by Gessy Alvarez

He kissed my bare shoulder. It was 75 degrees on a November day, and I wore gym shorts and a tank top. His denim jacket smelled like cigarettes and grass. I took in the wildness of his exotic musk. He wrapped his arm around my waist, pulled me close to his side. And I let him, not because I was afraid to say no. At that moment, I was not my mother’s confidante, not my father’s caretaker, not my boyfriend’s angel. It was as if the “I” I knew never existed.

I can’t stand rules or making plans or saying goodbye to my friends. I want everything that feels good to keep going. But the good becomes overripe – the sweetness softens and rots.

Earlier today, I cut class. I stayed inside the girls’ bathroom after the bell rang because I had nowhere else to go. I put on all the makeup in my bag: black eyeliner, plum lipstick, pink blush, blue mascara. Manipulating my fifteen-year-old face so that the future woman could overtake it. I studied the hardened eyes and bruised cheeks, the purple smear on my tight lips. The water was lukewarm – the liquid soap lathered lightly in my hand. The washing away left makeup clinging to my upturned eyes, marking them in black soot and blue rain. The rough paper towel abraded my skin, stung my eyelids.

He’s nothing but an idea, a body. It irritates me when he plays with his father’s Vietnam dog tags.

Oh, you have blue eyes. Oh, you have green eyes. Oh, you have G-RAY EYEZZZZ.

He said he didn’t know what I was singing. “I don’t listen to music,” he said.

“That’s incredibly stupid,” I said.

“My father doesn’t like music,” he said.

“And you only do things he likes?”

“No. I do lots of things he doesn’t like?”

“Like hanging out with me?” He stopped looking at me.

“My father is not a bad person.” He stopped holding me. “My father has bad ideas about people, but if he knew you, he would like you.”

I pull my hair up in a side bun, put it into a braid, pull it tight into a ponytail, then shake my curls free again. I live by feeling. By the excitement of knowing I’m doing something wrong, something sinful. Sin is a song with no rhythm that keeps me up at night, trapped in hardness and warmth, light and darkness. The dread liquifying and evaporating around me.

I stood over him so close that he had to bend his neck back to watch me. “You think I’m pure gold, soft and manageable. You have to mix gold with metal if you want it to last. You think I’m pure gold. Does that mean you’re the metal?” I said.

His mouth was slightly open. His arms behind him, holding his upper body up, hands fisting the lawn.

“Imagine, 24-karat gold shining over you while you sleep, think about the gold melting over your skin, encasing you, suffocating you. The desire and the terror of having me become a part of you.”

I kicked one of his feet, but my sneaker must have felt like a fluffy pillow on his steel-toe boot. A heaviness fell on my chest. I plopped down beside him and pressed my face to the side of his neck.

“I want to feel pain,” I said. “I don’t want to miss out on any new sensation.”

In the sun, his ideal tarnished. His pockmarked skin, bony chest, the black grease under his nails, how he never spoke out with clarity or force. It was all wrong. But reality is an unnecessary distraction.

He brushed my cheek with his calloused finger.

“I love how bad you smell,” I said.

Photo by Lucas Benjamin on Unsplash