Excerpt from Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Rose Mueller vs. Tanya Maw

In girls' hand-clapping games there are no winners. You may be chided for missing a beat, or for forgetting one of the lyrics, but there is no victory that lies ahead for just one of the participants. Hand-clapping games exist only in a state of play, or a state of rest. However, they are not free of competitiveness. There is a pressure exerted by young girls upon one another to continue to clap, to chant the tongue-tied lewd nursery rhymes for as long as possible. This competitiveness lies in the clapping pair's desire for maximum endurance. The lyrics of girls' hand-clapping games are endless. Their choruses always circle back on themselves so that the game is played on loop, begun again by the same lyric that signals the game's end.

* * *

As the referees begin this fourth bout, the last bout of the day, in this darkened warehouse where only nine onlookers remain, there is the implication of a loop, or the suggestion of a repetition, a circular groove within which the tournament has fit its narrative.

* * *

These last-bout fighters look caricatured in their desire to beat one another. They each wear frowns that make them look like actors.

* * *

The industrial bulbs of Bob's Boxing Palace cast omnipresent white like the lighting seen in theaters. In stage acting, makeup must be twice as caked to even show up to the eyes of the audience. Because of this, in this washed-out ring of light, Rose Mueller and Tanya Maw both look like they have monochrome white faces. Rose Mueller's hair is cut so short that you can barely see it under her headgear. Tanya Maw has woven her long hair into two looped braids. Her ovals of hair stick out of her headgear and place droopy circles on her back. Tanya Maw has her shoulders pulled forward over the center of her spine. Tanya Maw pushes her hands towards Rose Mueller and Rose Mueller moves her own hands to greet them. They're not clapping, but their hands are smacking each other in rhythm. Tanya Maw can hear clapping rhymes as her fists touch the fists of Rose Mueller. I'm an actor, says Tanya Maw, in her head, to herself. Tanya Maw needs to play the part of the winner.

* * *

The most famous hand-clapping game Tanya Maw knows is the one about the tugboat, where the last line of every verse morphs from a normal word into a crude trick. Tanya Maw used to love this game, although now, at seventeen, she is decidedly too old to play it. There had been something wonderful about listening to even her best, most well-behaved classmates put words in their mouths that changed mid-breath from banal to naughty. The words had changed while still lodged in their throats. She could see the words themselves shape-shifting, the strangeness of the word ask changing into ass, a fly bug changing into a crotch-covering zipper. As a young girl, playing hand-clapping games for hours on end, Tanya Maw had seen small, one-inch sculptures of the morphing words on the tongues of her playmates. When her playmates got to the end of a verse, she could see the sculpture of the word remold itself from something boring into something forbidden, and then these forbidden word sculptures were spit out into a pile on the pavement between the two girls who were at play. The more verses the girls got through, the more forbidden word sculptures they made. In those early days of girlhood there were piles of these sculptures all over the playground. It was a graveyard of hand-clapping games that had been played earlier that day. Tanya Maw has never met Rose Mueller before, but the way that Rose is clenching on her mouth guard makes Tanya think Rose is about to spit out a forbidden word sculpture. There is something foul inside the mouth of Rose Mueller.

* * *

Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller are not hand clapping. They are boxing. But there is a collaboration in the way that they stand. When Tanya Maw extends her fist out Rose Mueller greets it. When Rose Mueller puts her left leg forward, Tanya Maw moves back. There is also, technically, the referee in the ring with them, but the referee is no one. The referee is less than a person. The referee and the coaches and the judges, they are all so deeply separate. They think they are involved with this game, that they have power, but Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller have hoarded all the power for themselves. What is going on between Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller has nothing to do with the judges. The referees and the coaches are like the teachers who supervise their breaks between classes. They exist only to tell one the rules of recess. They are never involved in the politics, in the colossal dramas that unfold in the minutes between classes. Rose

* * *

Mueller's and Tanya Maw's coaches do know each other. They have been coaching youth fighters who compete against one an-other for over ten years' time. They are not close friends, but they have already made plans to, later in the evening, go out together. They were both thrilled when the Daughters of America tournament announced that it would be at Bob's Boxing Palace in Reno. They are deeply excited for the free drinks at the casinos. Tanya Maw lands a hit that makes Rose Mueller's coach and Tanya Maw's coach shout. When Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller swivel the corners of their eyes to look at their coaches, they see the coaches' bodies with the faces blurred out.

* * *

When Tanya Maw looks at Rose Mueller she sees a girl with boy-band hair and laser-beam eyes.

* * *

It can be intoxicating to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent's eyes. Tanya Maw wonders, while staring into the eyes of Rose Mueller, if this is why she is interested in both boxing and acting. There are so few activities that allow the intimacy of staring.

* * *

When Rose Mueller looks into Tanya Maw's eyes she sees orbs that look like fogged-in planets. Tanya Maw has a stray speck of black outside the center of her left eye. It's like a small piece of her pupil broke off and is orbiting a black moon. Rose Mueller thinks she sees the speck moving in a circle. Rose Mueller hits Tanya Maw in the ribs and the hit begins to turn Tanya Maw's ribs purple.

* * *

Rose Mueller grew up in Dallas. The playgrounds of her girlhood were littered throughout the various suburbs that satellite Dallas's strange neon core. On the Dallas playgrounds, Rose Mueller played the same hand-clapping games that Tanya Maw played growing up in Albuquerque, but some of the lyrics were slightly different, as if each group of clapping girls were connected by a thousand-mile-long tin can and string. Here, in Reno, Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller know each other, but they do not know that they share a clapping canon. Rose Mueller and Tanya Maw are punching each other with speed and precision. Rose Mueller's short hair is fully wet. It is glued to her head. Rose Mueller's headgear and wet hair and head feel as if they are all made out of the same material. Rose Mueller imagines her whole body being made out of the plastic foam of her headgear. With time and sun, her foam plastic head splinters. In the beginning of this bout with Tanya Maw, Rose Mueller was sure that she could make Tanya Maw splinter. The sun, long set at this point, is of no help now. Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller are boxing under floodlights. Rose Mueller is pushing her fists backwards and forwards. She narrows her eyes towards Tanya. Tanya narrows her eyes back and returns the hit.

* * *

The invisible network through which young American girls learn hand-clapping games is fueled by older sisters. The best older sisters from which to learn hand-clapping games are the ones who have recently departed from girlhood to driving. If one does not have an older sister, one must access an older sister through a friend. While it is from older sisters that the games are originally learned, once a game has been introduced to a group of girls it spreads among them like a sickness. If there is rumor of a new hand-clapping game, one must learn it as quickly as possible. If the new game (Lemonade Crunchy Ice, for instance) appears during lunch on a Tuesday, it must be learned by lunch on Thursday. In this way, a repertoire is built and enacted. The older sisters, while invaluable to the transmission of hand-clapping games, are also responsible for all of the mistakes in the lyrics. Their memories are not perfect. This is how whole states of girls develop alternate, new versions.

* * *

Decades into the future, Tanya Maw will, actually, become an actor. She will go to graduate school to learn how to fit her face into the faces of others.

* * *

There are hand-clapping games that can be played by more than two people. These games require young girls to stand, or sit cross-legged, in a circle. These games are closer to tag than to a dance. To begin the game one must touch two other girls' hands. Then, a rhyme is sung, a chain reaction of hand slapping begins, and the last person whose hand is slapped on the last beat of the rhyme must either run in a circle and catch someone—or leave. As these circular, multi-person hand-clapping games progress there are those still at play in the circle, and those who have been kicked out. The kicked-out girls may not reenter until there is one girl who is left the winner. It is the winner who gets to decide when the game is begun again. In the Daughters of America tournament the game is begun again immediately when the tournament ends. The WYBA committee plans them two years ahead. The girl fighters already know where next year's Daughters of America tournament will be, and the one after. They are clapping each other out of the tournament only to be prepared to invite each other back in. Get out of the ring, Tanya Maw is thinking to Rose Mueller. Get out now—you can always get back in after I'm the winner.

From HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Rita Bullwinkel.