“I’d touch him. But only through his clothes, not naked.”
She was silent, still stroking. Maybe she’d forgotten she was doing it.
“What about you?” I asked.
“Naked,” she said, her voice drowsy. I realized my eyes were closed. She said, “I’d want to feel his skin. I’d want to find out how that froggy jumps.”
I smiled at the image in my head, which at the moment didn’t seem that gross, just silly. If I ever got to go out with a boy, some day he might ask me to touch the front of his pants. I tried to imagine Nick with Mr. Ketchum’s bulge. I would do it if we were going steady.
I reached down and brought Min’s hand away from my nightgown. I was starting to feel again that I wanted more than I could ever hope for. To have a boyfriend. To be held all night. To be adored. Someday, to get married and have a family of my own.
I asked, “Would you put your arm around me?” I kept my eyes shut tight.
“’Course, Laura-lee.” I felt her breath on my face. Taking her hand from mine, she put it around my back, inching closer. I wondered if she thought we were still playing the game. But her body was warm, and I felt better. We fell asleep that way.
The next time Min spent the night, a week later, she climbed into my bed right away. This time I put my arm around her too. We smiled at each other, and I saw that she was already so comfortable, she was half-asleep.
My mother had taken us to a movie that afternoon. At the end, the man and the woman finally confessed they loved each other and made out for a long time. We could see how they opened their mouths wide, practically biting each other. Once the man’s tongue darted out like an eel between the lips of the woman. I could barely watch with my mother sitting next to me, but I couldn’t look away either. This was how grownups kissed. I was afraid I wouldn’t know how. I wanted to be good at it when a boy French kissed me.
Min must have felt the same way, because after we’d gone over that make-out scene for a while, she said, “We could try it.”
“What?” I asked, my heart beating fast and hard, like I’d been out on the basketball court.
“Kissing,” she said. When I didn’t say anything, she went on, “So we’ll know what to do.”
I could feel every place where Min and I were touching like there were bugs crawling there. But if I moved away, Min would know I was scared and she wouldn’t offer again. I kept myself very still, not even breathing. “Okay,” I said.
A few days before that, Nick had smiled at me for the first time ever when I came out the back door of the school still sweaty from practice. He had such a cute smile, I grinned back not even thinking about it. I was in seventh heaven. I couldn’t wait to get home and call Min. He was with a couple of his teammates on the lawn, sprawled out on his side. It was a rare warm January day, and we were all still in our t-shirts and gym shorts. He took a puff from a cigarette. I thought only the bad kids who hated school smoked. At first it bothered me. Then I decided it was kind of cool. As I walked across the parking lot toward the road, he flicked his cigarette butt on the sidewalk, stood up, gave a little wave to his teammates, and bounded up to me. His friends made teasing noises, calling his name with a little lilt. It turned out he lived nearby too, so we walked together for a few blocks. We didn’t say much. I was too nervous, and he seemed moody. At home afterwards I kept remembering his bangs hanging over his eyes and the awkward way he’d leaned on his elbow on the lawn. He wasn’t really any cooler or more mature than the other boys. My heart kept filling up thinking of him. Somehow I never did get around to telling Min. Nothing had really happened. I didn’t know if he liked me or anything.
Next to Min in the dark, I felt disoriented. I had kept that walk with Nick a secret from her, something I never thought I’d do. Now I felt strange for liking the idea of kissing her when it was Nick I fantasized about. I closed my eyes. I wanted to know what it was like. It might be years before I’d ever get to kiss a boy. I opened my eyes. “What do we do?” I asked her.
“Just kiss me, dummy.” Her voice was mean and affectionate at the same time.
I thought of something. “Maybe it’s different with girls than with boys. Maybe this won’t really help—”
I saw her shadowed face move closer on the pillow and felt her mouth land on mine, a little off-center. Her lips were soft and open slightly. Mine were tense and partly open because she’d caught me in mid-sentence. We pressed our mouths together while I held my breath, hoping she wasn’t going to want to try French kissing. Then I remembered the movie. I had to learn to kiss like that. Nick was probably an expert.
I pulled away, our lips peeling apart.
“Maybe we should move our mouths around more,” I said. Min nodded, silent. I wanted to crack a joke. Min and I were never this quiet together.
On our second try we were like two fish opening and closing our mouths against each other, but at the wrong time. Min started laughing, her lips still attached to mine. I imagined Nick laughing at how I kissed.
I pulled away again. “It’s not funny,” I said. “Do you want to kiss like that when it’s the real thing?”
Min wiggled her other arm, the one on the side she was lying on, underneath my neck, clasping both hands behind me. She snuggled closer to me, so that our chests and more of our legs touched. I could smell her breath, minty from toothpaste. I could feel the hard buds of her nipples on her flat chest even through both our nightgowns. My own breasts had grown in the last year to the size of tomatoes. Now they were pressed against Min, molded to her shape. I wondered what it would be like to be pressed against her without our nightgowns on. I rolled quickly onto my back. She kept her arms around me.
“Okay, let’s be serious,” Min said in a mock-stern voice.
I realized she was answering my question, that only a few seconds had passed since I’d asked it. She pushed up on one elbow and leaned down and kissed me again, closing her eyes and parting her lips. Her hair fell against my cheek. It was weird how naturally she did it this time, pressing her mouth softly against mine, peeling her lips away, then bringing them down again in a slightly different place. She was kissing me like she meant it, the way Nick did in my fantasies. I almost wanted to stop. We were girls. We were just friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend. Then she sighed, a blissful sound. I opened my eyes.
She stopped kissing me, but she stayed above me, her hair falling around her face. Her eyes were too dark for me to see clearly. I wonder what she could see in mine.
“Okay?” she asked in a normal voice. Then I figured it out. She’d been pretending. Her confidence, her sighing were part of our practicing. When I nodded, she brought her head down again. I tried to relax and keep my jaw slack. I felt the tip of her tongue against my lips. I felt my mouth open and her wet tongue inside and my tongue moving to meet it. Her tongue was pleasantly warm. Lazily, we slipped and slid over and around each other. It was like playing, teasing each other, laughing. It was its own kind of code. I was happy that Min and I were trying it. Now we shared another secret nobody else knew about.
After a while she sighed again. This time I ignored it. I was concentrating on the nice feeling of our tongues together, wondering if we were doing it right. In the movie they had been more frantic. Then Min’s hand, the one that wasn’t under me, moved along my shoulder and onto the front of my nightgown, over my breast. I froze. We were only going to kiss, nothing else. I was afraid she wasn’t pretending anymore. Maybe she did mean it. Maybe she was a sex maniac.
“What are you doing?” I asked, pushing her away, hard.
She lay next to me, her breathing rough. She didn’t speak. I thought she might be about to cry. Immediately I felt terrible for hurting her feelings. I knew she wasn’t a pervert. She was just curious, like me.
I wanted back the comfort of her arms around me. I turned on my side and put my arm across her stomach. She was pretending to be asleep, her eyes closed and her breathing deep. But after a while she turned on her side too and put
her arm around me. I snuggled in closer.
Since then we’d practiced kissing almost every week, when one of us spent the night at the other’s house. We didn’t mention her touching my breast, and she never did it again. In the same bed, we’d talk, then kiss, then fall asleep, our arms around each other. I thought maybe now I might be ready to move on to boys.
The afternoon of the day Min told me about Diana’s party, I stayed late as usual for basketball. It was after five and getting dark by the time our coach let us out of there. I called goodbye as my teammates climbed into their mothers’ cars. I was hoping to see Nick on my walk home, but it was still lightly raining and nobody was hanging out around the school. It had been raining a lot for February. I hadn’t run into him there for over a week. I breathed in the wet, tarry smell of the road, feeling sorry for myself.
When I had walked a couple of blocks, I heard a rolling noise and looked back, hoping it was Nick on his skateboard. It was. I was thrilled. He rumbled past me, pushing off the road with his sneaker a few times, then wheeled around and stopped right in front of me, blocking my way.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. Even though the dusk made everything gray, his eyes were a greenish-blue.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling shy standing so close to him. I watched as he flipped the skateboard up on its end with his high-top and caught its edge. He was good.
We started walking. “How was practice?” he asked.
I made a face. “Not that great. Debra kept running into me, like tackling me, and knocking the ball out of my hands, but when I hit her in the face with my elbow by accident, I was taken out of the game.”
“That sucks. Well, if it’ll make you feel any better, last week I fell right on my butt jumping for a rebound. Hurt like hell.”
“You?”
He nodded, smiling. I liked him for being able to admit he’d messed up, knowing I would now have a picture in my head of him landing clumsily under the hoop.
“Do you like basketball?” I asked.
“Sure. I’m good at it. Why?”
“I don’t know if I’m very good. But I want to be.” I tried to think out what I was trying to say. “When I have the ball, it’s like I’ve got the world in my hands. The worst thing is for somebody to take it away from me. But the best thing is when I know what to do and I can do it. No, it’s when I can do it without even thinking about it. That’s heaven. I’ve never told anybody that,” I added, afraid I had been talking too much.
“You’re intense,” he said. His head was tilted away from me. I didn’t know if intense was good or bad.
After a while, he asked, “Are you going to Diana’s party?”
I stared down at the pavement in front of my feet, my heart pounding. I knew he was invited to a lot of “Spin the Bottle” parties. If we played “Spin the Bottle,” would I let Nick French kiss me in front of everybody else? I wanted to be able to kiss him without even thinking about it. I could feel my face heating up.
“I don’t know.” It was true, but I sounded like a dope. My answer was the kind of thing my mom would approve of, what she called “being coy.”
He said, “Well, I am, and I hope you’ll go too.”
“This is my street,” I said, starting off to the left away from him. “Bye.”
He flashed me a little wave, but he looked baffled. The whole rest of the way home I cursed myself out for not telling him I would be there.
When Min and I walked into my house after school the next afternoon, my mother was in the kitchen on the phone. As we kicked off our shoes in the front hall, I could hear her voice rising and falling, though not the words. I thought it was a positive sign. Talking on the phone with her friends usually put her in a good mood. Min and I left our bookbags on the floor and quietly went into the kitchen. I was starving for something sweet.
My mother was sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar, hunched over, one hand rubbing her forehead. She’d had her monthly perm that day. Her light-brown hair was tightly curled around her head and touched up with blonde highlights. She didn’t seem to hear us until after we were in the room. Then, startled, she turned around and frowned at us. With one hand still holding the receiver to her ear, she picked up the phone, stood up, and took it into the laundry room, kicking the door closed behind her.
“What was that about?” Min asked. From the way she said it, I could tell she was insulted.
I shrugged. Jamie said our mother was crazy. He said he’d seen pills in her bathroom cabinet to prove it. The two of them could never get along anymore. He had just turned eighteen, and he was always reminding her he was legally an adult. He liked to stay out late with his greasy-haired friends. He wouldn’t even call if he wasn’t home by his old curfew. I didn’t see what was so thrilling about driving around all night, which was what he told me they did when I asked. Personally, I wasn’t sure why our mother was the way she was. But I felt sort of glad when I heard them yelling at each other. At least then I knew it wasn’t just me she hated.
I opened the refrigerator door and handed Min a Dutch Apple yogurt and got a Cherry one for myself. She pulled two spoons out of the silverware drawer. We sat at the bar, twisting our feet between the rungs of the stools, and pried the cardboard disk from inside the lid to add to our collections. I had every kind except Prune Whip, which made me sick just thinking of it. Now I was working on collecting extras. Kids traded them at school. I told Min about my father’s stack of beer coasters that he’d collected before he met my mother, when he was in college and then in the army and traveling a lot. He had a story to go along with every coaster. Claudia and Jamie and I used to shuffle through them, smelling their faintly malty odor and picking the ones with the maidens and lions to make up our own stories about.
There was a noise from behind the laundry room door like something heavy being dropped on the cement floor. “Why should I believe you anymore?” I heard my mother yell. I hated the hysterical whine of her voice, like a record being played too fast. Min and I stopped eating our yogurt and listened, not moving, our eyes on each other. Who was she talking to? A friend of hers? My brother? The whole house was silent, waiting for something to happen. “Fine, then, if that’s what you want to do.” I heard the receiver slam down in its cradle. Then it sounded like she was pounding on the top of the dryer with her fists. The sound made me flinch.
Min said, “Hey,” and reached out to touch my arm. I couldn’t look at her. If I did, I’d start to cry.
“Sorry,” I said. I stirred my yogurt. I had been hungry a few minutes ago.
“Don’t apologize,” Min answered, and from the way she said it I knew she meant not just for my jumpiness but for my mother too. My face felt like it was slowly burning up. I wished I could burn up, all of me, into nothing but ashes. It didn’t matter that Min had seen my mother like this before. Right then I despised my mother. I hated Min a little bit too. Her mother would never embarrass her. The laundry room door opened.
“That was your father,” my mother said, walking back across the kitchen with the phone, kicking the slack cord in front of her. “He won’t be home for dinner tonight.” The phone as she dropped it on the counter top gave out a muted ring.
“Again?” I asked. It seemed like at least once a week now my father had to stay late at the college where he taught. Sometimes it was because he needed the quiet to grade papers, sometimes it was to hear a speaker on campus or go to a faculty meeting. I asked, “Why couldn’t he grade papers here? We can all be quiet. I have homework.”
My mother stared at me for a second, then opened the breadbox and ate the last two donuts. Min and I looked at each other, and she puffed out her cheeks. I didn’t think my mom’s weight was funny. Still chewing, my mother went to the refrigerator and pulled out broccoli and a mound of hamburger wrapped in plastic. She got a bag of French fries out of the freezer. “Are you staying for dinner, Min?” she asked, not very nicely. “I guess there’s enough food now with only four of us. It shouldn�
�t go to waste.”
“Uh, no, I can’t,” Min answered. “My parents expect me home tonight.” She scraped around the bottom of her yogurt container, gathering the last spoonful. At her house her father and mother never fought, at least not in front of me. Min said she heard them sometimes, late at night when she was in bed. She said her mother could get really quiet and not even answer when Min or her father said something to her. I thought Catherine was nice. I had never heard of a mom who wanted her daughter’s friends to call her by her first name. She would sit down and listen when I went to her with my problems at school or when my own mother was being really mean. I liked Min’s father mostly because he made me laugh. And he loved Min so much that it hurt to watch them sometimes, kidding around. He was always giving her a hug or resting his hand on her shoulder. I wished he’d do that with me. When my father gave me pocket money, he might touch the top of my head, fluffing my hair like I was a little kid.
“Mom, can I make the hamburger patties?” I asked. I liked shaping them into a ball, then smushing them flat. She was pulling the cutting board down from its rack and clearing counter space near the stove.
“Don’t eat the raw meat, you’ll get sick. Here’s salt and pepper. Shall we put in an onion?”
“Yeah.”
She took one out of the wire basket hanging near the window. Her anger seemed to be leaking away. I got up and walked past Min, around the breakfast bar to the sink. Over the splash of running water, I said, “Mom, I’ve got something to ask you.”
Behind me, my mother asked, “What’s that?” Slowly, I lathered my hands with soap, washing each finger carefully.
“Well, Diana Sykes, in my class?” It wasn’t what I had expected to say. There was no response, just the rhythmic thunk of her knife against the cutting board. “Well, she’s having a party this weekend, and I was wondering if I could go.” I had lost my nerve. Why couldn’t I learn to lie to my mother?
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