Never Have I Ever(14)
She did, though, pencil-test-ready B cups with cotton-candy-colored nipples. I watched her tuck them away inside a polka-dot bra. I had small poinks that jutted from the fatty expanse of my chest. They seemed sexless to me, not breasts so much as smaller dandles of fat above the triple loaves of my hanging gut. Shelley caught me staring.
“Lesbo much?” she said, pulling her uniform shirt over her head, and I giggled nervously.
“Just thought yer bra was cute,” I said, jolly, jolly. I didn’t want to be the Fat Lesbian. Being the Fat was bad enough. “I need new ones.”
“Dillard’s, but it won’t come in your size,” Shelley said.
After that I learned how to look in little sips, to never get caught yearning. When I found myself behind one of those girls in the hall, I’d flick my gaze around, taking in the pieces. A bank of lockers, then slim hips. The window, then bare legs making the plaid uniform skirt flare and bell. The pile of books braced on my belly, then a sleek ponytail ticktocking between narrow shoulders.
These days I used the same technique to look-stalk Tig Simms. He was tall and just as lithe as those girls. His ribs showed when his shirt rode up. His hand-me-down khakis hung off his hip bones, but he had broad shoulders, tanned skin, dark eyes. That crazy hair.
I parked us in the dirt turnaround. We had to hike the last hundred yards down a narrow trail to reach the fire pit. I made Tig go first, to break any spiderwebs. I hated that feeling of a web strand on my skin. Tig carried our acoustics, and I grabbed the picnic, the jug wine, and a waxy paper Mickey D’s cup that I dug out of the backseat. Tig kept a flashlight in the glove box, but the night was crazy-bright with moon, and anyway we knew this path by heart.
Three splintery wood benches surrounded the ashy pit, and we each took one, unpacking our instruments. Behind us there was an old shed with a dank mattress inside, so stained and ill-used that sitting down on it could probably get me pregnant. If this was a weekend, someone would for sure be using it. A lot of kids knew about this place. But now, after 1:00 a.m. on a school night, we had it to ourselves.
“Did you bring a corkscrew?” Tig asked, handing me a fresh joint and picking up the jug. I was crestfallen, but he grinned. He unscrewed the cap and held it up to show me, like he’d done a magic trick. “It ain’t no nevermind, Smiffy. I got me some redneck ingenuity.” It was the voice he used to make fun of Assholio, and I laughed. How on earth had I thought that the jug would have a cork?
He poured the waxy paper cup near full and then gulped at it.
“Ahhh Smiffy,” he said, “That’s the stuff. Tastes like desperation.”
He offered me the cup, and it smelled flat and sour, very much like bad salad dressing. I drank it anyway. Three long swallows, holding my breath like it was a draft of medicine.
Tig’s eyebrows disappeared into the curls flopped on his forehead. He often liberated a couple of canned beers from his mom and Assholio, but I didn’t like the taste. I’d never been invited to the hunch-punch parties the Brighton kids threw down at the bluffs either.
Tonight, though? I wanted to fit my lips over the exact spot where his lips had touched the cup. Plus, the pot had given me dry mouth. I drank again, and it went down a little easier.
I would have committed murder for some cheese popcorn right about then. For cheese of any kind.
We played—the Smiths, Violent Femmes, the Cure—passing the cup back and forth between songs, then smoking the joint. Tig sang, soft and growly, and I liked how our voices wound together. I wanted to do some Pixies, and as we sang “Here Comes Your Man,” the notes rose up around us, almost visible. At this thought I knew that I was really, really stoned.
I felt so light. I forgot my body, became only my essential self, the piece that could sometimes feel like a filament, bright and hot and burning. I wasn’t stumbling on the chord shifts now, even though Tig was the musician; he’d been teaching me on an old guitar my brother, Connor, had abandoned. Mostly I strummed easy chords while he played lead. But tonight it was like I knew what Tig would do, where his hands and voice would go, as if we were a single thing. I met him in harmony, effortless and perfect.
“Ragweed’s rocking it, eh, Smiffy?” Tig said when we took a break to eat the pears, split the second sandwich, drink and smoke more.
“Oh, yeah. But, God, I hate pears,” I told him, pouring. The jug had gotten lighter, and the world seemed to slosh faintly along with it as I overfilled the cup. Wine splashed out, and I corrected, giggling.
He laughed, too. “I never seen you drunk.”
“You don’t feel it?”
“Naw. S’just wine,” he said, and chugged more.
Well, he was used to it. He talked about slamming forties and playing drinking games with his friends in his neighborhood. He lived in a wasteland of decrepit blocks behind the dilapidated Krispy Kreme that everybody called Downtown, and there he had a whole life I only knew from stories on nights like now. He hung out with Buddy and Carl, who did cars with him. He talked a lot about some girl named Toya. She was not his girlfriend, but it seemed like from his stories she’d had sex with him. Also Crystal, who for sure went all the way, because she had a baby. I wondered what her body looked like; a lot of girls were fatter after babies. I was pretty sure Tig had had sex with her, too, this potentially fatter girl, but the baby wasn’t his.
I knew because one time I’d asked, and he’d said, “Nah. I wrap that shit up, you know?”