While the headmaster circled around the room with a ruler to inspect the lengths of our nails, we meditated on the flies trapped between the wire mesh and the window pane, their batting wings as silent as our finger taps. 

This was a year before the last time we ever saw him, before words like arrested and molestation were passed from one girl to the next, each syllable flinching like pencil scratches on the notes we folded behind our teachers’ backs, the tips of our ears blooming pink. 

I think we all knew that Jill started it, whether you called it a rumor, or the truth, or the low hum of bodies just beginning to hear their own noise. Jill, who, that same year, played judge for recess hopscotch and gave extra points to whoever guessed the right number of ants curled on the ground afterwards, limp and lifeless next to our white sneakers, 

who, after Ashley and I sprained our ankles trying to prove to the boys that we could throw ourselves off the playground swing-set, taught us about the lizards, how they shed their tails when running from danger, how they do not even hesitate to unburden themselves of their own bodies. But even after weeks 

of dangling the small green reptiles between our fingers we never managed to see it happen, which convinced us that maybe they did it only in secret, only when they were certain there was no one there 

to witness how badly they craved survival. So after the new headmaster threatened to cut off our hair if we ever showed up to morning pledge with ponytails that weren’t tight enough, we began to gather 

in the restroom every morning, where, over sinks speckled with last night’s dead flies, their broken legs mistakable for our fallen eyelashes, we mastered 

the ritual of combing and pulling and splitting and stretching and sticking our bangs to our scalps with water or spit so quickly, so quietly,

that years later, my new lover is still surprised to find my hair already braided, every last strand already tucked away, each time he turns back around. And so I guess you could say we learnt everything from the insects, 

but really, we learnt everything from our mothers, who fished out tailless lizards from kitchen drawers, who stood patiently and waited for our fathers to crush the cockroach under his foot, 

who, afterwards, with a bottle of insecticide, hunted down every crevice of the house where she hid her eggs. Or maybe we never learnt anything at all, maybe that was the problem, that we weren’t willing to give up the parts of ourselves that were most painful, most cruel, most 

girl. That we needed our hair sleek so that the boys’ glances were furtive and envious, needed our nails sharp so that spots of blood hatched from the little crosses we dug into our mosquito bites, needed the ants

dead so that, in the last few minutes before the bell rang, in order to crown the winner of hopscotch, we all had to get down on our knees to count. 

Tiffany Wu is from Shanghai, China. She is currently studying Art History at Williams College, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Rattle and Rust and Moth.

Lauren Quin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including Pulse Train Howl (2022), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA, and group exhibitions such as Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection (2022), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and On Boxing (2021), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.