I took baths and scratched at the grime that gathered in the corners of the tub, ate mayonnaise slicked over wheat crackers and not much else. In her backyard, Lottie built a fort out of cardboard. She had me crawl inside with her one afternoon, and as she pointed to the kitchen, to the bedroom, I remember thinking she was fat. At some point, I laid my head against the grass, then woke to her father shaking me, the sun low in the sky. He said if I kept that up, they’d have to find someone else. I said maybe they should. On the fifth day, I walked the shore to Loch Arbor and back. Everything was grey—the water and the sky, the kids in their swim trunks. The waves came in like little tongues. Judith met me on the beach, a foil-wrapped sandwich under her arm. We sat together in the sand and watched gulls fight over cigarette butts.
We had to give it time, she insisted, before trying again to plant the benzos in the Corolla.
Maybe I’d have to hang out with him somewhere not related to the car—just so he wouldn’t catch on. Thankfully, most everything we did out here was tied to it anyway. Judith said all this quickly, parting the bread of her sandwich and picking out the onion bit by bit. The fibers were dark and wet in her hand.
“Now that summer’s almost over, I can eat this stuff,” she said. “Want some?”
I shook my head.
“It’s good that you guys have decided to stay here—you and your mom. So we can get this done. You’ll see him around town and all that.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve seemed off these past few days.”
A callus hung off the inside of my foot, and I pulled hard until the skin came apart. “I’m fine—I don’t know. I’m glad it’s done.”
She was quiet for a moment, then threw the slivers of onion to the gulls. “Maybe you have the same thing as your mom, you know.”
I turned to look at her. The bit of mayo on the rim of her lip, her hair going in the wind.
Judith.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”
I told her I couldn’t sleep over that night—that I wasn’t feeling well. Her father was supposed to pick us up from the beach, but I said my mom was coming. It wasn’t true. I walked the back roads home in the rain. My sweatshirt was wet and heavy, and water collected between my toes. When I reached the bungalow, things had quieted a little. Wind chimes lined with dew hung from the porch, and the grass of the yard was scalped, nearly washed out. Inside, everything was warm. In the bedroom, my mother was among the pillows, dim in the light of her phone. I stripped off my wet clothes and laid them over the radiator, then crawled in beside her, bare and goosepimpled. She said nothing, only put down the phone and pulled me closer into the warmth of her. I pressed my lips to her skin.
About the Author
Margaret Dunn is an MFA candidate in fiction at Boston University, where she serves as a senior teaching fellow and Leslie Epstein Global Fellow. Her short stories have received the University of Pennsylvania’s Honors Thesis Prize and have appeared in Princeton’s Nassau Literary Review and Flash Fiction Magazine. She is currently working on a novel.