Weekly Read: “Girls, At Play” by Celeste Ng
A prescription for new reads? Yes, please! BLR is pleased to bring you our new Weekly Read series — your literary Rx. Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, or essay from BLR‘s archive. Be inspired by works that explore health and healing from all angles—physical, emotional, and spiritual. Get to know new writers, or revisit the early work of authors who have gone on to great acclaim.
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This week’s read is “Girls, At Play“ by Celeste Ng, who went on to write the bestselling novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. BLR is proud to have been the home of one of Celeste’s earliest publications, which won a Pushcart Prize.
This is how we play the game: pink means kissing; red means tongue. Green means up your shirt; blue means down his pants. Purple means in your mouth. Black means all the way.
We play the game at recess, and the teachers don’t notice. We stand on the playground by the flagpole, arms ringed with colored bracelets from the drugstore, waiting. The boys come past us, in a bunch, all elbows, laughing.
They pretend not to look. We pretend not to see them. One of them reaches out and snaps a bracelet off one of us, breaking it like a rubber band, fast and sharp as plucking a guitar string. He won’t look back. He’ll walk back the way he came, along the edge of the football field. And whoever he picked, Angie or Carrie or Mandy, will watch him go. After a minute she’ll follow him and meet him under the bleachers, far down the field, where the teachers can’t see.
Why this story?
“In her story, ‘Girls, At Play,’ Celeste Ng beautifully and unflinchingly ushers the reader into the world of teenage girls, stealing, and random sex. The reader witnesses the initiation of Grace, new to the school, into a group of tough, struggling, cynical middle-school girls. At first small things change for her: she
learns to wear make-up, revealing outfits, and then how to steal. The story is written in first person (plural), and the “we” pulled me into the narrative. I felt like both an observer and participant. The trajectory is wrenching to witness: Grace’s loss of innocence. The reader watches, mesmerized and appalled, unable to intercede. I admire the story’s language, honesty, and its lasting, disturbing power. I was thrilled when ‘Girls, At Play’ was awarded the Pushcart Prize.”
– Ronna Wineberg, BLR contributing fiction editor
More from Celeste
Celeste Ng is the author of three novels — Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts — all New York Times bestsellers. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. Learn more about Celeste on her website.
Celeste was a part of NPR’s interview with BLR in 2021. Here is one of her quotes from the transcript:
“Our health and our mental health and our societal health are all really connected to each other,” Ng observes, adding that a literary journal that comes out of a hospital thinks about these things together. “It is a way that we’re thinking about what we’re thinking, what our health is, bodily speaking and then also how we connect with each other, how we function as a society, how we relate to each other as human beings.”
Celeste also told the New York Times that winning a Pushcart Prize for “Girls, At Play” was a “huge boost of confidence” after a bout of postpartum depression.
