I pull him around the corner so fewer people can see us.
“Shhh. Listen. We have a plan. We’ll stick to the plan. Everything’s going to be okay.”
He nods, his face blank. I put my hand on his, gently, his hand, calloused and rough, scaly almost, and so I run my fingers over his knuckles.
In the gym, I can hear the volleyball team practicing. Girls in tiny shorts. Spiking balls over the net one after the other. Click-swoosh. Spike. Click-swoosh. Spike. Their sneakers squeal against the gym floor.
He places his hands on my shoulders and backs me up against the wall.
“What are you doing, Sean?”
He’s flustered. He shushes me. “Sometimes . . . when I’m with you . . . I . . .”
My face is hot. I can barely look at him.
“What?” I whisper this. “What?” Because I’m scared of what he’s going to say to me. So breathless, so on the edge.
“I need someone to set me straight. I feel like you can help me, B.”
I exhale like I’ve never heard better news. What could he have said otherwise? That he loved me? Sometimes when I’m with you . . . his soft voice, pulsing inside me. Anything could have come after that, couldn’t it? A declaration. Even a kiss.
And I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t know if I would have wanted to turn him away.
12
ALI
“I want you to ask me any questions you can think of before we get there,” my aunt Marce says.
It’s Tuesday morning. We’re going to an emergency visit at my aunt Marce’s gynecologist in Jersey City. Marce told her I had unprotected sex, so I need an STI test. It’s my first time seeing a gynecologist and I know I should have so many other thoughts right now, but I seem to be fixated on all the women who have been in her office. All the mothers and the babies. All the vaginas.
“Are adult vaginas the same as teenage vaginas?”
Marce smirks. Gives me a quick look.
“Less pubic hair,” she says. “Pubic hair is like a gift that keeps on giving as you get older. It turns gray too.”
“No. It does not.”
“I am here to tell you, my darling, that it does. Sprouts of gray.”
I plunge right into an image from when I was little. Of my mother’s massive pubes. She was the kind of parent who walked around nude a lot. That was just her thing.
I called her pubes a gorilla for years, which she always laughed at. They would pop up in the bathtub when she’d soak there for what seemed like hours. And then I’d sit on the floor painting my little kid nails, nail polish all over my fingers, waiting for her to come out, and her gorilla vagina with all its dark curly pubes would hang down, dripping water all over the floor. Her vagina needed a separate towel.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve told her to trim it up, and she accused me of being a bikini-line fascist. “Women are supposed to have hair down there, Ali,” she said.
We’re at a stretch of road near the New Jersey Turnpike that runs along the plume-filled wetlands, and Aunt Marce pulls over. The plumes are these giant feathery tusks. In the distance, a steel bridge crosses over a railroad track. Trucks whiz over the bridge at full speed. Train tracks run side by side with the water. I don’t understand this part of New Jersey at all.
“Ali, I love you and want you to listen to me,” she says.
“Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“That I’m a whore. Or that I’m a slut. Or that I’m stupid.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything like that, Ali. I would never say anything like that to you.”
“Then why would you start a sentence with a ‘but’ clarification. ‘I love you, but . . .’”
“For the record, I said ‘I love you and want you to listen to me.’ There wasn’t one single ‘but.’” She shifts her hands on the steering wheel. “What happened the other night? I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you go up to the bedroom with him?”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this to me. Are you blaming me now?”
“No—” Her voice is getting higher, defensive. “I just want to figure out what’s going on.”
“Then you would know why I went up there!” I lower the car window. The dry wind moves through my hair. “I wanted to have sex.” I replay the whole thing over in my head. Going there with the intent to see Sean Nessel. Taking those drinks. Walking up those steps. Part of me wants to tell her.
“Honey, Sean Nessel—and let’s forget the part that happened in the bedroom—he was someone who was unattainable. Someone you kind of fantasized about.”
“I didn’t see it that way. In my mind, I knew him very well.”
Except I didn’t at all.
“But there’s more than that. For your first time, you want to have sex with someone who you love and care about. Not just a onetime thing at a party. When you’ve been drinking.”
“Who says it was my first time?”
“Ali.”
“Okay, fine. Fine.”
I slump deeper into my seat. Stare out at a mall in the distance. Something giant. More wetlands removed for it. More birds gone.
“Maybe there’s an emptiness inside. Maybe there’s something that you’re trying to fill up that empty space with.”
She’s talking about my mother, I know. She wants me to do the messy cry. But I won’t do it. I can’t do it right now.
“Sometimes when we have an emptiness that’s so great, we try to stuff it up and fill it up. And I think that’s what you did by having sex with that boy Sean.”
I’m dying to say: yeah, I filled it up—with Sean Nessel’s dick.
God, I’m disgusting. I’m just disgusting.
“I can’t do this with you right now,” I say. I can’t do this because she doesn’t know the full story. She
