Chapter 2 #2
In the version of the story she’d told me over the phone, there had been an awkward conversation between the two of them in the parking lot before they climbed into the blanket-lined trunk of his car.
But this time, he had a visible erection while they drove.
The preamble to the act disappeared. They parked.
She began. She described how she’d felt a painful awareness of her entire body, of her arms and legs and where they were and her teeth and hands and mouth and the slow passage of time.
She hadn’t been sure how long it would take, and she couldn’t say with certainty how long it had taken.
The boy had made a series of wonderful, unguarded breathy sounds as she continued her rhythm, which she tried to maintain as a continuous beat.
In the aftermath, she’d asked the boy for specific feedback, which he gave stumblingly and without the use of a single anatomical word.
“He said I was good—” Margaret began.
“I’m sure you were,” I interrupted, and El echoed, “Obviously.”
“—and that he liked it when I used my hand and my mouth at the same time, like in the same rhythm,” Margaret finished.
We nodded. This seemed like reasonable guidance.
Eleanor wanted more information about the boy’s testicles.
“Did you do anything to them?” she asked.
“Absolutely not,” Margaret said with a confidence born from resentment.
She disliked the implication that she might be anything other than at ease with male anatomy.
If she hadn’t caressed any testicles, it certainly wasn’t because she didn’t know how to do so, Eleanor!
And shouldn’t we be dwelling on all she had achieved instead of pointing out what she hadn’t?
Margaret always wanted us to be proud of her.
She wanted us to be grateful for her service in being the first of us, so that we could be the second and third, armed with the knowledge of her experience. “One thing at a time, okay!”
“I mean, I definitely don’t think you have to,” I said.
“Me neither,” Eleanor agreed, sensing she’d pushed enough.
We offered this reassurance based on zero expertise, but it seemed likely to be true given that she hadn’t and he still came.
Margaret resumed her story. As they left, a hint of danger—a mall cop who had rolled down his driver-side window to give them a look that said he knew they hadn’t gone shopping.
This was new. I hadn’t heard it over the phone.
I didn’t know whether or not it had happened, though obviously Margaret included the detail in that moment to regain our reverence.
She never demonstrated any self-consciousness about the evolving details of her stories.
We had a truce about the truth, the two of us.
Margaret who slipped and skirted, and I who couldn’t lie, who struggled even to evade—me with all my feelings always written on the surface of my body, with my self-serious sense of duty, of what was owed to the people I loved and what was owed to me by those who loved me in return.
Margaret wasn’t a liar exactly, but she dispersed the truth unevenly and to her own advantage.
The version of the story she told Eleanor was nearly identical to the version she had already told me, but the soft pencil of confusion and embarrassment that had shaded her first telling was erased and overwritten here.
When they got back to her house, she’d given the boy a brief kiss on the cheek because she wasn’t sure if it was rude to kiss him on the mouth, and then afterward regretted the decision and concluded that anyone whose penis she was kissing, she would thereafter kiss on the lips.
And she was so committed to this adjustment in future behavior, so convinced that it was how she would always act from then on, that when she told Eleanor the story, it became the way she had already acted.
Our eyes met as she said so, that she’d kissed him on the lips, but neither of us flickered.
A laden breeze shifted through the room.
Above me, the gossamer strands of a spiderweb bowed, glinting iridescently.
I lifted my hair from my neck for relief from the humidity.
With Margaret’s core story told, we were free to pursue its radiating lines of inquiry.
Whether or not she wanted to hook up with him again, for instance.
Her desire to continue texting him whenever it suited her self-esteem.
Eleanor brought up that she’d heard from one of her older sisters that one of their friends was allergic to semen.
The girl had found this out through a trial-and-error situation.
Antihistamines eventually solved the problem but only after it terrified all parties involved.
Was there in fact a way to discover you were allergic to semen before the substance was trying to close one opening of yours or another?
Not that we could think of, an alarming possibility.
Margaret at least could now feel secure in her own non-reaction.
“Though I slept for like twelve hours that night,” she said.
Eleanor and I gave her a simultaneous look.
“That is literally in no way an allergic reaction,” I responded at the same time as Eleanor asked, “Do you know what an allergy is?”
“Lol maybe,” Margaret answered.
Then she laid me down on the wicker couch and showed us how she’d arranged her body against his and the motions she’d made with her hands and the different ways she’d tried using her tongue and lips.
We were like this—unabashed in our sharing of information and desire to fully understand each other’s experiences.
The privacy of other people didn’t matter.
No claim to fidelity could be higher than our own on each other.
We didn’t have to ask Margaret to demonstrate or prompt her to be thorough and specific.
She did things at least half for the opportunity of regaling us with them. She knew we’d want to know.
And did I want to know because I thought this specific information applied to me?
Well, I wasn’t sure. The summer before, when we were fourteen, my mom had opened the door on me and Margaret sitting on the carpet in my room.
It was a million degrees outside. We were entirely naked and taking turns showing each other dumb videos on my laptop.
She just shut the door again. Later, she asked if I liked Margaret as more than a friend.
I said no, I didn’t. She said okay. Though she misread the situation, it would eventually become clear she hadn’t misread me.
That was the summer when I first discovered Ginevra, a fairy from a pornographic blog account I read obsessively on my laptop in bed, where I could attempt to resolve any pressing physical urges as they arose by straddling my locked arms or a pillow.
Ginevra floated around in a flower city, making out with people.
I knew at least that my love for Ginevra did not at all depend on the identity of the person invited to join her within the enormous lilac tree that grew through the center of her verdant cosmopolis.
Eleanor drummed her fingers on the arm of the couch, paying an intense kind of attention to the two of us.
She of course wanted to know how to give head because she always wanted to know everything, but she also watched Margaret’s bobbing with a look on her face, the high planes of which were pink with creeping rosacea.
Behavior of this kind amused and occasionally alarmed her.
She wouldn’t shower with us. She always said she wanted to shower alone.
She scratched her cheeks with her rhinestone nails.
“Be nice to yourself, Eleanor,” I said, and she looked away from me, but she lowered her fingers from her face.
Margaret’s hand continued to stroke the air between her open mouth and my pelvis until we heard the garage door open and the sound of a car engine turning off.
Margaret stumbled away from me and we all started laughing.
Eleanor got up to go to the bathroom. The house door to the garage groaned open, and the alarm system beeped in acknowledgment.
“Out back,” Margaret called.
A minute later, her mother, Nancy, appeared in the internal doorway of the porch, her blazer slung over one arm, her cellphone between her ear and her shoulder.
She’d been on the phone more or less continuously since Margaret’s dad had moved out a year ago.
She waved to us silently and then retreated into the house to finish her conversation.
I loved that Margaret’s mom accepted our presence without question.
She didn’t apologize for being on the phone or hang up to offer us a glass of water and a snack, the way my own mother always did, treating my friends as her guests and trying to attend to them.
We talked for the rest of the afternoon.
The sky opened, and rain fell sloppily onto the roof of the porch.
Droplets of water clung to the metal grid of its mesh walls in patches, making the green world of the backyard appear blurred, almost pixelated.
I asked my friends if I should ask my mom if they could sleep over that night, but Eleanor said she wanted to go home and play The Sims for nine hours instead.
She’d stopped playing that morning only because she’d wanted to hang out with us, and now that she had, she wanted to go home and play again.
She was in the middle of getting her Sim to sleep with every single one of her in-game neighbors.
The plan was proceeding pretty well, except one of her Sim’s lovers kept showing up in the middle of the night and letting herself into Eleanor’s Sim’s house to use the bathroom and watch TV and refuse to leave until morning, when the Sim would spin around in a circle to change her outfit and then depart for work, before inevitably returning the next night to cause the same problem all over again.
Eventually, El decided to just drown the interloper in the pool.
Margaret couldn’t come over either. She had a family dinner at her aunt and uncle’s house with her mom and her cousin Bea and wasn’t allowed to make any plans for after. I pouted, but I’d probably see them both the next day anyway.
After several hours of almost tropical intensity, the rain thinned to a mist. The sounds of birds and insects returned.
Nancy reappeared to ask if we needed rides home, but Eleanor had her bike and I said I would walk.
I texted my mom I was on my way and kissed Margaret on the cheek.
I kissed Eleanor on the cheek. I walked the several blocks back to my house beneath rows of dripping trees.
Pink and brown earthworms wriggled their naked bodies across the slick, wet sidewalk.
If I stepped on any of them, I’d never forgive myself.