“You’re grounded for a month,” she said. I’d already been grounded for two months for sneaking a miniskirt and black nylons to school in my bag. “You’re also grounded from using the phone, young lady,” she said, her jaw clenched. “You sneak, and you lie.”
It was true. I snuck clothing. I snuck into her shower when she was out and shaved my legs for the way it made my calves reflect a line of light, and then I lied about using her razor.
“And no allowance this month.”
My allowance was five dollars per week, but I’d been in trouble for long enough for the clothing, my poor evaluations at school, and not doing my homework when I said I would that I had not received it for at least three months. Any money I had was from Kate Willenborg’s father, who would give us each a twenty-dollar bill and drop us off at the mall. I believed money should be used, transformed into objects as quickly as possible before it disappeared.
Back at the house, she screamed. I worried the neighbors would hear us. Some strange power was moving through her veins and her extremities, the voltage almost too high for the instrument it ran through. She waggled an index finger right up close to my face and her cheeks got pink.
“You’re wasting your life,” she said. “If you don’t study now, you won’t find what you love to do, and then you won’t get to work with intelligent people later.”
“But I’m only in fifth grade,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” she said, starting to cry. “The work you do now will lead to the work you do later. It will inform who are the people you spend your life with, how interesting they are. Your colleagues.”
“I don’t care about them,” I said. I pictured people in an airless room who thought they were enjoying themselves, but who were not. I believed my mother was lying to me, wanting me to become just like her. This made no sense—she didn’t have colleagues—but her insistence that I abandon my own sensibility and adopt hers made me assume the story would end with me as her. Were I to abandon joy for study and long-term gratifications, I was sure I would be rewarded with a situation as tepid and flavorless as the studying itself. It didn’t occur to me until years later that she had been referring to her own loss, having a child so young when she might have continued at school, at work. Working alone now, when she might have liked to work with a team of people. That she had been fighting so hard for me to apply myself to my studies to help me have a good life, the closest she could come to describing the eminence she felt she had lost for herself.
“You will care, you little shit,” she said, kicking my bedroom door hard, and leaving a hole in the white paint that looked like a mouth dropped open in surprise.
A few days later I found my mother leaning over her bathroom sink again, yanking her braces off with needle-nose pliers.
“What are you doing?”
“The orthodontist said one more year,” she said, “but I don’t think so.” The sound of something crackling.
“Mom, go to the orthodontist. Let him do it.”
“I can’t wait. I can’t live like this anymore.” I’d noticed she’d been complaining about them more than usual lately: they were painful, food got caught, she was sick of changing the bands. She wanted them off for good. The adjustment had moved faster given how often she’d changed the bands; her teeth were straight enough, she said.
“Please, don’t,” I said. I stood next to her in the small bathroom. The wires stuck out like silver whiskers.
“I’m not stopping,” she said. “Get out. Go do something else.”
Some nights Toby called. He was a popular sixth grader with white-blond hair, a long neck, and ears that stuck out like delicate shells. His voice was a low, rich scratch with the higher notes still inside. At school, I flirted with him, glancing and looking away, giggling with friends.
“Do you want to go steady?” he asked one day.
“Sure,” I said. Sure was the word I’d decided to say if he asked—it was positive, but held something back.
We planned to French-kiss. Kate and Craig would escort us to the Stumps at lunchtime. The Stumps was an area down at the bottom of school property, a level clearing named after a collection of logs sawed into pieces near a bend in a fire road along a dry creek bed. Lunch was only forty minutes—with travel time factored in, we wouldn’t have long.
We followed a path below the middle school, over a small bridge in the shade of the trees that reminded me of Bridge to Terabithia, a book that had made me feel the great importance and weight of life and love. There were cool ribbons of wind inside the warm, dry air. The leaves cracked under my feet; the trees above covered the paths in cool shadows, with dots of light like white paint flicked all over the forest.
“So kiss a little longer, longer with Big Red,” Kate sang.
The path became steep and less determinate after the bridge, and I almost slipped on my butt, but scrambled up, grabbing at branches, being careful not to snag my earrings.
When we arrived, Toby said, “I guess you guys should go away now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for bringing us!”
At school, I lied and said I’d kissed before, ashamed to be later than my father had been at kissing, and thinking it would make me more attractive if it got around that I’d done it before. I felt woozy. I stood on a low stump to be level with his face.
“Well—I guess,” he said.
He smelled of soap and detergent. A thrill moved through my back, heat moving up. I wasn’t sure how long to keep going, how frenetically to maneuver my tongue. It was warm and good and electric, the temperature lower in his mouth by a degree or two, and less salt. Was I moving my tongue in the right way? How much was my tongue to be entertained, versus entertainment for his tongue?
My heart fluttered; his tongue seemed to be searching, avid, pointed at the tip and forcing his way through the cavity. An excess of saliva made my chin wet, and in the midst of it I worried about what I would do when it was over, to dry off. He ran his tongue over the back of my top front teeth, a hollow ring in my jaw.
My neck got sore and so I took a risk, detached and tilted my head to the other side, flipping my hair along with it. At the reattachment, we knocked teeth. We both laughed, nervously, then continued. Later, I would teach myself to twist my tongue both ways to reveal the soft underside.
It was unclear when to stop, but we’d have to get back to class, and now we’d done the kiss on both sides.
“We’d better go back,” I said. I jumped off the stump, looser in my limbs. His lips were red around the edges. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
I did, too, when he looked away.
The following summer, after more kisses in movie theaters, at the Baylands, the beach, and in the back of his mother’s station wagon, and letters exchanged back and forth, Toby called to end it with me. I talked on the now paint-spattered cordless phone my mother had purchased when we moved into the Rinconada house, the phone that was, like the microwave, a sign of moving up in the world.
“I think we should break up,” he said.
I felt a stab of guilt I couldn’t place. “I’m sorry for what I did wrong,” I said, choking up.