The Melting

by lize Spit

  “Sure you can!” Laurens and Pim exclaim, again almost in unison. “Just think about it.”

  “Okay, I guess I can try.”

  Pim sticks his hand down his pants and makes a quick adjustment. Elisa looks me straight in the eye and smiles faintly.

  “Swear,” Pim says to her.

  “Swear what?”

  “That we’ll stick to the rules.”

  “I swear. On my horse.” She holds up two fingers, scout’s honor. “You have to swear too, then.”

  “What do you want me to swear on?” Pim asks.

  “On Jan’s grave.”

  Laurens and I exchange looks. This is the first time an outsider has said Jan’s name out loud. Pim looks away at the rakes, the shovels.

  “Do we really need to swear?” I ask. “We can all trust each other here, right?”

  Pim cuts me off. “I swear,” he says. “On Jan.”

  “And you,” Elisa asks Laurens, “who do you swear on?”

  Laurens looks around in desperation. He doesn’t have anything of the same significance.

  “Just swear on something, your mom if you have to,” Pim commands.

  “Fine. I swear on my mother,” Laurens declares.

  “Good. What about you, Eva?” Elisa shoots me a conspiratorial look. I smile back hesitantly.

  “Just say the first thing that pops into your head, Eva.” Laurens’s face is red from the heat.

  I can’t think of anything.

  “Come on, Eva, just pick something,” Pim insists impatiently.

  “On Tessie,” I swear. The sun dips behind a cloud. Suddenly the temperature drops. A shiver runs down my back to my tailbone.

  Moments later I’m having second thoughts. Should I have given Elisa the answer to the riddle? Couldn’t I have gotten back at Laurens and Pim even more by just continuing as planned? Then they could see for themselves how ugly her vagina is, and that she’s got a big mole on her back. Then they’d have to face the truth: they spent an entire summer working up to an anticlimax. They’d finally realize how inaccurate their scoring system had been all these years.

  “You’re wearing six pieces of clothing, so you’ve got six guesses,” I say.

  Elisa thinks long and hard before asking the first question.

  “That water on the ground . . . is it urine?” She does her best to make it sound like a real guess, like she’s not sure, without falling out of character.

  “No,” says Pim.

  He knows it’s wrong—that question has been asked a bunch of times. “Take something off.”

  Elisa bends down and pulls off one of her riding boots. The tight pants are crumpled around the calf.

  “Do shoes count for one point or two?” she asks.

  The way she’s dragging this out, the confidence with which she undresses—it’s reassuring and, at the same time, terrifying. I didn’t expect Elisa to be such a good liar.

  “Do you ever go out with one shoe on?” Pim asks. “No way, shoes go together.”

  “If you say so, Pim.” Elisa takes off her other boot and sets them upright next to each other, between us. They hold the shape of her calves.

  She stands up, thrusting out her chest again. Before she pulls her fleece sweater over her head, she blurts out the next question. It’s almost as if she wants to lose the game, to be dominated by a couple of dimwits. I see Pim balling his fist behind his back.

  “Did the guy do it himself, or was there another person involved?” Her ponytail is charged with static electricity now; the hairs start floating up in all directions. Pim reaches to smooth them down for her, but she quickly does it herself.

  “You can only ask yes or no questions,” I say.

  “Was he alone?” Elisa rephrases her question.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Did he fall down through the ceiling from upstairs?”

  Pim looks at me. I shake my head no.

  “Nope,” Laurens repeats triumphantly.

  Elisa looks me dead in the eyes as she removes her T-shirt, exposing her upper body. Her firm breasts pop out from underneath. The non-elastic stitching around her lacy bra presses into the round flesh. She winks at me.

  Then, she stands there in silence for a few seconds, in nothing but her bra, socks and riding pants. She lets Pim and Laurens grope her body with their hungry eyes. I’m the only one who seems to be wondering why she didn’t take off her socks first.

  “Okay. Another guess. Was it an accident or on purpose?” she asks.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I say.

  Elisa bends down. With her hands on the cuff of her sock, she stops; her fingers glide up to the little hook behind her back. She unfastens it. For a split second, as her ponytail falls to the side, the thick, grape-shaped mole on her upper back is visible. Laurens and Pim don’t see it; their eyes are locked on the straps sliding down her shoulders. Even when she bends forward her breasts stay as round as ever.

  She straightens up again. The mole disappears back under her ponytail.

  Elisa’s breasts are the most beautiful we’ve seen yet. They’ve grown fuller since the last time I saw them in the changing room.

  I shouldn’t be jealous. She’s doing this for us, for herself, for me. The more she lets Laurens and Pim salivate now, the more disappointed they’ll be when they don’t get to touch these two prime specimens.

  “Were any other bodily fluids involved besides urine?” Elisa guesses.

  “No,” I say. Finally, she takes off her socks, first the right, then the left. Her breasts hang to the side as she leans sideways. She crumples up the socks and shoves them down into the riding boots still standing upright in the middle of the workshop.

  “Was the room full of water, so the man could float up and slip his head through the noose, and did it empty out afterwards?”

  Pim’s posture changes. Laurens crosses his arms. It’s the first guess in the right direction.

  “Is that right, Eva?” Pim practically squeaks.

  “No,” I say.

  Now Elisa has no choice but to peel off her tight riding pants. They are so tight against her skin that she has to pull down on each leg one by one. Her thighs are pale and covered in a thin downy layer of hair. She’s wearing a light blue thong, which is stuck in her crotch. Her labia hang there like the droopy leaves around a head of cauliflower. She pulls the panties out of her crotch. There’s not much left of it for the boys to see.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let me think for a second.”

  Slowly, she reviews her previous guesses. “It’s not pee, no ladder, no second person, not an accident, no swimming pool.”

  She scratches under her left breast, massages it, just for a second. Laurens and Pim look at each other proudly. And that’s when she gives her final answer.

  “Could it be that this man stood on a chunk of ice with the noose around his neck and waited for it to melt?”

  A deep, long silence falls over the workshop.

  Laurens and Pim are looking at me. No one has ever guessed this before. The stallion whinnies in the distance, probably at a passing cyclist.

  “Is that right?” Elisa asks.

  “Eva, say something.” The arousal in Pim’s body turns into desperation. Laurens wipes the sweat from his forehead and smells his fingertips again.

  I take a step back. For a second, I hesitate.

  Of course, I can still say it’s the wrong answer. I’m the riddle-keeper after all. I can say whatever I want.

  “Eva!” Pim shouts. “Did you swallow your tongue or what?”

  I look at him, then at Laurens. In the corner of the shed is the big shovel, facing the corner, as if it’s being punished for something.

  “That’s right,” I say. “The man was standing on an ice block.”

  Laurens and Pim look from Elisa to me, and then back to Elisa in dismay.

  “How can you stand on a block of ice? Isn’t it slippery?” Laurens squeaks.

  “So the guy had sho
es on, shouldn’t you have mentioned that?” Pim says.

  “What that man had was a lot of patience,” I say.

  “What a stupid riddle, Eva. This is bullshit.” Pim snorts loudly through his nostrils even though there’s no snot in them.

  Elisa puts her bra back on. Pim and Laurens watch as she lifts each breast one by one and drops it into the preformed cups. This is as good as it’s going to get for them—watching helplessly as their present is wrapped up again.

  Once the hooks are fastened behind her back, she pulls out her ponytail, holding it up in the air longer than necessary.

  “So, if I’m not mistaken, I just won, right?” She wriggles her tiny butt cheeks back into the narrow legs of her riding pants, inching them up on one leg after the other.

  Pim looks at Laurens. They both swore. He shrugs his shoulders and nods. If cleaning the stables is the only way left to please Elisa, that’s what he’ll have to do.

  “I know what I want from you. Take off your clothes, guys.”

  Laurens and Pim straighten up.

  “All three of us?” Laurens asks.

  “No, just you and Pim,” Elisa commands.

  Once Pim and Laurens are bent over untying their shoes, she gives me another wink.

  I try to relax as much as possible. It’s time. It’s my turn to humiliate Laurens and Pim a little bit, just enough to bring them back down to earth, to make them the boys they used to be.

  “These aren’t the rules,” Laurens mumbles. Pim motions for him to shut up. He must think something good is coming; he takes off all his clothes.

  “You chose this yourself,” Elisa says to Laurens. “You can’t complain now.”

  Reluctantly, he starts removing his clothes too. It doesn’t take long—all he’s wearing is a pair of shorts and a baggy T-shirt. He looks over at Pim to see if he has to take off his underwear. Laurens is the more embarrassed of the two. Now that I see them standing next to each other almost completely naked, I understand why.

  “How about I buy you a membership at the tanning salon?” Laurens asks before dropping his underwear.

  “Who’s going to pay for that?” Pim jeers.

  “My mom. She’s got a bunch of money under the cash register; it’s all off the books, she only counts it once a week.”

  “Why didn’t you say that before, when we needed the money?”

  Laurens and Pim are facing each other, thrusting their chins higher and higher in the air.

  Elisa grabs a stray paintbrush and waves it to call them to attention. “If I wanted money, I’d just ask my dad. Everything off. Underwear included,” she demands and flings the brush off into a corner.

  Pim tugs down his boxer-briefs, first sliding them down his butt, until the fabric gets caught on his penis. It flops out, half erect.

  Elisa casts a quick glance at Laurens’s penis, which is hanging sheepishly in his lap. Her gaze lingers longer on Pim’s. The longer she looks, the harder it gets. Elisa takes a step closer and pushes her index finger first into Pim’s firm pecs and then into Laurens’s flabby tissue.

  Last week, they were still acting like men. But when it comes down to it, men are just boys who’ve been overpowered by something.

  Elisa takes a few steps back so she can get a good look at them.

  “Okay. Now you have to do whatever I tell you,” she says. “No whining. That was the deal.”

  The hairs on Laurens’s arms are standing on end. I look away, at the two heaps of clothing on the workshop’s dirty concrete floor.

  “What about Eva?” Laurens sneers. “Shouldn’t Eva have to do something?”

  “Eva didn’t do anything to me.”

  “And we did?”

  “You guys invented this game. Not Eva.”

  “Eva came up with the riddle,” says Pim.

  “So what if she did? What’s in it for her?”

  “We taught her something. She should be thanking us.”

  Laurens nods in my direction. “You should be thanking us.”

  Elisa forces a loud, emphatic laugh. “What do you guys even know about it anyway? How many girls have you slept with?”

  Laurens looks down at his toes. For just a second, during a quick glance, I think of our last day of school. This is exactly how he must have stood at our usual meeting spot when he realized I wasn’t coming.

  “Didn’t Eva ever tell you she poisoned your horse?” Pim asks. He looks Elisa straight in the eyes. His penis is now fully erect. A boa constrictor, ready to attack. If the thing had eyes, I’d swear it was staring at me.

  I shake my head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  Elisa looks at me. “Is that true?”

  I try to shake my head more convincingly, but all of a sudden, I’m not sure whether I should be nodding yes or shaking no.

  “She told us when we were playing truth or dare at the beginning of the summer. She fed the horse candy. Poor Pinkle.”

  “Twinkle,” I correct him. “She didn’t die because of the candy.” I look each of them in the eye one by one. “I know what really happened.”

  Pim won’t even let me finish the sentence. “Elisa, do you remember all that shit in Mimi’s mailbox?” He nods in my direction. “Her idea.”

  “Not true,” I say, twice as loud. It’s my word against theirs.

  Elisa’s eyebrows are now straight lines above her eyes. She turns her back on us. I can’t see what she’s thinking. She brings her hands to her ponytail, pulls out the elastic, and shakes her hair loose.

  Denying it should be enough—after all, I’ve been friends with Elisa longer than the boys have, and I’ve known the boys way longer than she has. I have selflessly predicted their future countless times, I’m the link that holds them together. They can’t just ignore that.

  “All for one and one for all, Evie,” Pim scoffs.

  Musketeers. It doesn’t mean anything anymore; it’s a remnant of the past, a name we shared when we still knew how to bring toy soldiers to life in the sandbox.

  “It was Pim’s idea and Laurens’s poop,” I say. “I was just there.”

  Elisa pulls her hair back up into the same ponytail as before, only tighter. She whips around.

  “It doesn’t matter. You were an accomplice. You take off your clothes too, Eva.”

  I back up against the wall; both my feet are standing on an old paint splatter on the floor. The white spot has always been there, but only now do I notice it’s in the shape of a clover.

  “I did give Twinkle candy, but it couldn’t have killed her,” I say. “Lots of sugar over the long term can sometimes make dogs and cats go blind, but a horse can handle a lot more. Big animals are a lot stronger.”

  I turn from Elisa to the boys. “Did you ever see Twinkle up close? She was huge. It would have taken a lot to kill her. Jolan looked it up on the internet.”

  “What does Jolan know about it?” says Laurens. I’m sure he’s heard the gossip about the rat poison too—if Tessie’s heard it, Laurens probably has—Agnes most certainly told his mom.

  “Come on, you know it too, Laurens, admit it. I’m not the one who poisoned her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Elisa asks.

  Laurens gives me a quizzical look too, but he doesn’t ask any questions. I believe he really doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  “Don’t be such a prude, Eva,” Elisa says. “Stop lying.”

  Can I just tell them all to go home? Would they ever want to come back? I’m not taking my clothes off. This is my property. This is my dad’s workshop. I make the rules here.

  “Can’t I do whatever you want me to do with my clothes on?” I say.

  “Sure. In that case, we’ll wait for Tessie and ask her the riddle.” Elisa picks the dirt out from under a nail and flicks it away, not at the boys but between my feet.

  I look at Pim, then at Laurens. It’s up to them to intervene. They both know that Tessie’s not much to look at, she’s skin and bones.

  “Or
better yet, we can tell her how her big sister lured all those girls into a trap,” says Pim. Elisa laughs.

  Without accomplices, I don’t have any arguments left. I start taking off my clothes. I have no idea who I’m trying to satisfy the most.

  I slide my sweater off my arms, unbutton my pants, and pull them down. I don’t know which way is better—to strip down slowly, like Elisa did, or fast and sloppy, like how you unwrap a present from Aldi so you don’t have a chance to get your hopes up.

  I keep my panties on for now. I suck in my belly and lift my T-shirt over my head. I can feel their strange looks, and that’s when I remember: I’m wearing two padded bras on top of each other. This is how I’ve been training myself for larger breasts.

  I want to unfasten them both at the same time but that’s going to be tricky. If I stand there fiddling with the hooks, I’ll only draw more attention to the bras. So I unclip them one at a time as fast as I can. Just removing the first bra cuts the volume of my breasts in half. After the second one comes off, there’s barely anything left. I stash the two bras away under the pile of crumpled clothes. Elisa looks at my two little cupcakes with amusement and thrusts her cannons forward. Laurens and Pim look down at the T-shirt I’ve just stuffed the two bras under—four little hills on the concrete floor, my breasts. They don’t quite understand what just happened, or worse, they don’t care.

  “Your panties too,” Elisa says.

  I stay as close to the wall as possible, my feet firmly planted on the white clover, for some kind of cover at least.

  These are my friends. This is just a game that’s got out of hand, that’s all.

  For the record, my labia look way better than Elisa’s; I’ve got a nice tight package. I lower my panties, fold them up immediately and stuff them into the leg of my crumpled pants, hoping to hide the white skid mark. I comb my pubic hair with my fingers, two quick strokes, just to make sure it’s not matted together.

  I don’t have enough hands to cover everything I’m ashamed of. I let my arms hang at my sides like Laurens and Pim.

  “So, are you satisfied, Elisa? Seen enough?” Pim asks. He pronounces her name strangely. He’s holding his hands in front of his penis, which has grown limp at the sight of my naked body.

  There are three piles of clothes between us, clothes I could recognize Laurens and Pim in from a distance. When I think of all the afternoons they wore these T-shirts, all the holes in them . . . Now that we’ve taken it all off, stripped ourselves of our masks, why bother submitting ourselves to what we swore, why keep our promise, like good little musketeers?