Hit Like a Girl

The sun is a peeled scab over Harsen Hollow, Arkansas, casting the whole goddamn town in that sickly pink-orange of shame. Something's bleeding in the sky and in her mouth. Macy licks her bottom lip again, tongue tasting copper, salt, memory. She spits on the grass behind the 7-Eleven and it lands dark. Blood’s old now. Crusted at the edge, cracked when she smiles, which she keeps doing by accident.

There’s a boy in the parking lot. There’s always a boy in a parking lot. This one’s got a mullet like he earned it and socks that read “Bite Me” in gothic script. He doesn’t look at her. No one does, not directly. Macy’s got that kind of face—too much in the mouth, eyes that blink slow like a toad deciding if it's worth it.

“What happened to your face?” says the cashier, a girl with four rings in one ear and a Mountain Dew slushie the color of toxic algae. She doesn’t mean it cruelly. She means it like you’d ask about the weather or a math quiz.

Macy shrugs. “Walked into a story.”

Cashier snorts. “Bet it walked into you.”

She licks again. The copper comes easy. She wants to eat it.

At home, the air smells like powdered ranch and dollar store candles labeled Serenity. Her mom is on the couch, half-asleep with her feet on a pile of unopened mail, reruns of CSI: Miami playing low. A yogurt sits on the floor next to her like a pet. Expired three weeks ago. Still half-full.

“You hit someone?” her mom mumbles without looking.

Macy stares at her for a full ten seconds before answering. “No.”

“You get hit?”

“No.”

“Jesus, Macy.”

That’s it. Jesus, Macy. Not a question. Not a condemnation. Just her name used like an old sock wrung out over the sink.

In the bathroom mirror, she examines herself with the reverence of someone hunting for a relic. Her face looks fine except for the lip, which has started to turn purple at the edge. Her braid is loose, not sexy loose, just tired. There’s a dried leaf in it. She leaves it there.

Last year, someone at school made a meme out of her. A blurry photo in gym class with the caption: MACEY GRACEY LOOKIN LIKE A GHOST FETUS. They spelled her name wrong and it still went viral. For a week, kids whispered “ghost fetus” in the hallways. She carried around a tampon in her mouth and didn’t smile. They stopped.

This is her legacy now. A town where girls are born to be homecoming queens, or bleach blonde at seventeen, or stay. Macy wants to be something else. A spore, maybe. Or a rumor.

She touches the split again. It pulses like a tiny mouth whispering try harder.

Outside, it’s full dark. She walks barefoot down the center of River Road where the asphalt’s still warm and everything smells like skunk cabbage and fireworks from last month’s fair. She’s not sure where she’s going. Maybe the water tower. Maybe that dead-end street where the stray dogs live like ex-boyfriends. She thinks about climbing something. She thinks about screaming. She thinks about how everything tastes like blood lately, even when she’s not bleeding.

She passes an abandoned bike, a sun-bleached tire swing, a Barbie missing her legs.

From somewhere deep inside: hit like a girl.

She smiles, and this time she means it.

They say she was always like this. Even when she was small.

Macy Grace Hanlon: age six, arms windmilling in a sundress at the Pentecostal picnic, dirt on her knees, popsicle stains tattooing her elbows, yelling at the sky because the clouds weren’t doing anything. She bit a boy for cutting in line at the bouncy castle. He told his mom. She said Macy was feral. Macy didn’t know what that meant, but she liked the sound of it. Said it all week in the bathtub. Feral. Feral. Feral. Like a charm, or a curse.

Her cousin told her that periods were when God bled you so you wouldn’t get too powerful. Macy believed her. Macy felt something crack open behind her ribs that night, something not quite pain and not quite voice. She pressed her palm flat against her sternum and whispered, “Don’t worry. We’ll lie to them.”

Church camp, age eleven. Someone found a raccoon skull in the creek and said it was a sign. Macy wore it on a string around her neck for two days before the counselors made her give it up. Said it was morbid. Said it wasn’t feminine. Macy said, “You want feminine? I’ll make you feminine.” She meant it like a threat, but also maybe like a wish.

That was the summer she kissed Lila Goodman during the night game in the chapel basement. Just for fun. Just to see. Lila cried after. Said she couldn’t sleep. Said she saw the devil in Macy’s eyes.

Macy laughed and said, “You probably did.”

Thirteen now, and the stories start to follow her like stray cats. Did you hear she doesn’t shave? Did you hear she put a frog in her bra and said it was her real heart? Did you hear she sleeps in the crawlspace? Did you hear she stole a boy’s shoes and buried them in the churchyard? Did you hear she’s been touched?

Macy doesn’t correct any of them. She starts walking with a limp. On purpose. She writes fake diary entries and leaves them in bathroom stalls:

“God told me to stop smiling. Says it confuses the men.”

“I’m not alone. I’m just waiting for the other girls to wake up.”

“She hit like a girl. Which is to say, with grace, and venom, and an ache that lived in her fists like hunger.”

The vice principal calls her mother. The mother shrugs and says, “She’s always been… artistic.”

Fifteen and Macy starts collecting things. Zippo lighters without fuel. Tiny locks with no keys. Lost earrings. Snaps from jeans. Notes passed between girls with the word forever scratched out. She hides them in an old shoebox behind the cemetery. The box is lined with the tag from her first training bra and a lock of her own hair, cut during an eclipse.

The shrine isn’t to God. It isn’t even to her. It’s to the girls who never got to finish.

One time she caught a bee in her hands and let it sting her thumb. Watched it die slow. She cried—not for the pain, but for how fast it was over. For the ugliness of that kind of devotion.

Sixteen now, and she’s leaning against the fence behind the school’s batting cages, kissing a boy named Wes. Wes is all chin and fingers and baseball sweat. She doesn’t like him. She likes how his teeth feel against hers. She likes the scrape, the blood in her mouth. He pulls away and says she tastes like pennies. She doesn’t tell him she’s bleeding. She lets him figure it out.

“Are you into this?” he asks, panting, mascara on his shirt like war paint.

Macy just smiles and says, “Define ‘this.’”

Wes doesn’t get it. He says she’s weird. She says, “Yeah, and?”

He calls her a freak. She walks away laughing.

In the shower that night, her lip starts bleeding again. The water turns pink around her knees. The cut reopens like it’s saying remember me.

Macy closes her eyes. Thinks about the girl in the mirror. Thinks about the Barbie with no legs. Thinks about the first time she understood she wasn’t safe in this world and how, instead of shrinking, she grew claws.

Somewhere between scalp and stomach, a storm starts.

Tomorrow, she decides, she’ll learn how to fight.

Not with fists.

Not exactly.

With something older.

Something you can’t teach in a gym.

Something you have to wake up.

First, you learn how to hold your breath.

Because girls don’t scream in this town unless they want to be told they’re hysterical.

Because girls don’t cry unless they want to be punished for the leak.

Because girls don’t speak unless they’ve sanded the edge off the truth.

So Macy Grace Hanlon learns to hold her breath.

At the dinner table, when her stepdad says, “Smiling suits you better,” like her mouth is something on loan.

In geometry, when the boy behind her draws a penis on her notebook and calls it modern art.

Outside the gas station, when a truck slows and someone whistles and her spine tries to climb back into itself like a frightened worm.

Hold your breath. Count to four. Let the heat simmer inside your ribs. Let it scald.

Second, you learn how to disappear.

You walk faster. Lower your eyes. Shrink your shoulders. You wear black so the stains don’t show. You stop wearing lip gloss, because someone said it’s asking for it. You start wearing lip gloss again, because fuck that.

You leave your body like a coat on a hook. You practice floating above it. You imagine your bones are made of wire and lightbulbs and you dare someone to smash you.

You learn to vanish while still being watched.

Third: you pay attention.

Because something’s changing. You can feel it. The world tilting on its axis. The mirror glitching. Something feral rising in your throat again and this time you don’t spit it out.

You notice other girls—how they carry keys between their fingers, blades between their smiles. How they start looking at you not like prey, but like prophecy.

You notice the bruise blooming on Amanda Baker’s thigh that wasn’t there yesterday.

You notice the lipstick mark on Chelsea Flint’s collarbone, and how she hides it like it’s shame and not scripture.

You notice Olivia Warren doesn’t come to school for two days after her brother’s friends throw her in the lake.

You notice how the principal says boys will be boys and how something inside you sours, curdles, breaks into flame.

You start writing things on your desk in Sharpie. Not poems. Not threats.

Spells.

“We’re not the broken ones.”

“Some of us were built to bite.”

“You hit like a girl. And I do, too.”

Fourth: you practice.

You don’t go to boxing classes. You go to the field behind the middle school and let the wind coach you. You punch trees and kiss the bark after. You wrestle with your own shadow until you’re both out of breath. You scream into a pillow until it tastes like iron. You press your thumb to your lip and remember what it means to bleed on purpose.

Your body’s not a temple. It’s a battlefield. It’s a haunted house. It’s a drum, and you’re learning how to beat it.

There’s no teacher. Just instinct. Just rage shaped like a girl.

You start walking differently—like you know something they don’t. Like you’ve made friends with the part of yourself you were taught to hide.

Girls ask you what changed.

You say, “I woke up.”

The night before everything, you dream about a field full of girls. Some with knives. Some with matches. Some just with their fists and teeth and trembling mouths.

You ask one, “What are we waiting for?”

She smiles with a cracked lip. Says, “We’re not.”

And then she runs.

And then they all do.

And you wake up breathless, tasting blood, already dressed.

Something’s coming.

And this time, it has your name.

The sun goes down like it’s ashamed. Big and red and sinking behind the rusted Walmart sign and the Dollar General with the flickering O. And Macy Grace Hanlon is walking. Not to school. Not to church. Not to cheer practice or detention or home.

She is walking toward it.

Nobody told her where it was. There was no flyer. No Instagram post. Just a heat in her ribs and a shimmer under her skin like static. Just a whisper between lockers and in bathroom stalls and through glances held a second too long:

Tonight. Field by the substation. Bring nothing but yourself.

She doesn't bring a coat. Doesn’t bring her phone. Doesn’t tell her mother. Doesn’t need to.

The field’s half-frozen, sharp with witchgrass and old beer cans, and the air hums like a wire strung too tight. There are girls there already. Seventeen of them. Maybe more. Not all she knows, but all she recognizes. The ones who never speak in class. The ones who speak too loud. The ones who cried after gym. The ones who never cry.

Amanda Baker’s there, bare-legged and barefoot. Chelsea Flint with her lipstick like blood and a tire iron in one hand. Little Sylvia Cho with fists like pearls, quiet as a secret.

They don’t smile when Macy Grace arrives. They nod. That’s all.

This is not the place for performance. This is the place for revelation.

A circle opens. Macy steps in.

The girl opposite her is Olivia Warren.

She has no bruises now. Just a split lip and wild eyes and two words written across her chest in sharpie: TRY ME.

Macy’s heartbeat is a freight train, a warning siren, the opening drum of war.

She doesn’t know the rules. She doesn’t need to.

Because the point isn’t to win. The point is to burn.

“Hit like a girl,” Olivia says, mouth blood-slick and smiling.

Macy does.

It’s not a fight. It’s a ritual. A sacrament. The oldest language.

There’s a slap like thunder. There’s a knee to the ribs. There’s hair caught in fingers and spit flung like holy water. There’s laughter. There’s screaming. There’s silence that cracks wide open.

Macy falls. Olivia falls. They rise again. Over and over. Girls hold them up. Girls hold each other. Girls touch the wounds like saints.

And when it’s over—when both of them are panting and smeared with red and snot and earth—they don’t shake hands.

They kiss.

Not pretty. Not sweet. Not for show. Just real—a messy, broken, iron-wrought kiss that says I see you. I survived you. I am you.

And all the girls in the circle stomp their feet like drums. Like a funeral march. Like the beginning of something better.

Later, bruised and holy, Macy walks home barefoot.

The streetlights buzz like flies. Her lip throbs. Her knuckles sing. She doesn’t wipe the blood away. Doesn’t look in windows. Doesn’t lower her eyes.

She passes her stepdad’s car and doesn’t flinch.

Passes the boys outside the gas station and they look away first.

She gets home. Doesn’t sneak. Doesn’t lie. Doesn’t say a word.

She stands in the mirror. Sees the cracked mouth, the blooming cheek, the copper halo of herself. She touches her lip. She smiles.

Somewhere behind her ribs, the drum keeps going.

Somewhere in town, a boy wakes up sweating and doesn’t know why.

Somewhere, a girl whispers the story to another.

“Hit like a girl,” she says.

And the other girl nods.

And bares her teeth.

And begins.