She swipes a small circle into the highest point of the—flower? Fruit? Some combination of both?—and Sarah is hunched over, cry-laughing.
“Rhodes!” Sarah cries out. “You don’t know what you’re looking at?!”
I want to get in the car and go home. This is terrible—everything is terrible—and I should have never let Sarah convince me that the three of us could spend the night together without somebody getting hurt. I would get in the car and go back to campus, except I drove us here. Even if I’d strand Iliana without batting an eyelash, I can’t do it to Sarah, so I’m stuck.
“Tell us what you think it is,” Iliana says.
Her grin is the Cheshire Cat’s, brilliant white against the dark. As soon as the thought hits me, I strike it away. It’s sacrilege to think of the Cheshire Cat—not to mention, my Curious-in-Cheshire—and Iliana at the same time.
“No.”
“Oh, come on, Rho,” Iliana says. “It’s okay. It’s funny. I just want to know what you think it is.”
“Don’t call me that,” I say. “That nickname’s not for you.”
I would give anything to be Iliana right now. If the shoe were on the other foot, and if it were Sarah and somehow me making Iliana feel like this, she’d have laid us all to shreds. She’d raise her sharp brows and bare her sharp teeth, and in a matter of a dozen words, we’d both be crying. And with a toss of all that wild, curly hair, she’d march off without so much as a look behind her.
But I’m not Iliana. I’m me, and I’m terrible at this sort of thing.
“It’s a mango,” I say.
“Well, apparently, this will be educational for you and the entire Victory Hills athletic program,” Iliana says. With her hands, she swipes an arrow pointing to the small circle at the top of the teardrop-flower-fruit.
In wide, crude letters, she writes:
NEWSFLASH:
THIS!
IS!
A!
CLITORIS!
Oh.
The moment reframes itself, and I’m embarrassed again, for entirely different reasons.
“I knew that,” I mumble, but the girls are lost to giggling again.
It’s not so much that I’ve never heard of one before. Sarah told me once that Iliana has been with a lot of girls—well, not a lot a lot, but more than Sarah, who has never actually disclosed her number but strongly implied that she’s had sex more than a few times—and I’ve physically been with exactly zero.
I mean, I’ve kissed girls. But I’ve never actually seen a clitoris that belonged to someone else, and I’ve never been brave enough to use a mirror to take a look at my own.
Not to mention—in my family, sex isn’t something we talk about at all.
I don’t know how to even begin talking about it so casually; a part of me wishes I could. The rest of me still squirms with discomfort.
The announcer’s voice echoes up to us, declaring the end of the first half. The score is tied, the air is thick with tension, and an entire platoon of shiny helmets and shoulder pads are marching toward the backfield gates below. With a shriek, Sarah and Iliana slap the lids onto their buckets and toss the rollers into the woods.
We’re running again—this time the long way across the back of the field and out toward the parking lot.
I have no idea if the girls are going to remember tonight five years from now, or what they did, or what I said. It’s hard to know where my thoughts ended and the stuff that came out of my mouth began—only that everything felt personal, and then it wasn’t, and that I didn’t know something, and everybody else did.
I pull out my phone when we get back to the car, and while Iliana and Sarah are loading the trunk, I get in and swipe past eight bajillion notifications to open where a Slash/Spot shortcut is saved to my home screen. I have an entire afternoon’s worth of direct messages waiting on my phone.
The relief is so palpable, I could cry with it.
Cheshire knows me. She knows my heart, and she knows that these kinds of conversations terrify me, and she doesn’t judge me for any of it. It’s okay that I’ve never been with anyone. It’s okay that I’m still a little bit afraid of how everything works.
It’s okay that I don’t want to talk about it until I do.
And when I am ready, when I’m burning with want for her, she’s always ready to catch me. I open the direct message feature on my phone and reread Cheshire’s messages from earlier:
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:41p: Incredible.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:42p: This is even better than I could have imagined.
She loved my concept sketches for our next Hearts and Spades update.
I could cry with relief—this is the only thing I have left. The only piece of my creativity I have left that isn’t broken.
It’s also the only thing I won’t let anyone else in the world see.
Iliana’s and Sarah’s voices are echoing through the windows from outside the car. I don’t know what they’re laughing about, and I don’t really care—of course I care, I hate being left out of anything—but I hurry to fire back a response before I lose my phone for the rest of the night.
I-Kissed-Alice 8:41p: yes, tomorrow <3 let’s go over the script one more time after you get off work, okay?
“Let us in!” Sarah yanks on the handle of the locked passenger-side door. Iliana is propped against the car behind her, eternally uninvested in Sarah’s plight.
My heart is wild in my ears.
All I want is to curl up next to Cheshire and listen to all of her theorizing face-to-face, find some kind of a keyhole I could squeeze through into another life and another world where anonymity and distance doesn’t separate us. Sometimes I’m afraid that all she sees of me is a computer screen—to me she’s real, and she’s perfect. She’s all I’ve ever wanted.
But I belong to Sarah tonight—not Cheshire—so I allow myself one last message before I put my phone away for good.
I-Kissed-Alice 8:42p: I have to go. More soon. <3
With a kiss popped onto my darkened phone screen, I throw the thing into the console and unlock the car doors.
“Petty much?!” Sarah shrieks when she falls face-first into the front seat. “Jesus Christ on a cracker, it got chilly fast.”
In the rearview mirror, I catch Iliana glowering at the seat warmer controls.
“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, Sarah,” Iliana snips. She squints at the numbers on my dashboard. “Besides, it’s just sixty-seven degrees. It’s only comparatively colder than it was before the sun went down.”
I turn on the radio, and Sarah turns it off. We ride back to Sarah’s house in utter silence.
The car may be quiet, but tension screams in the air around us.
Comment 11: I-Kissed-Alice 11:43p: OH MY GOOOOOD.
Comment 12: I-Kissed-Alice 11:43p: You literally lifted that word for word from our direct messages the other night
Comment 13: Curious-in-Cheshire 12:15a: Are you ok? Was I not supposed to use that? You didn’t say …
Comment 14: I-Kissed-Alice 12:15a: It’s fine. It’s perfect.
Comment 15: I-Kissed-Alice 12:15a: I’ll be in my bunk
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