Chapter 2
On an early, empty afternoon in June, I told my mom I needed to walk over to Margaret’s house. I didn’t explain my urgency because if I said I had to hear Margaret’s gossip in person, she’d ask me what the gossip was about.
At fifteen, I was allowed to walk most places.
Doan, our neighborhood in the upper-right-hand corner of Ohio, was residential, majority populated by white people, the neighbors all apparently heterosexual.
Massive hundred-year-old trees lined its streets, announcing stable affluence.
A number of main boulevards stroked through the neighborhood in straight, cardinal directions.
Between them ran a network of snaking circuitous avenues that met in irregular, asterisk-like intersections.
Cars often lingered too long at stop signs, uncertain who held the right of way.
None of these things prevented my mother from being afraid for me all the time, though I was aware that was their purpose.
I didn’t know how to accommodate her fear, and I didn’t know how to assess its validity.
Very few bad things had ever happened to me.
She saw precarity where other people’s parents seemed to see regular life.
But then, she was smarter than everyone else.
There was no one I trusted more than I trusted her.
The walk to Margaret’s took between five and ten minutes depending on my mood.
My mood depended on the weather. The weather that day was humid, my pace languorous.
Dense air blurred my skin with sweat by the time I arrived at her house, a friendly rectangular building with a large front yard and a screened-in porch out back.
The porch was old and heavily used, with mesh panels for walls that bowed outward like the knees of well-loved pants.
I walked directly up the driveway to the back of the house and opened the screen door.
Margaret lay face down on the large white wicker couch in the middle of the room with her shirt off and her chestnut hair pushed up above her head, so it fell over the edge of the armrest. Eleanor straddled her back, her legs folded on either side of Margaret’s bare torso.
Bent over, her face hovered inches above Margaret’s skin, a tissue fixed between her fingers.
I raised my phone to take a picture of them.
Margaret held up a thumb. Eleanor righted herself at the sight of me.
“Totally standard,” I said with pleased sarcasm.
“As usual,” Margaret sang.
Eleanor extracted a pimple from Margaret’s right shoulder blade using her gel-polished fingernails and dismounted.
Margaret pulled her shirt back on. I sat down in an adjacent chair.
The porch looked like every other space in Margaret’s house, crowded with belongings and evidence of feminine inhabitation.
Spare cushions sat in tipping piles pushed up against the room’s mesh perimeter.
Potted plants on stands dripped green vines onto the tiled floor, and baskets of decade-old magazines featured the faces of girls we knew only as the women they’d become and instructions about sex we recognized as outdated but couldn’t help occasionally reading aloud to each other in the guise of a joke.
“Mar refused to tell me anything until you got here, no previews, even though you’ve already heard,” Eleanor complained.
She removed herself to the far side of the couch and sat down with her legs folded beneath her, her elbow on the armrest and her pointed chin in her hand.
“Mar needs her whole audience—” I said.
“—and phone tellings only half-count,” Margaret finished, her skin dewy with sweat and the pleasure of having gathered us for a purpose.
Margaret had recently given head for the first time.
Hence my need to come over right away, lest she tell Eleanor in person without me.
Neither of us had ever made it past anybody’s pants.
Margaret’s having done so seemed a near mythical achievement, an announcement of the dawning of a new era of our lives in which we might possibly put our hands and mouths on the bodies of other people.
Because she did things first among us. She did them on purpose, and she did them repeatedly in order to get better.
She’d climbed in and out of all the possible second-story windows of her house before she’d ever had reason to use them.
Oral sex represented a box that she had wanted to check, so she checked it with a boy who went to a different school than us, who was good-looking but not importantly so, who was seventeen and therefore would go to college in a year and forget that Margaret existed.
All of these attributes qualified him for a contained life experience, an experience whose significance would be determined by Margaret.
If she didn’t tell anyone, no one would know.
Well, we would know, but we wouldn’t tell anyone else because the only people we needed to tell anything to were each other.
“Wait,” I said.
I wanted to see a picture of him first. I’d seen pictures of him before, but I wanted to remember exactly who I was supposed to imagine being fellated.
Also, the request lent an air of pomp and circumstance to the telling, which was our preference—anything to enhance our sense of life as genuinely underway instead of just preparing to be.
Eleanor pulled up his profile and handed her phone to me because if we let Margaret choose the photo it would take twenty minutes.
Eleanor’s oval nails had tiny rhinestones glued into sky-blue polish.
She’d painted them herself. She could be very patient in pursuit of getting what she wanted, the way she wanted it.
“He doesn’t photograph well,” Margaret said, the standard caveat.
“Boys never do,” I answered.
I slunk down into the chair. I was tall for my age, my arms and legs long. In this weather, they felt heavy. I used my elbows to prop my hands and the phone just a few inches from my face while I scrolled.
Margaret felt exposed by this moment of judgment and so began to tell Eleanor what she’d already told me, that one of her hundred and five thousand friends other than us had said that one of her friends had said that the boy had a normal penis.
“Which I found comforting in the lead-up, but also like, how do I know that she knows what’s a normal dick? I don’t. However, I can now report that it was fine, a totally nice starter penis.”
“Great news,” Eleanor said. “Thrilled to hear it.”
Eleanor often sounded sarcastic both when she did and didn’t mean something—a point of pride for her, the control of tone, the possibility of a private humor, which I found to be either annoying or delicious.
While they spoke, I scrolled. Pictures of the sky took up half the boy’s profile, but a series of group photos revealed a tall, slim boy with shaggy hair, most often wearing a hunter-green bucket hat with a white swirl embroidered on the front.
He could have been better-looking and he could have been worse.
The main thing was that he had the bearing of a teenage boy who had definitely already hooked up with at least five total people, which limited risk of a certain variety. A baseline of experience existed.
Having gotten an impression, I closed the app and opened the front-facing camera.
My oval face and my large dark eyebrows appeared on Eleanor’s screen.
I lowered my eyelashes and took several flattering photos of myself, my expression blank and my gaze directed first at the aperture, then beyond the phone toward my friends on the couch, Margaret still going on with her prelude about how she and this boy originally started texting, and then one last picture looking back down at the screen again with my eyes widened in jest and acknowledgment.
I left these for El to find later, a game we sometimes played with each other, and flicked out of the application.
It occurred to me again that I myself had almost no baseline of experience.
No one could count on me to do anything first. I gave the phone back to Eleanor, who extended her hand, her nails winking in the muted light.
“Okay, he’s hot, we’re ready,” I said.
Margaret nodded seriously and moved on to the most suggestive aspect of context, the real start of the story, which she had withheld telling until she had both our full attention.
The boy’s previous girlfriend had refused the act point-blank, and her denial filled Margaret with a feeling of superiority, a sense of her own sexual bravery.
“Are you really going to go your whole life without putting anyone’s penis in your mouth?” Margaret asked with a flourish of the hand. “No—so I don’t understand her reasoning.”
In the lead-up, Margaret had experimented with bananas. The bananas were overripe and kept breaking apart in her mouth. She also watched a lot of porn.
“I searched for head tutorials online and the results were frankly—” She paused to make a face. “I thought I’d prefer to watch real people instead of porn stars, but real people are horrifying. The professionals were much more civilized.”
“Where did you go to watch it?” Eleanor asked.
Margaret twisted the stack of woven and metal bracelets around her wrist.
“I don’t know,” she said, though of course she did know. “I started looking and it was there.”
“But where specifically?”
“Well, in the search results,” Margaret said.
“That’s not an answer.”
I cut them both off. “It’s fine. Mar doesn’t want us to retrace her exact horny internet steps. Keep going.”
I loved listening to Margaret’s stories, as though she were somehow both a salacious audiobook and a parent reading me to sleep.
She gave me a grateful blink.
The boy had picked her up in his car and driven them to the mall parking lot.
“His car smelled like boy body spray, but I was basically into that.”