Mariana Enríquez understands the power of teenage girls, and this story is a bleak testament to that power. Told in the collective first person, ‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ chronicles a group of them who go to great lengths to win the attention of an older boy they have a crush on. When their wiles fail to attract him and he begins to date an older friend of theirs, things turn ugly. Like all great horror stories, ‘Our Lady’ starts off in an ordinary fashion with relatively run-of-the mill bitchiness from our jealous narrators. Slowly, however, bits of their feral nature are revealed. ‘Our Lady’ is a sparkling example of how teen obsession can quickly topple over into violence; how a perfect sunny day swimming at the quarry can become a sweaty, heat-drenched nightmare.
First published in The New Yorker, December 2020, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Hogarth, 2021
A Personal Anthology 