Continued, Girl’s Girl #2
It’s true that there wasn’t anything more wrong with looking into an empty building than with standing outside it, but the whole night had taken on a presence I dared not disturb.
I was sure I was about to be seen by someone, sure an eye would open on me.
I lacked my friends’ confidence in the ordinariness of the world, and I had to stop myself from calling them away.
Margaret turned after a moment, ready for the next revelation, but El lingered, her eyes like sharpened pencils taking down a secret shape.
We kept walking, out beyond the school, past the track, to the far end of the soccer field, where a large hill rose with soft geometry from the ground.
We made a bed for ourselves in the tall, wild grass, flung out our blankets and pillows into a single mattress.
My silence had spread between us. We worked without speaking, the night like a place of worship.
In the pure dark, we couldn’t see the mosquitoes, so we pretended they weren’t there.
Then, lying down on the blanket, the dark felt too large, so Margaret started to wriggle around like a worm on the ground to make us laugh, and we pressed our heads together and whispered secrets about ourselves we all already knew.
I sometimes read porn in the bathroom during dinner.
Eleanor’s famous first serve once hit a girl in the throat, and afterward the girl quit playing tennis.
Margaret, alone in the kitchen last year, spilled water all over her mom’s phone.
When submerging it in rice failed to bring the phone back to life, she returned it to her mother’s purse and said nothing.
Margaret kept accidentally raising the volume of her voice as she thought of one more thing to say, and Eleanor kept reaching an arm across my torso to grab Margaret’s wrist in reminder.
“Shh,” she said over and over again. “Haven’t you ever whispered in your life?”
Every time she hushed Margaret, Eleanor’s breath heated my neck and the weight of her arm lay upon my stomach, and I felt perfect there between them.
I noticed when El fell asleep, because her breath on my skin became even, and I lay there in the warm air of her exhalations wondering how long I could keep myself awake in this moment, how I could have more of it and what I thought the more might be.
“Mar,” I whispered into the eerie dark. She adjusted her position next to me, so I knew she’d heard. “You put a penis in your mouth.”
Her body shook against mine in silent laughter.
“Mina,” she whispered back. “You broke a rule.”
And she was right. I’d left the place I’d said I’d be without telling my mother, and I wasn’t going to get up and go back, not now that I’d made it all the way here with my friends.
All that remained for me was to sleep and then to wake up as a person who had already done this.
Maple tree samaras spiraled down through the sky like falling eyelashes. I closed my eyes and wished on them.
—
I woke up very early in the morning, my forehead pressed to the curl of Margaret’s back. Moisture clung to my face and hair, and droplets of dew bowed the blades of tall grass above me. Eleanor’s body wasn’t touching mine. I felt her missing from me and sat up.
She stood nearby, watching the sun rise, its ray like a brush combing the grassy field, her blanket in her hand.
Her pale hair looked almost pink in the new light.
Among it hung three small braids I hadn’t seen her make the night before.
The braids were loosened, fuzzed, plaits half released.
I got up, immediately alert, my pulse tapping like rain.
The braids were an invitation. I couldn’t let her go home and unbraid them.
I approached Eleanor. I was much taller than she was.
Her mouth reached my shoulder. Her face, when it turned toward me, was soft with lingering sleep.
“Why do you always leave sleepovers early?” I asked, my voice low.
She looked at me with impatience. She looked at me a little bit like I was an idiot. She looked at me like she’d already come to a conclusion and all I had to do was allow it.
And then she was kissing me—one hand to my waist, the other rising to touch my neck, to lower my face to hers—her lips on mine—her lips on mine—spectacular and disappearing as a snowflake.
Margaret rolled over and made a noise as though she might wake up. I thought Margaret could go ahead and die! But already Eleanor was withdrawing.
Her face flashed with superlative vulnerability. I had never seen such a look on her face before, and I knew right away she’d hold my having seen it against me. I stiffened. The idea of Eleanor holding anything against me had become suddenly intolerable.
For a minute we just stood there watching Margaret’s face, watching her eyes move behind her eyelids but never open and feeling like if they did it might be the end of the world.
If she’d seen us, then what? And if she hadn’t, to resume our usual three-way dynamic in the aftermath of what had happened felt impossible, almost violent.
“Tell Mar I said bye when she wakes up,” Eleanor said.
I nodded. I wanted her to stay, and I wanted her to leave, so that I could be alone for a moment and try to understand what had transpired between us.
I watched her outline recede through the field and finally disappear.
For long minutes, I remained where I was, busy being rearranged by the effect of her mouth on mine.
Then I woke Margaret and reported Eleanor’s having already left, and we gathered our remaining pillows and blankets into our bags and walked back to her house through the grass, dew dripping down my legs and mosquito bites swelling my ankles.