Watch Her Go

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“I’m not always there when you call—” She makes the telephone sign and presses her hand against her ear. “—but I’m always on time.”  She points to her wrist, grinning.  You think she’s clever.  You wouldn’t have thought of doing that first part with the telephone.

She does a slow hip swivel towards the couch you’re sitting on, pointing, first at herself, and then at you.  Her fingernail is checkered white and black like a soccer ball, which reminds you of the clusters of freckles on her chin and cheeks, which makes the decision of where to look, at her finger or her face, a difficult one.  Decide on her finger.  As she gets closer, you see the number 22 scratched into one of the black checkers.  22 is your jersey number.  When her finger touches your face, pushing down on a tender spot between your eyebrows that you’re pretty sure is an unemerged whitehead, remind her that 22 is your jersey number.  She bulges her eyes out, makes her mouth go slack and says, “Be cool, dippy,” in a thick, slow voice. Then she turns away and moves back into the dancing crowd.

You realize you’re leaning all the way forward.  Be cool, you say to yourself.  Drink your wine cooler.  It’s called a Cherry Fizz Colada.  It’s sweet and you can taste the red dye #47 and not really any of the alcohol which is good because the only other time you drank, it was vodka from a plastic bottle and while you threw up in Samantha Dooley’s bathroom she was lying on Samantha Dooley’s bed letting Brandon put his mouth on her pussy.  She told you all about it the next day during soccer practice, whispering the word pussy like it was a secret you hadn’t been let in on, which made you feel like you were going to throw up again.  You said nothing, but later when you practiced shielding drills, you hip-checked her so hard that she fell on the ground and cracked one of her front teeth. Now you wonder what her pussy tastes like—if it’s like a wine cooler, sweet, with little deposits of bitter. Your brother once told you that pussy tastes like a dog.  “How would you know what a dog tastes like?” you asked.

The song switches from Ja Rule to Jay-Z and she’s tired of dancing, so she’s on the couch next to you, sweating and chewing gum.  You wonder where she got the gum. You hope not from Brandon.  You wonder if you should ask her for some gum too.

There’s a hair band around your wrist that she put there earlier in the night when you decided together in her bathroom that she should definitely wear her hair down.  She pulls on it now and guides your wine cooler to her mouth.  When her lips get close enough, flinch the bottle a little bit, just to be a bitch, and listen to it clank against that newly repaired tooth.  She slaps you on the leg, and you’re about to call her a bitch but then she leaves her hand on your thigh while she drinks the rest of the bottle, which is a while because the bottle is almost full.

You tasted your own pussy once.  You were both waiting underneath the bleachers for your moms to pick you up and you were playing Dare cause you already knew every truth about each other. You dared her to lick the inside of her shin guard, so she dared you to scream penis out into the field where your coach was still picking up cones, so you dared her to hump an anthill, so she, flicking an ant off the crotch of her shorts, dared you to taste your own pussy.  You told her no way.  She pulled her glasses halfway down her nose and said, “Well then Maria, you are out,” sounding exactly like Heidi Klum.  You were pretty sure she wouldn’t stop being your friend just because you didn’t do what she said. But you also remembered the times you two had walked through the cafeteria and she used your body as a shield to hide herself from her old, boring friends. When they saw her they didn’t wave or smile, but the way their eyes got all moony, the way they continued to stare at her even when she sat at a table across the room, made you never want to be one of them.

You put your finger all the way inside yourself.  You weren’t sure if she meant for you to do that, but you did, and when it hit the spongy part in back, you made a noise, a quiet kind of grunt, because it felt good. And she made a different noise, a little release through her nose, so that for a second you were both making noises together.  When you put your finger in your mouth, it didn’t taste bad, just salty. You waited for her to ask you what it tasted like or to call you gross or to laugh, but she just stuck her head out from under the bleachers and said it was really weird that it was still this hot in October.

There’s a mustache of red wine cooler above her lip. She wipes it off with the back of her hand, closes her eyes, and lets her head fall against the couch. Lean in and study her face.  You can see the little indentations on her nose and cheeks where her glasses usually are. She says you are so lucky you have perfect vision because her glasses make her look like a Down’s kid, but you like the way she looks when she wears them.  They make her eyes all swimmy and her face kind of crooked and without them, she feels too perfect.  Stare into her open mouth, past the teeth that never needed braces, past the tongue that is small and pink and isn’t split at the tip like yours, to the darkness in back. Even her throat is perfect, perfectly black, perfectly empty, like a special little cave club that no one is allowed into. Tell her that she swallowed her gum.  She keeps her eyes closed and shakes her head back and forth like no, she didn’t swallow her gum.

“We’re friends.” She yawns and moves closer to you on the couch. She puts her head on your shoulder.  She can do that, touch you without thinking about it.  When she passes you in the halls at school or walks with you to the field before practice, she hugs you or squeezes your hand.  Sometimes she puts her arms around your neck and hangs there, her entire weight resting on your shoulders, pulling you forward until you almost fall.  But whenever you touch her, even just to push her away, you think about it a lot.  You smell your hands and worry that they smell like urine even though you always wash them after you go to the bathroom, or you watch her face for any signs of annoyance or disgust, along with the face of every person who walks past.  Everything starts to feel tight and hot. So generally, you keep your hands to yourself.

Watch the crowd get humpy and loose.  See Brandon.  He’s dancing with Jeannie, or she’s dancing with him, and he’s doing this thing where he doesn’t look at her or move his body at all.  The only part of Brandon that actual touches Jeannie are his hands, which are firmly attached to Jeannie’s butt.

She watches him too, her eyes squinting like she’s staring into the sun. “His hair is so gay,” she says to you and then she stares up at the ceiling and swallows a bunch. Brandon’s hair is gelled and separated into a bunch of short little spikes, like Deryck Whibley’s from Sum 41.  You hate Sum 41. Touch her head, just for a second, just so she knows that her hair isn’t gay, that it’s actually really awesome.

She leans even closer to you, creating a pocket between her stomach and her jeans where you can see the scalloped edges of her underwear, the pink ones, with the pictures of cat’s holding mice in their jaws.  It starts feeling warm in between your shoulder blades.  You both watch Jeannie flailing her arms over her head and whipping her hair back and forth, working so hard while Brandon does nothing.  Brandon is an idiot, but maybe she’s an idiot too for almost crying over a boy who will just dance with another girl right in front of her.  Look at her underwear again.  Also, maybe you’re an idiot.

She flips your hand over.

“Let me read your palm,” she says.  You keep as still as possible while she studies your hand.  “Oh shit, Maria.”

Ask her what.

“Oh.  Shit.”

Ask her what again.

“Your headline and your lifeline totally run together.”

She’s told you this before.  She reads your palm every day after school, and depending on her mood, tells you that you will either live a long and prosperous life and get famous—probably for your paintings but possibly for your Brandi Chastain-like slide tackle—or that you’ll go to community college and get herpes from the ugly Backstreet Boy.  But ask her what she means anyway because maybe this time she’ll say something different.

She turns your palm sideways, and rests it on her stomach.  You’ve never touched anyone’s bare stomach before.  You feel the cold rim of her belly button ring, and the way the muscles stay tense even when she breathes out.  She puts her hand on top of your hand.  Look at the 22 on her fingernail.  Breathe out, be cool.  She starts guiding your hand down.  The 22 disappears beneath the fence posts of her underwear.  You feel like someone is playing a piano inside your chest. She keeps pushing your hand down.  There’s no hair, just rough, sandy skin.  You didn’t know she shaved. You don’t shave. She usually tells you everything.

Your brother once said that a dyke stole his girlfriend.  You asked him why and he snorted and said, “Home field advantage.” But this is not a field you’re familiar with.

This is her pussy and you are touching it. It is different than yours, not long and open—more compressed, gathered together in a soft little hill like a lump of jelly. Her head is turned to the side and her eyes are shut tight like she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Does she think you know what you’re doing?  Why would she think that? You press your fingers into the skin and it parts.  It’s wet. There isn’t very much room to move.  Draw your finger along the wetness, to that bud of muscle at the top. When you touch yourself, you always rub above your clit, circling the protective hood of skin.  Rubbing on the clit hurts, and the idea of giving her that direct hurting feeling makes you queasy.  You choose the left side and start to rub. A boy walks by and hits your foot. It is crowded and dark, but you almost stop.  The boy isn’t looking, though. He is saying “Ooooh shit!” and slapping hands with some kid from your geometry class.  You look at her again. Her lips are pressed down tight against each other like she’s sucking something in and forcing something out at the same time.  Keep rubbing.  Your hand hurts. Her jeans press against your wrist. She makes that breathing sound through her nose like she did under the bleachers, a tight wheeze. Rub faster.  The pain in your hand threads up to your elbow.

You think about what it will be like on Monday when everyone will meet up and talk about this party and who got what done to them and where and what the shape of it was and whether it was sloppy or fast or weird.  And you know you won’t tell anyone about this, not ever.  She scrunches her nose, the freckles gathering at the center of her face. Stick your finger inside her. All the way.  Listen to her go, “Uh,” like she’s just been slammed against the ground. She’s shaking, and opening her mouth. You see the place where she broke her tooth and feel so good—like at the end of a soccer game, when you’re done and it’s over and you don’t have to worry anymore about doing well or making a mistake.

The song changes.  It’s Celine Dion, a mistake.  People start booing. She’s breathing out of her mouth, huh, huh, huh, looking at everything but you.  Your hand is still there but it already feels like it’s not.  She stops huffing and coughs hard once, and while she coughs she pulls your hand out from under her jeans. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she whispers and you think it sounds weird. Usually she’d just shout, “I gotta pee.”

She is gone.  Your wrist aches.  Bend it back and look at your fingers.  They are wrinkled and in between the wrinkles there are tiny white bubbles, a kind of soapy lather.  Look around at all the kids who are no longer dancing just packed together waiting for the next thing to happen.  Jeannie is still there, making out with a boy who has a mushroom cut. Put your fingers in your mouth because no one is watching.  The taste isn’t so much a taste as a feeling. Feel proud of that feeling.  Think, you’d like to tell her about it when she comes back from the bathroom.

She comes back, just not to you. Brandon is standing by the stereo, taking CDs from the shelf and stuffing them into his jacket pocket. You wait for her to do something, punch him in the arm for dancing with another girl or maybe just turn around and look at you. Brandon turns around. He nods at her.  She slides her hands into her pockets and smiles up at him.  He hugs her, his baggy windbreaker covering her like a cocoon.  Watch her touch his gay hair. Watch him move his hands down to her butt. Think about the girls in the cafeteria, her old friends, how you wouldn’t have looked up if you were them, how you wouldn’t have even noticed her passing by. She turns to look at you over her shoulder, first at your eyes and then at your fingers.  Brandon pulls on the waist of her jeans, the waist that is still imprinted on the back of your hand.  Spit your fingers out and make a face like you’ve just swallowed moldy cheese. Wipe your fingers on the couch. Her mouth opens, but she doesn’t say anything. Brandon takes her hand and pulls her towards the stairs.  She follows him.  Watch them go.