2004-09-07 - 8:43 p.m.

It was one of those impossibly hot and dripping days, and I guess that's part of what instigated the fight at the Quincy Center T station last weekend. It was between two Boston -tough-type fourteen year old girls, the kind with their hair up in tight ponytails and who wear too-small tank tops and tight jeans all year. I missed the actual physical confrontation; by the time I noticed, they were just yelling at each other. I'm not quite sure about what. Whatever tough fourteen year old girls have to argue about on hot and dripping days, I suppose.

One of the girls had gotten a bloody nose from the other one, though she didn't seem to realize it, or react to it. Her entire lower face was soaked in blood, and what I had first thought to be embroidered flower petals on her white tank top muliplied as her nose bled more. And still, she was the stoic one. The other girl screamed, and stomped away, and was apprehended by the MBTA police, and had a short argument with her mother who shortly drove up (and who didn't seem to be much older than she was). But the girl with the bloody nose just stood there, eventually lighting a cigarette and smoking, her bloody fingers leaving delicate stains on the filter.

An ambulance arrived for the bloody-nose girl, though they didn't seem to be able to convince her to go to the hospital. Finally, they gave her a huge wad of gauze and left her holding this bloom of cotton under the flow of blood. The other girl had since dissolved into deep, exhausted sobs.

What got me is that the girl with the bloody nose was so damned unaffected by it. She had a certain cold look in her eyes, not blank or arrogant but somehow robotic. A person who has no reaction to bleeding profusely is exponentially more frightening to someone who explodes and screams and cries and attacks. What happens to a girl that, at fourteen, she is so cold? It's absolutely haunting.