Literary court, juvie edition: "Little Beast" by C Pam Zhang, Best American Short Stories 2021

I've played "literary court" a few times before when looking into entries from Best American Short Stories. Once was with Mary Gaitskell's "Pleasure" and another was with Danielle Evans' "Boys Go to Jupiter." It's an idea I stole from my son's middle school English teacher. One year, they had the class divide up into prosecution, defense, judge, and jury and argued over whether a character from a story was guilty of murder, based on the text. I thought it was lame then, but I guess I've come to change my mind, because I keep raiding the idea over and over. 

This year's going to be a little different, though. There's no arguing that our protagonist, called "Girlie" by her father, is guilty. At the very end of "Little Beast," we learn that she has apparently poisoned her father with an overdose of sleeping pills. It's going to be a charge of manslaughter or reckless negligence, rather than murder, because she didn't kill him on purpose. Instead, she needed to drug him in order to carry out her other crime, which was faking photos and evidence that suggested her father had sexually assaulted her. 

She's definitely guilty. It seems she's already confessed to the crime of lying about sexual violence and waiting for her punishment when the authorities bring her the news that her father is dead. 

What drove her to such a rash, reckless, and perhaps "beastly" action? Even though the death was accidental, the staging of a sexual crime wasn't. Let's assume we are the person assigned to determine what to do with her, and we are using the text of this story--how did it come to us? I don't know. It just did--to determine how "beastly" Girlie's actions were, or whether we can understand what led her to her fateful decisions. 

Motivating factor #1: "slopping"

The opening line is something of a head-scratcher. "At thirteen, I felt my body slopping." How does a body "slop"? When I think of slopping, I think of a bucket full of water that's being carried, and the movement of being carried makes the water slap and slosh around and spill over the sides. How does a body "slop"? Doesn't a body come with skin to contain all that slopping? 

Reading on, "slopping" is Girlie's word for two character traits she abhors. One is oversharing, in which sense the thing "slopping" out would be too much personal information, particularly of an uninteresting nature. "I spilled into conversations and overshared the banal." Girlie's father is an oversharer extraordinaire,  "He laughed too loud. In public, he was fond of asking what had clogged our toilet, what size training bra I wore." 

That's one half of what "slopping" is to her. Of course, there are two parts to water in a bucket slopping. It goes forward and back. The second half of the meaning of "slopping" for Girlie is being too interested in what others have to say. It's being too eager to please, which Girlie sees as a kind of weakness. "My posture was liquid and my spine nonexistent," she criticizes herself, then uses the same weak spine imagery for her father leaning forward to hear her speak. "I mumbled, which made him bend closer. In his soft spine, in his supplicant's pose, I saw and despised myself." 

Girlie is mortified at how much of her father's natural, affable weakness has invaded her. An avid biology student, she thinks about how his "DNA ran riot through my cells...his shamefulness breaking out, like acne, over me." 

Girlie sees this over eagerness to both know and be known by others as "supplication," that is, begging. Begging for approval, begging to be noticed. She dislikes begging, because, as the scholarship student at an uber-rich girls' school whose father is the janitor, she already feels like she is too much seen as a recipient of charity. 

Motivating factor #2: the desire to be unknowable 

The opposite of an accommodating, "slopping" personality is someone who is a complete enigma, someone who tries neither to understand others nor to be understood. Girlie is not interested in being friends with most of the girls in her school, because none of them contain any secrets. She has already learned their secrets through her father's janitorial work: "...because my father was Alta's night janitor, he knew their secrets by way of secretaries and cafeteria ladies, by way of lockers and trash cans." Girlie isn't interested in these knowable, sloshy girls.

What does interest her are the four "a bit strange" girls at Alta. "Not glowing but shadowed girls, skinny wraiths with bitten nails, dark circles, dry hair." These "shadowed" girls are wrapped in mystery and keep their secrets. "Under Alta's bright lights, these girls' lashes drew vertical bars over their eyes. More than anything, I wanted to know what inside them needed caging." 

Motivating factor #3: longing for control

Girlie ends up becoming one of the strange girls when she develops an eating disorder. She sees her father's obesity as an outward sign of his inward sloppiness/slopping/slovenliness, and Girlie views her anorexia as "the discipline to shape" herself differently. In other words, as many researchers of eating disorders have found, her eating disorder is about her trying to gain control. The same seems to be true of the other four "strange" girls. 

Girlie stumbles into anorexia almost by mistake, but she studies the other girls and tries to mimic their other attempts to control and to push away the world. She pretends to be a cutter, but can't. Girlie has obstacles in her path to becoming like the other girls, precisely because she has been given so much love by her father. "I was poor in neglect, in that cold, instructive pain...I'd had dinners of chicken and mashed potatoes, dutifully stirred halfway through heating so that they neither burnt nor froze my tongue." 

As a result, Girlie fails to truly become one with the "clot" of other girls. She becomes what she has always hated, a desperate, fawning acolyte of the girls, trying to get them to like her. "I spoke from the edge of my seat, spit flying, my spine curving toward my audience of four." It's this failure to be seen as damaged on the level of the other girls that forces Girlie to her ultimate expedient of pretending her father has molested her. She wanted to be mysterious, aloof, and in control, but she is none of these things, which forces her to her last resort. 

Motivating factor #4: The news

Girlie has time on her hands while her father cleans the school at night, and she often occupies it watching the news. There, she finds all the lurid, barely euphemized violence against women that seems like it's been the lead of local news for as long as I've known what local news programs were. "Late at night the coverage gave way to the faces of girls and what was done to their bodies. Staticky clips from dispatcher calls. Teary interviews. But loudest of all, the silence. Newscasters resorted to euphemisms even as the screen showed photo after bloody photo." 

Girlie finds the same type of stories in the backs of magazines at the library. Stories of women being abducted, imprisoned, raped, and terrified by men. Girlie associates these stories of women being trapped with her own predicament when her father is knocking on the bathroom door, wanting to make sure she is okay. The women in the news were made captive by males intent on evil; Girlie is made captive by her father's all-too-present love. This association makes her lash out at her father, calling him a pervert for wanting to see her. This accusation makes the father leave her alone, fleeing from "the thing inside me." It's her frequent contact with the violence in the news more then anything that puts the "beast" inside her. It's the news that awakened her to the "clot of violence" which she ends up wanting to join.

How mitigating are these motivations? 

Is Girlie a beast, or is she a victim of a society that fetishizes neglect and violence? Should we send her to the juvie slammer, or should we try to help her with therapy? Is she someone to fear, or someone to pity, as much as she would hate our pity? 

Had she not accidentally killed her father with an overdose of sleeping pills, she would probably have straightened out on her own. She was planning her own acts of contrition while waiting for her father to arrive, and it seemed like she had come to terms with accepting his love as better than whatever misguided adulation she could get from faking abuse. If only he hadn't died, things probably would have worked themselves out. 

This story somewhat follows the logic of horror, in which the universe tends to give people the punishment they deserve. I think a juvie judge could probably afford to go easy on girlie. If the punishment is too lenient, the universe will probably take care of it. 

Speaking of horror, it's rumored that Hollywood types read BASS, trolling for ideas. "Little Beast" probably makes the best movie/series crossover of all the winning stories this year. I mean, I wouldn't watch it. Horror movies scare me, and not in a good way. So do goth girls. But I can see how this story is a rich vein that could be tapped visually. I hope someone's got sense enough to mine it. Sounds like Karen Carlson would watch it.