“Not a lot.” I breathed out slowly, considering my words. “I just have the shell. Found it in my backyard.” Every sentence prompted the movement of her hand to a different place on my body. First, she rubbed the tender inside of my forearm, then slipped below the hem of my shirt to stroke the skin above my navel.
“What else?” Her breath was a heavy, live thing in my ear.
It was hard to collect the memory. Her fingers crawled over my ribs, slipping delicately beneath the wire of my bra cup. “It was under the basketball hoop, by the shed. My brother tried to crush it with a basketball, but he kept missing.”
One finger lazily swept along the bottom of my breast, just barely grazing my nipple. “What did it look like?”
“Waxy yellow. Like cellophane tape.”
“What did it smell like?” With the other hand she scraped along the seam of my jeans, back and forth. Lightly at first, and then hard enough I could hear the scratch of her nails against the fabric.
I took in more air and paused, the memory bursting from static fuzz at the back of my brain. “Nothing. There was nothing to smell.”
What I’d done was taste it, licking a hole right through the middle of the thorax. Brynn dared me to do it. Dared me to touch my mouth to the hollow shell, holding it up like she wanted me to give it a kiss. A bit of shell had come away from the body, stuck to the tip of my tongue. It melted there, gluey, the way that tapioca pearls tasted when stripped of the pudding. Brynn screamed and ran back into the house, leaving me there. I’d cupped the body in my hands like it might try to escape too.
Lucinda rubbed hard and fast and I came, teeth digging into my lip until I could taste the copper of blood almost bursting through the skin. I grabbed her wrist when she kept going and the spasms were undercut with the roughness of my jeans grinding into my crotch.
A man opened the door to the bar and light from inside expanded outward in a bright circle. We climbed into the truck and I let her take us to my apartment. She drove five miles under the speed limit, struggling over the clutch whenever she tried shifting higher than second gear. Hunched over the wheel, white-knuckling on the stick shift, she looked frail and small. Not the kind of person who could bring someone to orgasm in a public parking lot. There was danger in being around a person so malleable. She could be anything I wanted: sweet, shy, hard, careful. Loveable. Her layers were cracking open. I worried what I’d discover about myself if I dug into her too deeply.
“You’re stripping the gears,” I said, laughing at her pinched expression. She drove like an old lady. She drove, I thought, like my mother. “Get a rhythm going. Sex rhythm. You know that, right?”
Lucinda slapped my hand when I tried to shift for her. “Next time don’t drink so much, you can drive.”
“Fine.” She was cute, weaving all over the road. Cute, but scary. “Speed up, we’re gonna get pulled over.”
The truck lurched into third and I clutched the seat, hoping we wouldn’t stall out.
Back at my apartment, Lucinda asked to see the cicada. I pulled a Tupperware from the back of my bedroom closet and found it shrouded in newspaper at the very bottom of the bin, buried beneath a couple of Brynn’s old T-shirts and stacks of Polaroids I couldn’t bear to look at. Us at birthday parties, sleepovers. Opening gifts at Christmas. Pictures of Brynn holding the kids, wearing only a nightgown. The two of us crunched together on a dirty, strange couch in purple and pink Halloween cat ears.
The shell had disintegrated a little where my tongue had poked through, but the head was still completely intact. It sat cupped in my hand as Lucinda hovered over it, drinking the last cold beer from my fridge. Why was another woman always finishing my beers?
“I should get you some art. For the apartment. It’s sparse in here.”
“I’ve seen the kind of art you’re into. Pass.”
She didn’t respond to my jab, just leaned over to examine the insect shell. Condensation dripped off the bottle and landed on my palm, squirreling down toward the carapace. I tilted my wrist so it dripped down my arm instead.
“Fine, no art. Put up some photos, Jessa. Mementos.” Lucinda set the empty on the coffee table next to the others we’d killed. Her fingernail gently traced the translucent wings, tapped at its empty, bristled legs. “It’s incredible. Perfectly formed, but completely hollow.”
Its eyes were milky spots that stood out like bits of bubble wrap. “I like how cicadas sound,” I admitted, rolling the shell back and forth in my hand. “They make me feel like the whole world’s about to go to sleep. Reminds me of being up late with my dad.”
Lucinda took off her pants and shirt, opening the bedroom window in just her black underwear. Her breasts were high and small, so different from my own, which sagged like spent party balloons. My skin wrinkled up whenever she lifted a nipple to suck. It hurt a little, but it was a good kind of ache. When she came back to the bed and tried to kiss me, I pushed her away and kicked off my boots, my jeans. I thought about her roommate, a woman just like me, waiting at home for her, and then I kissed her to make myself forget. Forget all about it. Think only about the body—how it would open for me, be the thing that I needed.
She lay back on my unmade covers, still rumpled from the night before. Had me set the carapace of the cicada on the plane of her stomach, in the fallen divot between her ribs. We watched each other through the open hole of its body. I could hear the live ones screaming again outside in the trees, high and shrill. When my mouth touched the opening to her body, her chest rose abruptly. The cicada rolled forward, ready for flight.
Lucinda got up early the next morning. She pulled on one of my shirts and put her hair back into a ponytail that sat twisted to one side of her head. As she leaned over me in the bed, I could smell my own toothpaste on her breath.
“I’m gonna go down the street and pick us up doughnuts,” she whispered, smoothing a hand along my cheek. “Then let’s talk about tonight. We should have a game plan for your mom’s house.” I grunted and rolled over, pretending to fall back asleep.
When the door closed behind her, I sat up and let my hangover sit heavy in my head, dreading the fear and exhaustion that always came with morning sobriety. The cicada was on the nightstand. I held it up to the light, streaming bright through the broken vertical blinds. Its wings were translucent, body yellow stained glass.
Brynn once asked me to make her a dragonfly costume for Halloween. It took me weeks, selecting shiny fabric scraps and molding shimmering wings, holding them up to her back, measuring her for something fluttery and fragile. It fit her perfectly.
Jessa made this for me, isn’t it great?
She told this to anyone who’d listen, spinning in circles in the middle of a party, flapping the sparkling wings. I’d dotted them with painstaking rows of tiny rhinestones. She liked the costume so much she’d worn it three years in a row. A beautiful, shining creature.
I left before Lucinda got back and drove to the shop. I drank dank leftover coffee in the dark, broodily, until my stomach pitched and I switched to water.
Everyone was meeting at my mother’s that evening for a preview of her showcase. She’d invited over some of our family friends: Vera and her husband, Travis and his wife. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I didn’t like the unknown aspect of what might be shoved in my face. I worked on some mounts, half-heartedly, then scrubbed down the already pristine counters with bleach. Milo called a couple of times and so did Lucinda. I set my phone to silent and tried to take a nap on the cot in the back, but my brain wouldn’t let me rest.