Fear, power, and the fear of power: "That Girl" by Addie Citchens

When we first meet her, Theo is beneath an awning on a porch that almost acts like a cave in which she is hibernating. "Underneath the huge, old, rusty awning, it was three shades darker and ten degrees cooler than in the street." It's a place of retreat and safety from "the street," where dangers lurk. Theo is in her early teens, about to arrive at a point in life where she cannot hide from danger anymore. Some dangers, in the form of her mother, Jane, who occasionally hits her, have already come to her, although Jane's recent marriage to Roger has temporarily tamed Jane's violent streak. Still, Theo prefers places of quiet retreat, just as she feels more comfortable reading inside her own head, where words make sense, to reading out loud, where she has a stutter. 

Shirlee first appears on the street in front of her house, where Theo is spending the summer reading on the porch, and this is the moment when Theo realizes she is lonely and longs for some kind of connection to the world outside the cave of isolation. Whether Shirlee is--as Jane believes--herself one of those dangers of the street outside the cave, or if she merely brings knowledge of those dangers, she eventually comes into Theo's sanctuary on the porch, rather than tempting Theo to come outside. This is a pattern that will repeat itself. There are two ways to end the isolation of being in a room alone. One is to open the door and leave, the other is to open the door selectively to others so they can come in. Theo much prefers the second method, perhaps because it feels safer to her, but as any cyber security expert will tell you, leaving ports open in a firewall, while necessary in order to be able to do fun stuff like watch videos and chat with people, also leaves you vulnerable to threats. 

Theo experiments with various possible apertures to take her outside her cave of safety. There are books. Theo first reads an unnamed story "about England in the First World War" with Shirlee, finding, to her surprise, that she is no longer stuttering when reading in Shirlee's presence. Her first attempt at letting someone into her zone of safety seems to have helped her out of isolation. There are Roger's songs that he plays when he comes home, forming a diegetic soundtrack to the story. But the main doors she leaves open are literal ones for Shirlee to sneak into the house, first during the day when Jane is gone, and then later during the evening so they can do "secret, sweet stuff" with each other that one can only do at night. 

The second and third books are a book about murderers she selects to entertain Shirlee with and a romance novel she hopes to read when she is forced to go to Bible study. The book about murders is a good example of a door she leaves open into her life that brings both pleasure and fear, as she and Shirlee do, as expected, enjoy reading it together, but once she's read it, it leaves Theo worrying about murderers. One night, when she leaves the door open for Shirlee to sneak in, Theo worries that a murderer might sneak in first, showing she has realized the vulnerabilities that leaving portals open into your life entail.

She briefly imagines, along with Shirlee, taking the fight to the threat by hatching a plot to kill men who would otherwise do violence to women. Beyond the book, Shirlee has already learned about the threat from men when her principal molested her. Their plot involves luring men to let them into their cars, where they would then kill them, but Theo finds herself not up to breaking down the doors into the lives of others. When she thinks of carrying out the plan, she trembles with "fear, and power, and the fear of power." 

Shirlee comments more than once that Theo is a "scary ass" (meaning scaredy-cat) or a "scary Mary," because Shirlee is much less afraid of breaking doors down to go get what she wants. When they go to the house of an older boy to get pot in exchange for sexual favors, Shirlee walks in without fear, while Theo can't even wait for Shirlee to reappear from the back and has to leave the house, locking herself out in the process, and then stumbling back home where she barely manages to let herself back into safety. Theo is curious enough to let others in selectively, but she also knows her mind enough to know when a new adventure is too much for her. 

Icarus doesn't fall but he does get the door to his room taken off

The threat of Jane is kept at bay for most of the first two-thirds of the story, because she is too busy being happy with Roger to take much note of Theo. We will later realize that Jane, helped out by tattling from older cousin Keita, has half-suspected that Theo was running around with Shirlee, including the suspicion that Theo was a "bulldagger" or "dyke," which seems to upset Jane more because of how it would appear to the church-going crowd than anything. Jane breaks into Theo's room when Shirlee is there, and after Shirlee runs away, she attacks Theo with an extension cord. Theo curses herself and Shirlee for getting greedy and bringing Shirlee over too soon, but the worst effect of them flying too close to the sun isn't the bruises Theo gets. It's that Jane has Roger take off the door to her room. Now Theo has no ability to control who enters her quiet inner space. She has no quiet inner space left, no interior life. It's all laid bare to everyone. It's the personal space equivalent of being completely hacked, where the hackers now have access to all your information.

Worse for Theo, the hackers, in this case Jane, have shared that information with everyone. Everywhere Theo goes now, from her aunt's day school for people with developmental issues to Bible studies, people already know why Jane has concocted a strict summer schedule for Theo to keep her out of trouble. 

Lacking any ability to keep others out of places in her life she doesn't want them, Theo is reduced to a space somewhere between fatalism--wondering if she's condemned to hell or if some people just have to live out hell on Earth--and impotent fantasy, promising herself that she will run away when she is sixteen or have her mother put into a nursing home when Jane is sixty. She has one opportunity to run out of a literal door at Bible study, but she declines, and instead return to class, holding her hands over her lower abdomen in a way that leaves Brother Dobbs guessing what the gesture means. Making Brother Dobbs unsure if she has bowel troubles or menstrual cramps is the closest she has to masking her interior life at this point.

Is Theo closer to making a step forward by the end?

One could read the ending as another form of Theo's fatalism. The two girls, who have been a rare portal into happiness for one another, are not going to be able to be together, and that's that and life sucks. Theo shouts her pet name for Shirlee into the darkness, but Leelee is gone. 

But maybe Theo has gone through a transformation, one that might help her prepare for life with some kind of self-fulfillment. She has realized that the spirit resides "between the skin and the muscle," and while an "invisible razor" has been cutting her spirit loose, Theo feels this as a bit of a liberation, because "her skin had been so tight that it had been smothering her spirit." In other words, something about the ordeal has freed her spirit. When Shirlee comes to the house at night one last time, Theo herself goes out the door to meet her, not even taking a minute to put shoes on. This is a significant step for her, as it signals a movement from passivity to actively claiming what she wants. Moreover, the final sentence of the story has Theo calling after her friend, but this time, in her head. She has reestablished her ability to have an interior life separate from that which everyone can see. She's going to need the ability to keep her private thoughts private if she's going to survive long enough to get out of the house. 

This ability to keep thoughts within herself has allowed her to reclaim the phrase "that girl," which is the title of the story, from Jane. Jane has used it as a curse, "that girl" who is threatening to corrupt her baby. But Theo uses the phrase to recall the good that Leelee brought to her: "No one would ever cup Theo as tenderly as that girl had." This isn't the power to bring retribution on all would-be evil-doers, perhaps, but it is power of a sort that might help Theo survive adolescence.