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#jo's blog has irrevocably changed me can you tell
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jo, aged 13, removes nail polish behind a locked bathroom door
1000 words. read on my ao3
One afternoon she sneaks into her mother’s room and can’t help looking over her shoulder as she slides nail polish out of the bag in the dresser, making sure to cover her tracks completely when she shuts the drawer with barely a bump and leaves the door the same angle of ajar Ellen had.
She hurries back to her own room on quiet feet, hunter feet, padding fleetingly down the rug on the hallway in pink spotted socks, nail polish bottle feeling clunky in her hand the whole way.
For some reason she can’t quite place, she feels like she’s doing something wrong.
Her bedroom door clicks shut behind her and her heart feels like a bird caught in a net in her chest. Cross legged, she sits herself down on her bedroom floor, unscrews the cap of the bottle while telling herself to take deep breaths.
How can she ever be a hunter if she can’t even steady her breath when painting her stupid nails? The girls at school have them painted all the time; it’s not like it can be that hard.
The brush feels foreign in her hands, the plastic warming against the fleshy insides of fingers which expect the cool smooth of a knife hilt. But she tries to forget about metal and monsters and men for a moment and thinks instead about cheap plastic and smelly nail polish and boys at school, like she’s sure the other girls do.
She decides to think very hard about the things other girls do.
Her thumb goes alright, she pictures the boy who sits next to her in math, the one who always avoids her eyes. But that’s okay, if she unfocuses her eyes when she looks over at him sat there in his leather jacket he looks a little bit like a picture her mom once showed her of her dad when he was young.
Or maybe her dad looked like the boy and it’s the other way around. She’s not so sure these days.
She’s trying very hard to think about things other girls do. Other girls don’t think about their dead dad, but that’s mostly because other girls’ dads are alive. They think about their alive dads.
Whatever, she’s just painting her nails.
She’s on her index finger now, streaking pink across it like it’ll get all these things in her out of her system. And she does the next finger after that too; she does all of them, one coat each. One after the other, like a runaway train, her brain making the screeching sound of wheels breaking against the track.
All the while her hands, so steady when she shoots rows of cans off the fence, won’t stop shaking. Fingers that can nock an arrow in a bow before the last has even hit the target aren’t nimble enough to keep the paint on the nail.
Why is she even trying?
She blanches and runs to the bathroom before they even get the chance to dry, washing her hands with soap in the sink and washing her hands with soap in the sink and washing her hands with soap in the sink to try to make the nail polish - and damn if it’s not a bitch to remove - come back off.
There’s a part of her, hazy quiet and floating above the whole scene, that flinches at the idea of the girl scrubbing sparkly nail polish off in the bathroom sink using the word bitch .
And there it is again, the rough hand squeezing her gut feeling, like she’s doing something wrong.
She ends up sat on the toilet, squirting soap onto loo roll and scrubbing it against her nails. The polish keeps sticking to the paper and there’s heat all over her cheeks and she wonders what her dad would say.
There are far more men in her life than women. All her uncles at the Roadhouse; she talks to them loads, would never ask them about makeup. But she feels, and she doesn’t understand it at all, that if her dad was here she’d know how to paint her nails.
By the time only an acceptably small amount of nail polish remains she’s remembered they probably have nail polish remover somewhere. Too late to find it now.
Her nails are weak and splintering as she flushes the clumps of wet toilet roll down the toilet, watching them all the way to make sure they go down. And then waits another minute to make sure they don’t come back up. It would be bad enough if her mom caught her painting her nails, but worse if she caught her removing the paint and removing it wrong.
She catches herself in the bathroom mirror before she unlocks the door again, holds her own gaze back until she figures her cheeks look normal coloured. She knows how much blotchiness she can get away with, feels like somewhat of an expert about how much red her mother won’t notice.
She nods at herself and strolls out of the door with her shoulders back in case her mom is coming up the stairs. She isn’t, so Jo hurries back to her room again, feet skittish over the creaky floorboards she knows to avoid (good practice for when she starts hunting in haunted houses, she always thinks); grabs the nail polish and places it exactly back where it was in her mother’s drawer.
She spends the rest of the day glancing down at her hands and feeling guilty. Her nails had looked fine before and now they’re cracked and fragile.
What kind of a girl even is she?
Some of her uncles drop in that evening, though, and while she’s serving them their beers she watches their leather scarred hands and oddly angled fingers wrap around the glasses. Their nails are short and cracked and battered too. She has nails like a hunter. Hunter nails.
And she figures some girls are built different than others.
Some girls can paint their nails in perfect pink on the first try.
Other girls have dead dads.
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