Harvesting the Heart

arms crossed, I barely recognized her. “Paige,” she said casually, “have you ever kissed an actual boy?”

I hadn’t, but I wasn’t about to let her know that. “Sure,” I said. “Haven’t you?”

Priscilla tossed her hair and took a step forward. “Prove it,” she said.

I couldn’t; and this very topic, in fact, had been one of my biggest worries. I had spent entire nights awake, practicing kissing with my pillow, but I couldn’t figure out the finer points, like where my nose should go and when I was supposed to take a breath. “How am I supposed to prove it?” I said. “Unless there’s a guy in here that I can’t see.”

Priscilla walked toward me, thin and almost see-through in the purple afternoon. She leaned over me so that her hair made a quiet tent. “Pretend,” she said, “I’m the guy.”

I knew that Priscilla knew I had been lying; just as well as I knew that I wasn’t going to admit it. So I leaned forward and put my hands on her shoulders and pressed my lips against hers. “You see,” I said, dismissing her with a wave of my hand.

“No,” she said, “it’s like this.” And she turned her head and kissed me back. Her lips moved as much as mine hadn’t, molding me beneath her until my mouth was doing the same thing. My eyes were wide open, still watching the lightning. In that instant I knew that every rumor told about Priscilla Divine in school, every nun’s warning and every altar boy’s sideways glance, was justified. Her tongue slipped over my lips, and I jumped back. Priscilla’s hair clung to my shoulders and my face like a web, that’s the kind of electricity we had generated.

We spent time after that getting kissing down to a science. We’d borrow Priscilla’s mother’s red lipstick and make out with the bathroom mirror, watching our own faces fog up as we learned to love ourselves. We went to the public library and hid in the stacks with adult romance novels, skimming the pages until we came to the sex scenes, and then we’d whisper them out loud. Occasionally we kissed each other, taking turns playing the boy. Whoever was the girl got to swoon and to lower her eyelashes and to whisper breathlessly l my±eathlesslike the women in those forbidden books. Whoever was the boy had to stand still and straight, to accept.

One day after school Priscilla showed up at my front door, out of breath. “Paige,” she said, “you’ve got to come now.” She knew I was supposed to stay at home alone until my father returned from the office where he worked as a computer programmer to supplement his income from inventions. She knew that I never broke promises to my father. “Paige,” she insisted, “this is important.”

I went to Priscilla’s that day and hid with her inside the hot dark closet in her brother’s room, which smelled of gym shorts and bologna and Canoe. We watched the room settle, split through the closet door’s slats. “Don’t move,” Priscilla whispered. “Don’t even breathe.”

Priscilla’s brother, Steven, was a junior in high school and was the source of most of her information about sex. We knew he had done it, because he kept condoms hidden in his nightstand, as many as twelve at a time. Once, we had stolen one and opened its silver wrapper. I had unrolled the pale tube over Priscilla’s arm, marveling as it stretched and grew like a second skin. I had watched my fingers slip over and over as if I were stroking velvet.

Minutes after we had settled ourselves in the closet, Steven came into his room with a girl. She was not someone from Pope Pius but probably a public-school girl from downtown. She had short brown hair and wore pink nail polish, and her white jeans rode low on her hips. Steven pulled her onto his bed with a groan and began to unbutton her shirt. She kicked off her shoes and wiggled off her pants, and before I knew what had happened they were both naked. I could not see much of Steven, which was good, because how would I ever have faced him? But there were the smooth circles of his bottom and the pink heels of his feet, and tangled across his back were the legs of this girl. Steven squeezed the breast of the girl with one hand, revealing a nipple like a strawberry, while he rummaged in his nightstand drawer for a condom. And then he began to move on her, rocking her back and forth like those playground animals on thick wiry springs. Her legs climbed higher, her toes crossed on Steven’s shoulders, and they both started to moan. The sound rose around them like yellow steam, punctuated by the scrape of the bed on the hardwood floor. I was not sure what I was seeing, sliced as it was by the closet into strips, but it seemed a machine, or a mythical beast that shrieked as it fed on itself.

Priscilla’s crazy aunt from Boise sent her a Ouija board for her fifteenth birthday, and the first question we asked it was who would be the May Queen. May was Mary’s month, or so we’d been told at Our Lady, and every year there was a parade on the first Monday night in May. The students would march in a procession from the school to Saint Christopher’s, preceded by the discord and oompahs of the school band. At the end of the parade came the May Queen, chosen by Father Draher himself, and her court of attendants. The prettiest girl in the eighth grade was always the May Queen, and everyone assumed that this year it would be Priscilla, so when we asked the Ouija board I gave a subtle push toward P, knowing it would have gone that way no matter what.

“P what?” Priscilla said, impatiently tapping her fingers on the cursor.

“Don’t tap,” I warned her. “It won’t work. It’s got to feel the heat.”

Priscilla rubbed her nose with her shoulder and said that the board didn’t want to answer that question, although I wondered if it was because she was afraid the next letter might not be R. “I know,” she said. “Let’s ask it who you’re going to go out with.”

Since spying on Steven, Priscilla had been dating a steady stream of boys. She had let them kiss her and touch her breasts, and she told me that the next time she might even go to third base. I had listened to her describe the way Joe Salvatore jammed his tongue in her mouth, and I wondered why she would keep going back for more. First base, second base, third base-it reminded me of the Stations of the Cross, the special services during Lent where you said a prayer for each of the twelve steps leading up to the Crucifixion. I’d been doing it for years every Friday during Lent, and it was the same hour-long ordeal week after week. First Station, Second Station, Third… I would flip ahead in the prayer book to see how much longer I’d have to suffer. It seemed to me that in a different way, Priscilla was doing the same thing.

“S-E-T-H,” Priscilla pronounced. “You’re going to go out with Seth.” She took her fingers off the Ouija cursor and frowned. “Who the hell is Seth?” she said.

There was no Seth in our school, no Seth related to Priscilla or to me, no Seth anywhere in the world that we knew of. “Who cares,” I said, and I meant it.

The next day in school Father Draher announced that the May Queen that year would be Paige O’Toole, and I almost died. I turned bright red and wondered what on earth had made them pick me, when Priscilla was clearly more beautiful. In fact, I could feel her eyes searing into my neck from the desk behind me and the cruel jab of her pencil in my shoulder blade. I also wondered why, for a rite honoring the mother of God, they’d pick someone who had no mother at all.

Priscilla was one of the May Queen’s attendants, which meant she got off easy. I had to spend every day after school being fitted for the white lace gown I would wear during the procession. I spent hours listening to Sister Felicite and Sister Anata Falla as they pinned up the hem and adjusted the bustline from last year’s queen. As I watched the setting sun run into the gutters of the wet streets, I wondered if Priscilla had found another friend.

But Priscilla did not hold the May Queen appointment against me. She cut her trig class two days later and stood outside the door of my English class until I noticed her waving and smiling. I took the bathroom pass and met her in the hall. “Paige,” she said, “how do you feel about getting violently ill?”

We planned a way for me to get away from May Queen practice that day: I would start shaking during lunch and then get severe abdominal cramps, and although I would be able to troupe it out till the end of the day, I would tell Sister Felicite that it was that time of the month, something the sisters seemed to be overly accommodating about. Then I’d meet Priscilla behind the bleachers and we’d take the bus uptown. Priscilla said there was something she had to show me, and it was a surprise.

It was nearly four o’clock when we arrived at the old car lot, a blacktop area enclosed with high mesh fencing that someone had rigged with two netless basketball hoops. A shock of multicolored, sweating men were running up and down the makeshift court, passing a dirty ball back and forth. Their muscles flexed, outlined and taut. They grunted and gasped and whistled, hoarding the air like gold. Of course I had seen basketball before, but never like this. It was primal, angry, and wholehearted, played as if the players’ souls were at stake.

“Look at him, Paige,” Priscilla whispered. Her fingers gripped the chain links so tightly that the joints paled. “He’s so beautiful.” She pointed to one of the men. He was tall and lean and could jump with the grace of a mountain lion. His hands seemed to cover the basketball. He was black.

“Priscilla,” I said, “your mother will kill you.”

Priscilla didn’t even look at me. “Only if some Goody Two-shoes virgin May Queen rats on me,” she said.