Bad Girl
- Alan Rice
- Jul 9
- 3 min read
The Brussels Review accepted "Kim" for publication online only two weeks or so after I submitted it. That was in March, 2025. I amgrateful to TBR for providing a venue for my story, though as you might guess, I'm annoyed that they took so long to publish it. In the past year, it might have been accepted by another journal, and received a larger audience. But well.
"Kim" is one story of which I'm particularly proud. It has a weird genesis; there was a news article on TV about a botched attempted abduction of an adolescent girl. She was thirteen or so; I forget. There was a picture of her: she looked sturdy, vigorous, and wholesome, if not particularly pretty. The abudction lasted about one day. The would-be abductor had evidently planned a kidnapping. He left a ransom note in the girl's parents' mailbox. He didn't mail the note, but for some reason put it in an envelope with a return address on it. He was promptly apprehended. The girl was returned to her family apparently unharmed, physically or emotionally.
I certainly don't want to trivialize a terribly serious event. Kidnapping, whether for ransom or for some other, darker purpose is no laughing matter. And yet, one of the most memorable - and one of the funniest - stories I have ever read was O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," about a would-be abduction that completely goes south when the victim turns the tables on his captors, and in the end they a pay the boy's wealthy grandfather to take him back. Happy ending.
I began to play around with the idea of an abduction gone wrong, where the victim becomes the predator.
There were many challenges. First, I could not write anything that would imply that I (or the narrator) in any way sympathized with the abductor, or justified his bahavior. I was not interested in producing any sort of soft-core porn. I couldn't allow any stereotypes. And I had to stay true to my primary theme, my overarching question: How could such a thing happed? Could it happen at all?
And who was going to tell the story?
As the story started to take shape around the mysterious character of Kim, I found myself writing in the first person plural. To identify an individual narrator seemed too personal, and I felt it necessary to distance my narrator from the actual events. That device of having "us" narrate the story is not original. Jeffrey Eugenides used it brilliantly in The Virgin Suicides, and there are some echoes of that wonderful novel in my own "Kim." But there are important differences, too. I hope that the reader will see that my story is not derivative of, or a reworking of, Eugenides' work.
In The Virgin Suicides, we find out what happens, more or less. The "why" is obscure, but not completely hidden. In "Kim," as you 'll find out when you read it, even what is right before the narrators' eyes is misunderstood. Is Kim really a bad girl, sleeping around and doing drugs while maintaining the illusion of being a sweet young girl? Or is she really quite ordinary, but putting on some kind of perverse act of being bad-to-the-bone? Even the explanation, when it finally comes, is uncertain, because it is given by a narrator who wasn't actually there, who seems to have made up an ending that would satisfy the expectations of the community. Maybe.
I have fun writing it, and rewriting it, making the whole thing seem at once outrageous and plausible. I hope you'll read it (this one is for free). And, of course, I hope you'll enjoy it. Ant tell me what you think.
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