Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(54)

Do you want to just, go? she asks.

While he’s in there?

Yeah.

We don’t say another word before standing up and shoving our chairs under the table. Before I have time to think about it, I take her face in my hands and kiss her.

I kiss Lennox every five feet of our walk. I kiss her on every corner. Against every building. I kiss her in front of every person we pass. If someone says something about it, I kiss her harder. If they say nothing, I kiss her harder. I kiss her for every girl I have ever not kissed.

I kiss her against the door of my parents’ empty apartment, and against the kitchen sink, and then in bed. Let me fuck you, I say. I want to love you.

She takes her top off, nodding. I unhook her bra, easy. I’m relieved to manage this part. She unbuttons my shirt, unhooks me. We press chest to chest and I have never felt this naked in my life. Her breasts are large, shining, firm.

You ever feel these before?

I press my hands over them—up, down, left, right, like a Hail Mary—unsure of what to do. I lick. I suck. I crunch my hips against her, but I’m not sure what kind of contact I’m making, or where. I move my hands down between her legs, under the lace, fumbling for something familiar. It must feel familiar right? Nothing feels familiar. I am shaking and circling my hands, grinding my torso against her leg like a newly neutered dog. She is sucking on my neck, moaning, Oh yeah, that’s right, but I know this is an act of kindness. Of mercy.

It is true, when I say that I am always about to cry.



By two thirty A.M., Addison, Dani, and Claudia are packing bulbs of purple haze into a glass pipe shaped like an elephant.

Let’s call this pipe Anne Bowl’leyn, I say, but nobody gets it.

The girls speak with flat, croaked voices as we swat smoke and mosquitos.

Sorry, dude. Maybe the lines really are tied up, says Dani.

Or maybe she drives really, really slow, says Addison, chuckling to herself until she forgets what it is she’s chuckling about. We are high.

My phone is in the middle of the table, between the ashtrays. A dead, blank face to it. Nothing. Claudia’s inside, shouting the contents of Dani’s refrigerator as we scream yes or no. Addison pulls on a lace bodysuit she plans on wearing to a Lady Gaga concert. Her nipple rings glitter here, in the dark.

I don’t smoke grass, I say, sucking from the trunk of the elephant.

Yeah, it doesn’t look like it, says Dani.

Remember when you used to bug out? says Addison. You always thought you were dying.

We’re all always dying, I say.

You’re so full of shit, Addison goes on. You don’t smoke grass like you never drank, like you never sucked dudes off in the school parking lot. You always deny everything you want. Addison, always a philosopher when high.

True, I say. But that’s not the same as not wanting it.

What the fuck are we talking about? asks Dani. Like, what?



In middle school, Clarissa and I went to Disney with our friend Geri. In the Universal Studios bathroom, Geri leaned back on the stall door, Manic Panic green bangs sweat-smeared across her forehead, and she laced her fingers behind my neck, said, Practice. Why don’t we practice for the real thing? She opened her mouth for me, just like that, the O of her choir face, and so I leaned into it. Let me in on the practice, Clarissa said, and the three of us kissed one another—1-2-3, you go left, I go right—tongues sloppy, braces clicking. Later that night, we met some boys near the hotel pool. Clarissa kissed someone in the dark as I watched the blue glow on Geri’s bare stomach. Geri’s pruned feet. One of the boys leading Geri away as she let go of my hand, laughing, saying, I’ll be right back.



We all take the stairs to Dani’s bedroom. It’s still pink, lacy as a tablecloth, unchanged since high school. The lavender sachets in her pajama drawers are brown by now. The sheets, too starched.

The girls fall asleep with their clothes on. I curl up on the carpeted floor, watch the lights of passing cars slash up and down the walls. My phone does not buzz in my hand. I check and recheck to make sure it’s on, charged. Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting.

Louisa. Lennox Price.

Her name drags me down the stairs, out the door, to my car, where I drive home along the beach. The sun lifts and bleeds out along the ocean. It’s a new year, and the air is already warm. Louisa. I walk barefoot into my house, bury myself under my childhood covers, and sleep.

The next day there are pictures of her, partying in Fort Lauderdale with her old friends. In the days after that, more pictures of her appear on the Internet, with the comedian. She posted the photos herself, the two of them in a white, linen bed with Koko the cat. Happy holidays! We love you!

She does love him, I think. The look of her—she does. Whatever comes before or after men is a footnote; my life has taught me this by now. I nod my head at the computer, understanding, forcing a smile, as if this were our final conversation. Lennox Price went back to the boyfriend who would love her, need her, the simpler life, of course she did.

By spring, I do, too.



FOOTNOTE

This is how it goes for a while:

Jane’s fingers are long and her knuckles are smooth and white as beach stones. She’s a painter with a shaved head and a lip ring, and I don’t know anything else about Jane except for the way she looks at me across the bar. Her hands when she pours a drink. The exact distance between the blue of her jeans when she walks. We scoot orange pills across the surface of her bar that keep us up all night, sipping bourbon, smoking when the lights dim, talking. I always come here alone.