“Intimacy means giving up parts of yourself to someone, even when that means they can hurt you very badly. But sometimes we let them because pain can feel good too.” She pressed her palm against my cheek.
I yawned until my jaw cracked. “I don’t wanna try all the time. I’m just tired.”
“That’s okay.” She petted my neck and smoothed back my hair. “It’s hard to talk about the ugly parts. How we can be that terrible and still worthy of love.”
“I don’t want to feel anything.” I leaned into her and she cradled my head against her chest. It was awkward and uncomfortable. I willed myself to go numb, to fill with white noise.
“It’s scary to need people.”
Burying my face into the crook of her neck, I felt my teeth denting the wrinkled flesh. I found it hard to speak without choking. “I do like feeling pain, feeling hurt about Brynn,” I confessed, hating myself for saying it. “I like it because it’s mine and it’s the only thing I have left of her. If I stop feeling bad, then she’s really gone.”
My mother’s fingers dug into my braid. I let myself cry then too. Both of us clinging to each other, the towel falling around her waist. Sir Charles stared down at us, little paws soaking ruin into the woodwork.
GOPHERUS AGASSIZII—DESERT TORTOISE
We found the condoms in the lot behind Brynn’s trailer. A whole box of them, unopened, like they’d just fallen out of someone’s shopping bag. I’d seen condoms on TV before but never in person. Brynn told me her mother used them, but she wasn’t sure where she kept them. She thought maybe the guys her mother dated were expected to bring them over. I didn’t know if my parents used them, but it wasn’t something I’d ask.
Let’s blow ’em up, like balloons. She shook the box, held it overhead and shook it again, slapped it against her ass like a tambourine. Fucking condoms!
It was too hot to be outside. It was early August and we were smothering. I was breaking out bad on my back and wore a gray flannel to try to cover it, roasting myself alive. I’d ditched Milo at the 7-Eleven when he wouldn’t share his Slurpee with me. He’d find us eventually, but for now it was just the two of us, which was better. Brynn was hanging on him a lot, touching him too often. Throwing her arm around his neck, poking at his underwear when the band popped up out of his shorts. It made him blush and then she’d laugh at the color in his cheeks, leaning in to giggle in his ear.
Brynn held the condoms out to me. Let’s do this. It’ll be fun.
Someone will see, I said, crossing my arms. We’ll look stupid.
We should find your brother. He’d like this.
It put me in a really bad mood to think about the two of them together. I wasn’t happy with anything; too broken out, my hair greasy from hormones. Brynn looked comfortable, snug in her cutoff jean shorts and white cami top. I could see her nipples through the thin fabric, and I told her so, but she just shrugged and wiggled her chest at me. I knew if Milo saw her he’d freak out and get that look on his face that always meant he was thinking about sex. It bothered me for a lot of reasons I couldn’t reconcile. Brynn was mine, but Milo was mine too. I hated the idea of the two of them having each other without me.
No, let’s just do it. You and me.
Yay! She skipped around in the grass, kicking up dirt with her flip-flops.
We drank hose water, pulled around from the front of the trailer to the back, where we could hide from prying eyes. Brynn’s mother wasn’t home, but she hardly ever was. She’d met a new guy and he was already living in the trailer. Brynn said he didn’t have a job and he just sat around watching TV in his boxer shorts. It sounded gross to me, but Brynn said all the men her mother let move in were like that. The kind of guys who made her want to lock the bathroom door when she showered.
Fill them up with water. She held up one of the condoms, bloated and slick with lubricant. That was what Brynn had told me the shiny stuff was: L-U-B-E spelled out at me like I was an imbecile.
Like the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! of jizz. Brynn shook it and it jiggled, so full it looked ready to burst.
That’s nasty. I can’t even look at it.
Get used to it. How else are you gonna have a baby? Gonna need some baby batter, dummy. She tossed it lightly, hand to hand, so slick she nearly dropped it. The hose had wet her cami, and now I could really see through it, tiny nipples hard as pencil erasers.
I don’t want a baby.
Brynn snorted. Of course you do. Everybody wants a baby.
Well, I don’t.
Most kids grossed me out. How babies were made especially disgusted me. I never wanted to think about having to do something like that with a boy, letting him lie on top of me and shoot weird gunk inside my body. It sounded like a horror movie. Made me sick even thinking about it.
I could smell the funk from my own crotch and underarms, got whiffs of the greasy mess of my hair, like old french fries. I didn’t want to be in the field tossing condoms around. I wanted to swim in the community pool, spit chlorinated water from the gap between my front teeth. In the pool, I could feel light and weightless and like everybody else.
Taking a deep gulp of hose water, I held it in my mouth and wished it didn’t taste so much like melting rubber. It was the tail end of summer and nothing felt good. Already my mother had put out the fall harvest leaves, the wreath on the table ringing the large white pillar candles we were never allowed to light.
Four, five, six condom water balloons stuffed into an old plastic Easter basket that Brynn had unearthed from beneath the trailer. Their place was a dump, so full of trash all the time. They never threw anything away, and it always smelled like pulpy, rotten wood. Usually I didn’t mind. It was so different from my house and it reminded me of Brynn, how she loved things so much she couldn’t bear to throw them out. But I was thinking of Milo, how he would find us soon, and then Brynn would ignore me to giggle at him, and it made me want to bite something. It was too hot. I just wanted to be alone.
Okay, we’re ready. Come on.
I followed her back to the empty lot where we’d found the box, and she sat down with the basket of improvised water balloons. They jiggled obscenely. I waited for them to pop, stuffed next to sprigs of sharp plastic, but they stayed whole and glistening.
Wish I had a Coke. I threw myself down on a patch of grass and picked at some of the V-shaped weeds, pulling them apart and tossing the remnants to the side. Or an ice cream Snickers.
No, you don’t. Remember last time?
I remembered. Brynn and I and some of our friends were hanging out while we waited for boys’ track practice to end. Chocolate from the ice cream had melted onto my hands and face, but Brynn hadn’t told me. She’d just licked at her strawberry Popsicle, holding the dripping mess away from her white overalls. Milo found us then and told me it looked like I’d gotten shit on my mouth. Brynn laughed so hard I thought she was going to piss herself. She’d given Milo the last of her Popsicle, and he’d crunched into it with his front teeth. The two of them had looked so cozy, like they knew everything about each other—every stupid secret, every bad idea. My skin felt tender and porous, as if their actions had actually scraped my flesh.
That was the funniest thing ever, she said now, laughing. I wish I could see it all over again.