Mermaid Juice

“No Answers” by DARKRECONSTRUCTION

I spent the summer of my sixteenth year sitting on a bathroom countertop watching Leilah learn how to be a woman. Outside, heat blurred the faces of the identical-looking houses. Inside, chilled by air conditioning, Leilah’s features came into focus as she spread lipstick carefully within the lines of her cupid’s bow, rubbed perfume samples ripped from magazines on her pulse points, and used Scotch tape to remove stray glitter that fell onto the tip of her nose. My sole decoration was the checkerboard imprint of the tile on the back of my thighs.

Every girl needs a sister. Those we don’t get through blood, we seek among the wreck of strangers that pass through our lives. Sisters we play with, bond with, worship. We find her in those who look like us, speak like us, and act like us or in those who are so different from us that they pry open a space inside our hearts we didn’t know existed and climb inside, sewing up the gaping hole behind them so we can’t even claw them out if we tried.

I had no sisters by nature. Neither did Leilah. That, I think, is how we found each other.

Best friends since the first grade, districting had split us into rival high schools across the city. Our lazy, post-class afternoons had given way to studying for AP classes and the SATs. But the summer afforded us time and Leilah had cash, an ample allowance supplemented with money slipped from her mother’s purse.

As the only children of absent mothers, hers a high-level executive and mine running a busy chiropractic office with my father, Leilah and I had no one to demonstrate winged eyeliner or tell us how many layers of mascara we could swipe on before it clumped, thick and spidery. At the drugstore, a few bucks bought a wand of sticky lip-gloss, a bottle of nail polish, and a women’s magazine replete with instructions. I hovered while Leilah flicked through the options in the plastic display rack and, later, as she spent hours practicing with her newfound tools.

Leilah’s make-up was sacred. When I wanted to try some shimmer, as incandescent as fairy dust, she insisted on applying it to my cheekbones herself so I wouldn’t waste any.

“There,” she said, pulling away. I examined myself in the mirror and cocked my head as I’d seen Leilah do. It looked as if I had just run a mile in the 90-degree heat outside. Leilah insisted it made me look dewy, not sweaty, and then never let me use it again.

We shared other rites, like drenching ourselves in olive oil and laying in Leilah’s driveway until our skin turned red and, later, blistered. Our burns faded to tans, but no amount of washing removed the oil stains from our frilly bikinis. We wore the same halter-top suit in different colors (purple for her, teal for me), which only served to magnify the difference in our bodies. The soft snaking of her flesh; my body all bones and angles and peach fuzz. Leilah’s bikini top was three sizes larger than mine and, even then, her breasts strained in it like toothpaste in a tube rolled too tight.

***

The most important thing to know about Leilah was that she was beautiful.

She never had to pluck her nearly translucent eyebrows. Not once.

She always smelled good. Sweet, like vanilla-scented lotion and brown sugar.

When men drove by, they leaned out the windows of their cars before realizing how young she was. They hesitated. Then they leaned out even further.

***

Leilah and I had only two uninterrupted months to practice with make-up and walk into town to buy Frappuccinos, and pick up DVDs from Blockbuster. In August, Leilah would go to Amsterdam to visit her cousin for two weeks while I stayed home and helped my parents reorganize their office.

My mother dropped me off at Leilah’s each day before work. We watched movies, up to three a day. The first week that summer, we watched one called Death University, about a group of college girls cursed to die during their freshman year. I think the college had been built on a Native American burial spot or something. I don’t remember.

I watched a pretty Latina girl get electrocuted by a frayed bit of wiring in her dorm room. In the next scene, a busty blonde navigated her car onto the freeway to get home for Thanksgiving break. Out of seemingly nowhere, a pole flew from the back of a pickup truck, slicing through a windshield and spearing through her forehead. Blood dripped down her face and onto her cleavage. Her eyes crossed as she stared at the thing killing her.

Leilah had lied about her age to the pervy cashier at Blockbuster to get the movie. She planned to hide it in her room before her mother came home, but it wasn’t like we’d get in trouble if she didn’t.

On screen, an unsuspecting woman dug around a frat’s kitchen sink for a lost earring. The garbage disposal whirred to life. Blood and bones flung across the kitchen. A nearby keg dripped crimson.

Leilah watched, slack-jawed but unaffected, through a full mask of make-up. Even with foundation on, the light from her Toshiba rendered her skin almost transparent. Occasionally, she reached over to pluck a kernel of popcorn from our shared bowl until she reached over and her fingers hit cold, greasy glass and grains of salt. I’d been absent-mindedly eating palmfuls. Leilah rolled her eyes. It was like that for us. Leilah, of moderation. Me, insatiable.

“You ate it all,” she said, her gaze returning to the TV.

“Sorry.”

“You’re not.”

I shrugged.

She glanced sidelong at me. “I’d kill to be able to eat that much and still be that skinny.”

“Well, I’d kill for your boobs.”

“I’d trade you bodies,” she said, but then thought twice of my chest, strapped in by a flimsy bralette, though it didn’t need to be. “But I’d keep my boobs.”

On screen, a cheerleader walked through the quad when a plastic bag flying through the air got sucked into her throat. She turned red and coughed, but the thing wouldn’t come up. We watched her choke.

***

Leilah asked me to help dye her silver-blonde strands with blue Kool Aid for Fourth of July. My mother would have murdered me if I tried it. Besides, my dark hair would’ve needed to be bleached to hell first. Leilah, on the other hand, did as she pleased. After her parents broke up and her father moved away, her mother stopped enforcing rules. Once, Leilah went out to the hardware store, bought a can of black paint and a roller, and spent a weekend turning her room into a goth cavern. Her mother hardly said a word, just popped her head in to remind her to keep a window open for ventilation.

In the bathroom, I mixed the sugary blue powder with conditioner and guided the gloop into her hair with my bare hands. She arched her back and closed her eyes, as if she were relaxing in a salon chair. I stared down her tank top. I caught myself, but couldn’t stop.

I don’t know exactly when Leilah began talking about her breasts as if they were alien invaders, something apart from the rest of her body. She complained of how underwire poked her skin, how the straps of her bras were extended to their limits, leaving raised red marks on her shoulders like scars. She couldn’t sleep on her stomach. Button-up shirts could only be fastened to mid-chest before they burst loose.

Faint stretch marks where her breast met her armpits winked at me. I thought about those marks a lot—a flaw that she’d carry with her forever. Her punishment for growing up too fast and leaving me behind.

While we waited for the color to set, Leilah examined the empty Kool Aid packet.

“When I was little, I called this stuff Mermaid Juice,” she said.

I joked that her head was covered in mermaid blood, that she’d sprout gills and a fin, that we’d turn on the water to wash her hair and she’d jump down the drain and swim away.

After we rinsed it out, Leilah toweled herself off, looked in the mirror, and silently nodded. She meant to signal her approval, but I saw her swallow a thick gulp of reproach. The dye job was patchy and, though we’d covered the bathroom floor with old towels, I still managed to stain a corner of her shower mat.

Reminders of my failure, blue flecks with the sickly-sweet smell of fake lemonade, clung to the undersides of my fingernails for days until I finally gnawed them down to stumps.

***

My friends had begun bleeding years before; I was late. My mother brought me to a doctor who wrote me a prescription for birth control pills. Medicine to pull my reluctant body toward what it needed to become.

In the car on the way to the pharmacy, my mother said, “Well, at least we won’t have to have that awkward conversation when you start having sex.”

My neck burned. I hadn’t even kissed a boy. I was late to that, too.

I dutifully took the pill every day. Half the size of a Tic Tac, so small I could swallow it dry, it swept my body with a tidal wave of synthetic hormones. For weeks, nausea crippled me.

I choked down saltines and ginger ale every day for lunch until my stomach finally stopped churning, accepting its fate.

Leilah flew to the Netherlands. Meanwhile, I got my first period while alphabetizing patient files. I knew it was due—I’d taken the last few sugar pills in my blister pack—yet it still felt unexpected. The blood came like my body was making up for lost time.

My flow filled two heavy tampons in under an hour. At night, it soaked through the crotch of my pajamas. During the day, the humidity cloyed as I felt myself growing heavy, warm, and damp between my legs. Like some animal had burrowed there, growing fat on my blood.

One afternoon, as I dusted shelves in my parents’ office, I shifted and realized my tampon was full. Panic washed over me. I didn’t have an extra one on hand. I’d used them all.

My mom was busy with a client, so I found my dad at the front desk and mumbled that I needed money.

“For what?”

I stared at my dirty Keds. “I just need something.”

When I didn’t explain what it was, he insisted on walking me to the drugstore to pay for it himself. We both burned with shame as I placed the box of Tampax on the counter.

***

Leilah returned from Europe with stories about boys named Sven and Pierre, friends of her cousin who approached her at clubs and whose hearts were broken when she refused their advances. She hadn’t simply stayed in Amsterdam, but traveled all over. Brussels, London, Paris. She told me of riding trains, drinking wine, seeing famous paintings, wandering the streets at night, speaking French, eating soft cheeses that spilled open like living creatures when you cut into them.

“The thing,” she said at her kitchen table between bites of ice cream, “is for women to wear these bright thongs under white pants. In blacklights, they glow.”

“Ew.” I wrinkled my nose.

“I thought about buying a pair but, you know…” She swirled together the scoops of vanilla and strawberry in her bowl, creating a kind of soup. “Anyway, all the boys kept begging to dance with me.”

“Huh.”

“Gillie,” that was the name of her stupid cousin, “said she’s never heard her friends go on and on about someone before. Even though I’m from the States.”

Her voice dripped with something impossible to shake. The States was not just a place, but an idea, consuming everything and everyone there. Including me.

“Same assholes, different accents,” I mumbled.

“Hm?”

“Nothing.”

***

Hazel began showing up to our final summer afternoons. Hazel, who was in Leilah’s French class the year before and had been off at archery camp for most of the summer. Hazel, tall with milky skin and ruby cheeks. The kind of girl who had a favorite poem, which she could recite on cue.

Naturally, I hated her.

“Hazel is the name of a nut, not a person,” I said to Leilah after I first met her.

She cut me a mean look. “Hazel’s cool. She knows, like, three languages.”

The two of them seemed easy around each other in a way that never came naturally to me, draping their limbs over each other when they watched TV or gently tucking in the other’s shirt label when it stuck out, nary a word passing between them to apologize for touching the other unprompted. Their parents had activated unlimited texting on each of their respective Nokia phones, something mine refused to pay for. As movies played on Leilah’s TV, the two of them craned over their devices, typing madly. I pretended not to notice, but I could tell that, when one hit send, the other’s phone vibrated a moment later. Were they talking about me? What could they possibly be saying when all I was doing was sitting there?

Whenever Leilah left the room, Hazel and I went quiet. She kept texting; I yanked at the edges of my cuticles.

The two of them picked up some French curse words from a little book of foreign language slang Hazel stole from her older brother’s bookshelf. These words were never explained to me, they just appeared in conversation.

“Merde,” Hazel said, slapping her forehead, when she realized she forgot one of Leilah’s favorite CDs at home.

“Connard,” Leilah said when she stubbed her toe.

“Pute,” I parroted one day as I fumbled to open the door at Starbucks with a Frappuccino in hand. Leilah, who had ordered a double cappuccino despite the heat, stopped in her tracks.

“That’s my and Hazel’s thing,” she said. “And you didn’t pronounce it right.”

***

Late that night, a memory came to me, something I hadn’t thought of in years. During a sleepover in eighth grade, Leilah and I were falling asleep in her bed when she had mumbled, “We could practice kissing each other. Sometimes friends do that.”

“Huh?” I said, too sleepy to muster any real response. I caught a glance of Leilah’s digital clock, glowing with the time. 3:14 AM.

I felt Leilah bristle. The sheets tented between her bent legs as she sat up, a chill tunneling under the blankets. I tugged the covers close to me again. “It’s just so we know what we’re doing with boys.”

“I practice with a pillow,” I told her. That much was true. Many nights, I’d shoved my face into my pillow, my lips bestowing big, open kisses on it, bouncing my hips up and down on my fingers below until I felt the snap of orgasm and I could drift off to sleep. Though I barely understood what I was doing, I knew enough not to speak of it to anyone. Even mentioning it to Leilah was something I’d never have done in the light of day. The anonymity of nighttime drew strange things out of me.

I didn’t have to explain anymore because that was the end of that and she never spoke of it again.

That conversation seemed so strange that I told myself I must’ve imagined it. Yet it had returned to me as real as anything, my rejection of her burning sweet and bitter in my throat.

***

I’d seen Leilah’s journal peeking out of a pile of junk on Leilah’s desk. Purple leather with a slender cloth ribbon. When she saw me notice it, she silently pushed it back under. I didn’t snag it right away, that would’ve been too obvious. I bid my time until a few days later when Leilah decided to take a shower.

The bathroom sat across the hall from her bedroom. I waited until I heard a zipper, the plink of water, her feet squeaking on wet tile.

I studied exactly where the journal was placed so I could return it unnoticed. My heart raced when I opened it. Inside, her tiny handwriting lined up in neat rows. She could fit so much on a page. She wrote lists that had no rhyme or reason except that they were lovely: names of constellations, of authors, of favorite coffee blends and scents of candles. On other pages, she practiced cursive or wrote down French conjugations.

One entry said: In Europe, there’s no school or family. Just wine. Language. Exploring. Life should be about traveling and staying in shitty hostels and dancing and learning and dancing some more. If only I were brave enough to run away. But I’m not. That fact makes me so depressed, I could puke.

She mentioned Hazel and Gillie in a couple entries. On one page, she just wrote the word “Puppy” with a little heart next to it. I didn’t know what it meant. But the thing that stuck with me most was that she didn’t mention me. Not even once.

The water whined off. I heard Leilah shuffling through some containers, probably searching for her body lotion.

I took the nearest pen and opened to a random page.

The medicine cabinet snapped shut.

In a corner, I wrote my initials: MC. Then, as quick as I could, I slipped the journal back under the desk.

When she padded into her room, barefoot and rubbing at her wet hair with a towel, I was skimming through her pile of movies, as if nothing had changed between us at all.

***

By the beginning of the school year, firm lumps rose under my nipples and the acne along the bend of my jawbone dried up. More of me materialized, transforming my overall shape into something nearly desirable. The approximation of a woman. Mine was a false femininity, but it was the only femininity I was going to get. And the truth was that I wanted it more than anything.

When I complained to Leilah about my discomfort, her voice brimmed with well-practiced pity, but her gaze lingered and hardened. I’d watched her long enough to know that she was sizing me up.

Some of the kids at my school had been attending keggers in the veil of the forested hills since junior high. The only parties I’d gone to were for birthdays or school dances; same for Leilah.

So I was surprised when, a few weeks into the semester, she told me she wanted to host a party of her own. Her mother was out of town for the weekend and she invited a dozen classmates from her school.

Hazel and I arrived early to get ready in the upstairs bathroom. Leilah put on a low-cut black tank, slashing wedges of electric blue liquid eyeshadow on her lids. Hazel wore a peasant top and Leilah’s maroon lipstick which, to my delight, made her mouth look as ugly as if she’d just bitten into a stewed beet. As they greeted the kids gathering downstairs, rumors of their voices coming through the floorboards, I finished up. I’d taken some of my mother’s make-up and tried to recall what I’d learned watching Leilah. I applied mascara and blinked against my outstretched finger. Dabbed concealer on a couple pimples. Used toilet paper to blot my mother’s pink lipstick, subduing its shade. Rubbed some of Leilah’s scented lotion onto my hands. Catching myself in the mirror, wearing jeans stuck into fur-lined boots, a Henley shirt, and my hair straightened into curtains around my face, I looked almost pretty.

As I left the room, I saw the little blue stain from the Kool Aid. I’d dyed Leilah’s hair just a couple months earlier. It felt like a lifetime.

When I finally descended the stairs, tugging self-consciously at the bottom of my shirt, I found a gaggle of boys gathered there. One tall with a mangy goatee, another tan with a thick carpet of arm hair, and a third with beady eyes and wild curls. The fourth caught my attention. Short, with shaggy hair, his arms a little too big for his body. His real name was Kevin, but everyone called him Puppy.

A bell trilled inside my head.

I took my place beside Leilah and Hazel on the couch. But, soon, Puppy walked up to me, asked if he could pour me a drink. It was as if I’d summoned him with my mind.

“What’ll you have?”

“Vodka,” I said. I’d had sips of my mom’s Bloody Marys and knew I could tolerate it.

“And?”

“And…”

“As a mixer.”

“Anything.”

He laughed at that. His front teeth were crooked in a perfect sort of way. My own smile had been tortured by orthodontia. There was something natural about his mouth. I wanted to run my finger over their irregular grooves.

As the night progressed, his being off limits—sort of, maybe—faded from my mind. Or, perhaps, that fact settled in and only served to increase my hunger. I drank until I stopped feeling the need to look over my shoulder to check on Leilah.

By the time I found myself sitting on the ground with Puppy and he put his hand on the back of my head and pulled me to him, everything else had faded from view. Our teeth clattered together, our lips danced.

Things turn dark in my memory from there, flickering on and off like a light. I remember Leilah leading us to her mother’s bedroom, telling us that we could take it. I assumed she meant me and Puppy would have it to ourselves, but my memory cuts and then returns to me being beneath the sheets with Puppy, Leilah, and a red-headed boy with a name that sounded like an Italian dessert.

Shirts came off, though bras and pants stayed on. I felt as if I’d only meant to dip my toes into a pool and now I was suddenly in the deep end, sputtering water from my lungs as I tried to stay afloat. My brain spun.

Our four bodies joined in different combinations. I pulled myself up from the metallic tang of the red-headed boy’s mouth and saw Puppy on top of Leilah, the moons of her breast heaving from her bra and red with hickies. Then, I was kissing Leilah while the boys watched, her lips soft and wide. Then, somehow Puppy was with me again. My body felt spent, my mind barely tethered to reality, but I still liked the feeling of him. I closed my eyes. Fingers slipped under the top of my jeans, clearing the elastic band of my panties. Brushing against me, feeling my wrinkled, damp skin. My breath caught and I lay there, waiting.

Then the hand slipped away as if it had never been there at all.

I crawled out of bed before the others the next morning. Not sure what else to do, I put on an oversized sweatshirt and sat at Leilah’s kitchen table, holding my aching head, until the other kids rose from the assorted places where they’d fallen asleep. After about an hour, Puppy came in, his own hoodie pulled low over his bloodshot eyes. Before he left for home he asked, sheepishly, if he could have my number.

“Do you mind?” I asked Leilah once everyone else had left. I had, of course, already given it to him.

“I could care less.”

Later, I wondered why I’d asked for her permission.

***

A mutual friend from middle school saw a photo of Puppy and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but he looks like he could be her brother.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“I know so.”

“They don’t even have the same hair color.”

“Close enough.”

Puppy and I went out for dinner at a pizza place. I asked Leilah if she could cover for me—I’d told my parents Leilah and I were going to the movies.

Puppy was surprisingly sweet, opening doors for me, holding my hand, kissing me goodnight. He wasn’t like the person in Leilah’s mother’s bed. But, then again, I wasn’t that person, either. Or, at least, I didn’t think I was.

When I got home, I discovered my mom on the living room couch, waiting. “Leilah called while you were gone.”

My stomach dropped. “Yeah, she couldn’t make it to the movie.”

“She called a lot. Four times.”

“Weird.”

She stared at me a while, then got up and walked me to my room. Hovering, I realized, to see if she could smell booze or weed.

When I finally called Leilah back, she acted nonchalant.

“How’d it go?”

“Oh, fine,” I said, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of knowing that she’d tipped off my parents, but too chicken to confront her about it.

“Are you going to hang out again?”

“He asked if I wanted to go to Chad’s party next weekend.”

“Listen, do you actually like Puppy or something?”

I don’t know why I lied to her. “Not really.”

Later, she texted: “im going to chad’s. ditch him & come with me.”

I winced. Leilah knew sending a text would rack up a charge on my phone bill. However small, my mom would interrogate me about it and make me pay for it myself. Still, I agreed to go with her. I wasn’t sure how to say no.

***

Chad’s house sat up in the wooded hills on the other side of town. Leilah kept me close from the moment we arrived. We smoked pot in the kitchen with the other kids, blowing the smoke into the churning oven fan so the neighbors wouldn’t smell it, and spilled watery Jell-O shots down our chins. In the fluorescent lighting, I could almost see the traces of mermaid juice lingering in Leilah’s hair.

Puppy gave me a nod when he arrived. I blushed, raised a hand, turned to refill my cup. His gaze tingled on the back of my neck.

“I have to pee.” Leilah grabbed at my hand. Hazel intercepted her.

“Me too,” she said. Though, of course, she really just wanted to gossip. Probably about Chad, who I’d seen sneak an arm around her waist.

As the two of them stumbled toward the bathroom, Puppy appeared next to me with a hopeful, boyish grin.

“Wanna go outside to smoke?”

I accompanied him to a bench by the hot tub, where some of the other kids were splashing around in their underwear and dunking below the foaming hot churn to see who could hold their breath the longest.

“I’m glad you came,” Puppy said. He took a hit and and let the smoke trickle slowly from his mouth.

“Me too.”

“We could have hung out before the party. Gotten dinner or something.”

“Well, you know…Leilah wanted me to come with her.”

He rolled his eyes and leaned back into the creaking bench. “You don’t owe her shit.”

“We’re best friends.” My voice sounded insistent and girlish in a way I hated. I plucked the spliff from his fingers, inhaled. My throat tightened. I covered my coughs with a sip of warm beer.

“Seems like she’s your best friend. But are you hers?”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget it,” he said, though we both knew I wouldn’t. He crushed the spliff into the ground with the toe of his sneaker and put an arm around me. I rested my head, heavy with smoke, on his shoulder. I fit into the curve of his body perfectly. I felt different, like I’d taken over someone else’s life. Surreal, yet incomparably right. Like I was finally in the correct place, in the body I was meant to have all along.

“What the fuck,” Leilah shouted in the doorway, grasping at the frame for support. She stumbled outside, got tangled in her own feet, fell to her knees. Her open hands smacked the ground. She glanced at her skinned palms, groaned. The hot tubbers stopped splashing each other to watch, one girl using the opportunity to redo her bra clasp, which one of the boys had flicked undone.

Leilah remained where she had fallen, head lowered. I heard her mumbling in French. I reached toward her to help her up, but she yanked away.

“Don’t touch me!” The smudge of her eyeliner emphasized the shocking blue of her irises. “Don’t you fucking dare.” She began to weep, her shoulders rolling with each sob.

God, I hated her. Even the way she broke down was beautiful.

Hazel appeared. “Shit.” She hadn’t been drinking, her voice clear and measured as she laid out her perfect words and logic for us to ignore. “I was watching her in the bathroom. She had too much to drink and was laying on the tile because she said it felt good. I left to get her water and…fuck!”

I didn’t respond to Hazel, and Puppy didn’t either. Hazel lay down next to weeping Leilah. My face turned to stone. My cruelty felt powerful, like I was floating far above the scene unfolding in front of me. I couldn’t have told you who exactly Leilah was mad at or why, and yet I knew.

Hazel wiped Leilah’s cheeks, but Leilah wouldn’t quiet until she started whispering nonsense French into her hair.

“Cherie,” Hazel said. “Oh, mon dieu.” Finally, Leilah let Hazel pick her up to take her inside. As she went, she looked over her shoulder at me one more time. “Emsee,” she hissed.

Emsee? I tried to place this strange new French word before I realized that it wasn’t a French word at all. She didn’t say emsee but, rather, MC. My initials. A declaration of my betrayal.

My stomach tightened. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out and, besides, Leilah had already turned away. She grabbed a towel discarded beside the hot tub to wrap around herself as she left.

“Hey, what am I supposed to use,” shouted one of the girls in the hot tub. “Crazy bitch.”

I don’t know where Leilah went. I felt startled to find that I didn’t care. Puppy and I waited a while—long enough, I thought, for no one to mistakenly think Leilah had chased us away—before finding some blankets and taking them upstairs to Chad’s father’s office. We talked about all kinds of things, everything but Leilah, until we fell asleep on the floor as rays of dawn trickled through the window.

I thought it would be awkward between us when we woke, our necks crinked from sleeping without pillows. Then Puppy kissed me with his morning breath and I caught a feeling of sinking, settling.

“I really like you,” he said, though I still couldn’t imagine why.

When we came down to the living room, Leilah had made break-and-bake cinnamon rolls she’d brought from home. She sat on the couch, curled into herself, rubbing her temples. She’d washed her face, but had forgotten her make-up bag at home. She looked bare. She refused to look at me.

“Making breakfast? Creepy,” Chad whispered between bites when she was out of earshot. “Is she trying to be our mom or something?”

Puppy laughed. I did, too.

***

At the end of our next date, Puppy and I pulled over in an empty parking lot to make out. After a while, I stopped him, putting a hand on his chest.

“I need to tell you something,” I said. “I don’t have a ton of experience. With, uh, this.” I motioned to the space between us, as if that were the exact place where sex lay.

“Me neither.” He kissed me again. Every time he did that, it made me feel as stupid as if someone had scrambled up my brain with a fork and served it back to me steaming hot.

“Oh,” I said, trying to think of what to say next. “I wasn’t sure. I mean, you haven’t been quite so, uh, handsy as the night we met.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I really don’t.”

***

Leilah and I never spoke about what happened. In fact, we never spoke at all. I called once, but she didn’t pick up. For weeks, I started writing emails to her that I always ended up deleting. I couldn’t even get past the subject line.

She faded into the background, becoming more memory than person. Puppy only mentioned her when she appeared in his advanced math class. The next time he went, she’d dropped it.

The last time I saw Leilah was at their graduation.

I trailed Puppy’s parents to the bleachers, my high heels sinking into the soft turf of the football field. I held the edges of my sundress flat to my thighs to keep the wind from lifting it up.

I caught a glimpse of blonde hair sticking out from a black cap. Leilah sat in the student chairs beside Hazel, facing away from the crowd.

When I turned to see where Puppy’s parents had gone, I locked eyes with Leilah’s mother, pretty but worn out, in a navy wrap dress and oversized sunglasses. I wondered, for a moment, if I should pretend I hadn’t seen her, but then she waved me over and pulled me into a hug. If she was confused as to why I was there—Leilah, after all, hadn’t invited me—she didn’t ask about it. Nor, to my relief, did she show any signs of knowing what had transpired between us.

“I haven’t seen you in a while. Hiding from us?” She winked.

“Just really busy. I have a boyfriend, so…”

She smiled knowingly. “Which one?” I pointed him out. “Cute,” she said, nudging me with her elbow. I said goodbye and went to sit a few rows away.

The graduation walk was in alphabetical order. Leilah was third to last, the crowd tired and antsy by then. The afternoon sun illuminated her imperfections. Despite wearing blush and lipstick, her face looked washed out, floating between a black cap and gown like a filmy moon in the night sky. I sat there, watching a girl I’d known my whole life from afar, as if I’d never known her at all.

She disappeared into the sea of other students and then she was gone. We both went out of state for school, though on opposite coasts.

Now, years after our dissolution, years after Puppy and I broke up, years after I grew up and started a life far from our hometown, Leilah still appears to me, unwelcome as a ghost. I catch glimpses of her. Pale skin reflected in the window of a passing bus, silvery hair crossing the street by the pharmacy, pursing her lips as she calculates the tip in a booth at a café, chest brimming from a low-cut top as she relaxes on a park bench. Then those girls raise their eyes or turn their heads, and I realize they’re not her. They’re nothing like her at all.

I did hear one rumor about her, which I believe to be true: Her breasts never stopped growing. She went under the knife to reduce them to the size of oranges. I always wondered what happened to those scars edging her arms. Whether those marks remained.

about the author

Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, CA. Her non-fiction work has been published by The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Playboy, Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her short fiction has appeared in WIRED, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Otherwheres, and the anthology Berkeley Noir from Akashic Books. She's currently at work on a novel.

About the Artist

DARKRECONSTRUCTION is a nonbinary queer painter from Queens, NY, USA. They have been painting their entire life to express their emotions, hopes, and dreams. DARKRECONSTRUCTION prides themselves on creating dreamlike, frothy, ephemeral compositions on a variety of surfaces including canvas, reclaimed cardboard, and fabric. Their work focuses on the contrast between urban life and nature. They are inspired by concrete walls overgrown by ivy and tree branches, train underpasses covered in graffiti and grass, a strong New York summer rainstorm beating against their window, the decaying Red Hook warehouses, tiny alleys, and the way the air smells on the first few days of September. It is their aim to create paintings that bring a moment of serenity and calm to the viewer. You can connect with them on www.darkreconstructionart.com and on Instagram @darkreconstruction.