I run a hand over my stomach. I feel as if I am from another planet.
“I just want someone to take it away,” I say.
Sophia nods. In her eyes, I see a big warmth which expands. She reaches out and touches my hand. My pain becomes a bit smaller. We don’t play rocking horse at Sophia’s house, but there is this.
I WALK WITH MY BROTHER INTO THE Acres. The land stretches all around us. My brother carries his mallet and shovel. He’s meant to test my instinct.
“How do you know where the meat will be?” I ask my brother. “Teach me how to sense.”
“Dunno,” he says. “It’s like I have a magnet in my gut and it pulls me there.”
“Find one then,” I say.
We keep walking until a small hum comes from my brother’s mouth. It sounds like the thrum of metal.
“Here,” he murmurs.
The ground is nothing but sparse dirt. I stomp a foot to be sure. It feels no different than any other land under foot.
“No, no. Don’t do that.”
His breath quickens. He stands strong on a certain spot. His fingers move to the buttons on his shirt and he undoes them one by one. Bare chested, he lifts his mallet into the air above his head and brings it down to the ground.
The earth shakes with the puncture. The mallet leaves a deep dent in the dirt.
“Let’s take a look,” he says.
We bend over the new hole, stare down into the deep dirt.
“See, the dirt gets redder at the bottom. Step back.”
He lifts the mallet again and drops it once more into the same hole, driving deeper this time.
We lean over the hole again, which slowly fills with red liquid. Blood rises up from the meat below to the upper crust of the soil.
“Red never lies,” he says, grinning. “That’s how you know.”
He grabs his shovel and digs. Blood rushes forth with each new slice into the earth. Soon, he is covered in it. My brother keeps digging and digging, down to the meat, a slick machine.
TODAY, MY MOTHER IS FOCUSED ON illusion.
“We must do something about your face,” she says.
I follow her voice into the yellow light of her bathroom.
“Look at you,” she says. “You’re a mess.”
She pulls her makeup from the cabinet. Small pots of color cover the counter alongside sharp silver instruments, black brushes.
“Let’s start with the eyebrows,” she says.
She brings a thin pair of tweezers to my face. She grasps a single hair and pulls. Tears well up in my eyes.
“It hurts!”
“Too bad,” she says. “We can’t have you walking around like this. People talk, you know.”
She keeps going, keeps pulling the hairs from my brows, one by one. Each yank is a small torture. Water streams down my face, which becomes red and blotchy in the mirror.
“Now let’s do the rest,” she says.
Her fingers run over my face, then a brush, then another brush, I am a painting.
“There now,” she says. “Open your eyes.”
I don’t recognize myself. I am another girl from another planet, a warped version of myself.
SOPHIA STARTS TO DO BAD THINGS.
First, she steals lip gloss from the store in town.
“You just put it in your bra,” she says, then she puts it in her bra.
When I try, the lip gloss slides over my braless chest and catches on my knot before it falls to the ground.
SOPHIA IS ALSO SMOKING.
She smokes the butt of a found cigarette on the walk home from school each day, coughing.
“You just purse your lips and inhale,” she says, smoking.
I take a drag and cough like her.
“Nice,” I say, smoking.
SOPHIA HAS ALSO BEEN KISSING THE BOYS. Everyone knows about it.
“Sophia’s a slut,” the girls whisper to me in the hall. “Sophia’s a total hoe.”
She kisses the boys with the plain brown hair by the dumpsters after lunch.
“It’s no big deal,” Sophia says, smoking. “It’s just mouths.”
I think about the smell of rotting lunches in the dumpsters. Then I think about Jarred’s mouth on mine.
◆Two-thirds of people tilt their head toward the right when they kiss
◆The muscle used to pucker the lips is called orbicularis oris
◆The word kiss is derived in part from the Old English cyssan, “to touch with the lips” in respect or reverence
◆No two lip prints are the same
◆In medieval times, it was common to sign the name with an X, then kiss the mark as a display of sincerity
I BEGIN TO TRICK JARRED INTO TOUCHing me. I stand in the middle of the hallway each morning when his bus arrives.
He enters the building in the stream of other bodies, bookbag slung over his shoulder. Morning still crusts his eyes.
I hold my breath until he gets close, closer, closest, then brushes against my arm and I am lit by a million watts.
“Why are you always in my way?” he hisses.
But I still radiate from it, the contact of our skins. The light of it makes me want.
MY BODY IS A LAND UNDISCOVERED, MY heart beneath the skin wanting to be found and touched.
Between my legs, nothing has happened since rocking horse. Some nights, I slide a pillow there and rock again, thinking of Jarred.
TODAY, MY MOTHER IS FOCUSED ON SELF-improvement.
“Take off your clothes,” she says.
We stand in her bedroom.
“I don’t want to.”
“It’s time to look at ourselves with honesty,” she says.
My mother has been going into town. She’s been spending more money. Her fingernails are made of plastic now. Her teeth gleam whiter than snow.
“Your teeth are so white,” I say.
“It’s a new technique from the dentist in town,” she says. “He is a hunk.”
She yanks my dress over my head, then runs her hands over my body, fake plastic nails brushing my shoulders, my arms, my hips, then thighs.
“We need to slim you down,” she says.
VISION
I am the queen of the cake room.
There are dozens of round cakes on silver steel tables. Pastel frosting flowers dot their edges and tops. I am starving, My hand sweats around a fork.
I step toward them, mouth full of drool.
The first cake is round, white with pink flowers. I sink the fork into