Chapter 25
Margaret came over the next day to hear my report on having a girl’s tongue in my mouth.
We ran up the stairs to my room. Summer’s heat had mellowed.
I had all my windows open, and the wood-slat ceiling fan circulated lazily.
Margaret had told her mom her phone fell out of her pocket into the marsh.
Nancy accused Margaret of having lost the phone on purpose for the sake of getting a new one.
Margaret could have gotten into real trouble for this, but instead she pointed out that her mom could be the one to get the new phone, and Margaret could inherit her mom’s old one.
“She loves when I’m the reason she has to buy something new for herself,” Margaret said, and tossed the new old phone onto my bed, where it made a divot in the center of the comforter.
She climbed on after, claiming the left side of my mattress, my side of the bed.
“I think I should ruin all her clothes as a favor,” Margaret continued.
“She’d love to be obligated to buy a new wardrobe. ”
I scooted onto the right side of the bed, the side tucked into the room’s corner, where Margaret always slept when she slept over.
From there, I could see us both reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall, so I shook out my hair and arranged my limbs a little more artfully.
Margaret, whose eyes sought out reflective surfaces at least as often as mine, looked over her shoulder into the mirror, caught what I was doing, and began to do the same.
She extended her neck and bent up her right leg, which lay on top of her left, to raise her hip, so her waist became a curved shape.
We moved in silence, making these minor adjustments, until the picture of ourselves we saw in the mirror appeared desirable, composed—establishing whatever we said next as a conversation had by attractive people sitting attractively.
“We have a topic,” I said, a little salaciously. Salaciousness felt like the only tone I knew how to take.
“We have a real topic!” Margaret echoed, with a coy little move of the chin.
She seemed unusually alert, like she wanted her wits about her.
For once, I’d done something Margaret hadn’t already done herself.
I’d hooked up with a girl, with Eleanor, a person we’d both seen naked and whose mother we knew, Eleanor, who had been but was no longer equally our other best friend.
Now Eleanor was my girlfriend. Now both of Margaret’s best friends were dating each other.
“So how was it?” she asked.
I realized I couldn’t continue in the mode I’d begun—I couldn’t gossip about hooking up with Eleanor—but I didn’t know how to reply otherwise.
“Good,” I said, and I could tell Margaret thought this was for dramatic effect, misreading me.
She rolled her eyes. “I’m so glad,” she said, meaning Say the rest already.
But I didn’t know how. If I were Margaret, or rather if Eleanor had been some boy, I would have gotten us both on the floor.
I’d have sat us on our knees to show Margaret how my right knee slowly moved between Eleanor’s legs as we kissed and touched each other, so that eventually she’d sat on my thigh and began to grind herself against me.
But this information was private, I felt sure—the way Eleanor had stopped, embarrassed, because rubbing yourself on someone’s thigh wasn’t the kind of sexual experience any of us anticipated having or heard about as an achievement.
I couldn’t tell Margaret about either Eleanor’s pleasure or her embarrassment.
“Well, what’s a pussy like?” Margaret tried.
Though I appreciated the way she framed the question, I couldn’t speak in general without speaking about Eleanor. I had a sample size of one.
“Really soft,” I said.
I felt a rising tide of anxiety, perhaps the same fear that had stopped me from talking to Margaret in the first place.
How would our friendship be, from now on, if I couldn’t reveal every inch of my life to her, without consideration for other people, the way we always had?
Could I keep telling her how hot she was every time she tried on a new outfit?
Could I keep letting her borrow all my clothes, or would it upset Eleanor to see Margaret braless in my sweaters?
Could we keep showering together? Could we keep loving each other in all the ways we always had?
“Did you like, make her come?” Margaret asked, still seeking a point of entry for this conversation.
She’d begun to seem nervous. She checked the lock screen of her phone and then put it to sleep again.
I didn’t want to make her nervous. Having surpassed or at least exited the realm of her experience made me feel like I was living my own life, but it also made me feel lonely.
I wondered if Margaret would ever hook up with a girl.
I wondered if Margaret had kissed Eleanor even a little bit for the sake of catching up with me.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
“Oh.”
“I mean, I didn’t either,” I said with some trepidation. A thin wind blew through the room, air cool and light like I hadn’t felt since the start of the season.
“Right.”
“I think either of us coming would have been hard, though, on our first try.” This seemed like a kind of truth I could convey, something I could tell Margaret that was real but didn’t seem to compromise Eleanor.
“Oh, yeah, totally, of course,” she reassured me. “It’s not like a boy has ever made me come.”
Which wasn’t something Margaret had ever acknowledged to me before.
Her stories typically conveyed a certain smugness about how she’d made the other person feel, how she’d done such a great job getting them to ejaculate as planned, but she skipped over saying much about her own pleasure.
She told me if she liked it or not, but she didn’t treat her physical experience as the point.
When she confessed this to me, I heard in her voice such an evident desire to rescue me from even the potential of my own doubt about my sexual performance that at last I identified a place I could begin.
“Do you want me to tell you something?”
“Yes,” she said, at full attention. “Tell me.”
“Before I went over, like when I knew I was going over to her house in an hour, I looked up clitorises. Like, I looked up what is a clitoris to be sure. And did you know, it’s actually not only the little flesh at the top?
That’s just the most obvious part. It’s also underneath your skin along the sides.
It’s like a wishbone shape around like the opening. ”
Margaret looked stricken. “Wait,” she said. “What do you mean the flesh and what do you mean the sides?”
“Like the nub, the thing at the top.”
Margaret sat up. “I don’t know if I have that.”
“You definitely have it. You’d know by now if you didn’t have it.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t think I do.”
“Okay, well, you’ve like had an orgasm,” I said in a conciliatory, stating-the-facts tone of voice, because Margaret had previously led me to believe she knew how to make herself come, even if no one else did.
She demurred. “The thing is, I’m not sure if I have or not.”
“Okay, but you told me about the faucet and the bathtub. You started when you were seven. I remember.”
“Yeah, I know, but just because I touch myself doesn’t mean that like anything especially happens. It just feels good and then eventually I stop.”
This meant hooking up with Eleanor hadn’t been the first thing I’d done before Margaret, only the first I knew about.
She looked upset to have admitted this. She didn’t want it to be true.
She told me now because she needed me to have all the evidence, so I could assist her in sorting through it.
Disclosure from Margaret made me feel vital, important.
“Yeah, totally, I know what you mean,” I said, to comfort her. I showed her the diagram I’d found on an online encyclopedia. I’d saved a screenshot to my camera roll for future reference. The clitoris was an upside-down pink Y, the stem of the letter folded over at the top.
“What if I don’t have that, Mina—and I can’t?”
“Can’t what?”
“Ever come.”
“You have it.”
“I don’t think I do.” Real fear cracked in her voice.
I wanted to reassure Margaret, but for a moment, the urgency and sincerity of her worry broke through my confidence.
I didn’t know whether or not her anatomy was like mine.
Then, determined, I bricked up this uncertainty, the way Margaret always did for me, when I needed her composure. It was my turn to be steadfast.
“I’m going to search if you can be born without a clitoris,” she said rashly.
“No. Don’t do that,” I said with authority, my hand cutting her off. “Definitely, we’re not doing that as a first step. That’s a trap.”
“Well, I need to know like right now.”
I understood. “Do you want me to look?”
“Yes,” she said. “Will you?”
I left to fetch a cotton swab. Margaret took off her pants and underwear and lay down on my bed, on top of the covers.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen her vagina, though never from this angle and never so on purpose, with her legs half open, the overhead light on, my bedside table cloud lamp lit up, and the flashlight on Margaret’s phone active and in her hand in case I needed additional light.
We were apparently concerned I could be led astray by insufficient illumination, as though this were a mining expedition.
I was a little, though not painfully, embarrassed.
I was pleased to be needed on a mission that could be entrusted to no one else.
I was curious to know what she looked like.
I felt no need to touch her, however. She was an attractive person, and I saw and loved her attractiveness, but her beauty had nothing to do with me, not in the way that Eleanor’s did.
Margaret naked was Margaret naked. We’d been naked together routinely for most of our lives.
All that had changed was the understanding that I could have felt differently.
Her clitoris was there, though its apex looked more like two soft sheets crossing over each other than the dense doubled-over rose I knew from my own.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
I pressed on the top with the cotton swab.
“Oh,” she said, surprised.
Then I faintly traced down the sides, to explain the wishbone. She made a little shiver. This was the only thing I feared I shouldn’t have seen. My heart sped for a second. Quickly, I withdrew my hand. “It’s under there.”
“That’s crazy,” she said, with a laugh, still holding on to her knees, unembarrassed to be naked or by her own reaction. “That’s crazy!”
“I know,” I agreed. “Like who was going to tell us that and when?” Relief at Margaret’s relaxed response thumped through me. It felt right. This was our friendship, the ability to bare ourselves to each other.
She put her pants back on, and while she was getting dressed, she said, “I realize that might have been weird for you. Was that something we shouldn’t have done—because of El, I mean?”
Margaret asked me this question over her shoulder and only after we’d already finished.
I wondered when it had occurred to her. I wondered if she’d wanted, on some level, to gauge my reaction, to figure out if I wanted anything from her other than what I’d always wanted, now that I’d made it clear what I wanted from Eleanor.
“No,” I said. “I mean I guess it was a little weird, but only in the way that I noticed that, like, this is something that could be weird but actually isn’t.”
Margaret nodded. A different imbalance was on my mind, however, something else I thought had to be addressed for Margaret and Eleanor and me to knit ourselves together again.
“I think you should apologize to Eleanor,” I said.
“Like I think you should say I’m sorry out loud.
” The two of them wouldn’t get there on their own.
Eleanor wouldn’t ask for an apology, and Margaret wouldn’t acknowledge a wrong unless someone made her.
“She kissed you in front of other people. She did you a favor that was counter to her personality.”
Margaret disagreed. Reclothed, she hopped back on my bed. “Kissing people you wouldn’t kiss otherwise is literally the premise of Truth or Dare.”
“Yes, but you took her participation for granted,” I said. “It’s Eleanor. She could have declined or left. She chose not to leave you hanging.”
What I didn’t say was that Eleanor kissing Margaret had been a betrayal of Eleanor’s feelings for me, for Margaret’s benefit. Did Margaret know that? We looked at each other. Margaret’s eyes were brown, like mine, though lighter.
“Okay,” she said, in the way that meant, I’ll do this because you’re telling me to.
“Okay,” I said, in the way that meant, Thank you for letting me determine what’s necessary under our present circumstances.