D. Arthur

D. Arthur

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“Let’s do something fun tomorrow, Teeny Tina.”

Elle swirls into the kitchen with Boston Market. Tina sets the table, leaving a place for her mom in case she comes downstairs. She won’t, but the table feels lopsided without the third setting.

“Mm, yes, fun. You know me, I love fun.” Tina pulls down ceramic serving bowls painted with patterns of fruit. She transfers blocks of mashed potatoes and limp green beans into them. Elle spends more time in Tina’s kitchen than she does at her parents’ house down the street. She spends more time there than Tina’s own mom does. She flits from cabinet to cabinet, procuring salt, pepper, burgundy cloth napkins, mismatched cutlery. Tina and Elle put finishing touches on the illusion of a home-cooked meal. Elle’s T-shirt lifts to reveal a slice of her stomach as she reaches to grab champagne glasses. The girls sit down.

“We could race shopping carts, or kidnap a dog, oh, or maybe . . .” Tina says as she pours ginger ale.

Most summers with Elle are filled to the brim with small misadventures, like the time they stole turquoise condoms from a gas station because they liked the color, or the time they sucked each other’s tongues in Mark Calhoun’s backyard while the boys hooted and hollered, or the time they sucked each other’s tongues later that night, back at Elle’s house, when there was no one left to hoot or holler.

“Now you’re talking!” Elle grabs Tina’s bare foot. She holds it, and Tina feels aware of what it is like to have a foot. This thing that she hardly thinks about is also a part of her, sensual and smelly and made up of living cells. She swears she can feel every groove of Elle’s fingerprint against her skin. She tries to rearrange the potatoes on her plate to match the swirls of the fingerprint.

“Kidding.” Tina spears a green bean, refusing to make eye contact for fear that she will be blinded by the way Elle’s eyes glow when she has an idea she won’t drop.

This summer hasn’t been most summers. Elle has brought over food, scrolled through Netflix, missed parties, urged Tina to have some freaking fun. Tina has batted down every suggestion. She’s scrubbed at dishes in the sink with water as hot as it goes until her hands turn bright pink and pruned. She’s opened books in bed and read the same page over and over. She’s hidden in her closet when it gets to be too late and too much and she’s so tired but she can’t sleep. Tina has tiptoed around conflicting desires: to avoid her mother at all costs, or to crawl into her mother’s bed and fall asleep as her mother brushes back wisps of her hair.

Now both girls slurp at the pop in their champagne glasses. Hopefully Elle will drop this, and they will spend tomorrow lying on the carpet in Tina’s basement until their elbows are speckled and raw with the imprint of the pile. They don’t talk. They just eat. Tina enjoys wading into this quiet that’s not so quiet, really. Tongues smack silverware. Feet squeak on the linoleum floor. Throats swallow. Elle breathes. Tina drags the tines of her fork around her plate. Elle finishes her meal and reaches across to snag some of the green beans that Tina has moved but not eaten.

“I’m serious, Tina. We should do something tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you just come over?”

“We could swipe Smirnoff Ice from my dad’s fridge and drink in Pat Cello’s car.”

“Come on.”

“Bake Goldstein is having a party! Maybe some gaaaanja would mellow you.”

People say Jake Goldstein is heir apparent to his family’s marijuana empire and that their booming orthodontia business is just a front. Tina knows that his parents just travel a lot to tooth conferences. They leave Jake too much money for pizza, which he was able to hoard and save up for a $600 weed vaporizer called The Volcano.

“I’m serious. Drop it.”

“I’m trying to help.” Elle drops her fork with a dramatic clank. “If you want to stay in this house, I will stay with you forever, but I think you need to get out.”

Tina weighs this. She tugs at her t-shirt. She runs her hand over her smooth belly.

“I know you’re trying.” Tina cradles Elle’s wrist between loose fingers. Tina thinks she might cry, but doesn’t. She hasn’t cried, not since the night of, when she showered fully clothed. She feels the cry inside her and thinks of how much easier it would be if Elle saw her cry, how good it would feel to become less suffocated. Tina lets go of Elle’s wrist and gets up to clear the table.

“I know something we can do, Elle.”

“Seriously?”

“Meet me at 6:45 a.m. in the Walmart parking lot tomorrow.”

“K, I’m there.”

“Aren’t you going to ask why?” Tina turns the hot water on in the sink.

“No questions,” Elle sets her dish down, turns the water cooler, “unless you want to tell.”

“No.”

“If you need me, I’m there, Teen the Queen.” Elle drops her dishes with a small splash and puts her hand on Tina’s forearm, marking the skin with wet and soapy fingers. “I am more than there. Wherever you are, I am there. I am everywhere.”

After the night of, they drew blood and swabbed and prodded and poked at Tina. “You’re lucky,” explained a male doctor. His fat hands felt cold on Tina’s skin. “A clean panel, and a negative pregnancy test.” Lucky. It’s not that Tina doesn’t trust the doctors. It’s just that she doesn’t know what her body does beneath her skin. Now it has been three months without a period. She imagines her body plugged up with blood and tears, congealing together to make a mass the shape and size of a baby.

Tina can’t take more than one step inside of her closet, but she calls it a walk-in because she can fit her whole body in it. She was the tallest girl in fifth grade, first to get tits, first to stain the bus seat with period blood on a school trip. Little did she know she wouldn’t really grow after that year. Little. She is sixteen and little and can still fit her whole body with its dumb knees and dumb tits and dumb teeth into the strangled space with her bare feet knocking towers of pop-punk CDs, her nose brushing against studded belts that hang like streamers.

“I know you’re in there,” Tina’s mother hisses from the other side of the closet door. Tina’s insides clench uneasily at the sound of her low-drunk whisper. “Come out, let’s talk.”

When Tina pushes out of the closet, she sees her mom flipping through one of Tina’s middle school yearbooks. There is a soft smile behind her eyes, and for a second she looks sober and caring. Like a mom. Tina sits beside her and considers resting her head on her shoulder.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Tina.” She stretches and creates space between them. “I know this summer has been . . .” Difficult. Terrible. Brutal. Pain-filled. The worst summer of Tina’s life. Tina fills in the blank in her head while her mom shuts the yearbook, then opens it. Shuts and opens, over and over again. “Busy.” The yearbook lays open on her lap. A happier Tina in front of a marbled gray backdrop smiles up at the ceiling. “Do you need me to go school shopping with you next week?”

Is that what being an adult is? Asking any question you can think of? Any question, except for ones that matter?

“Sure.”

Tina’s mom gets up and makes her way out of the room. She pauses in the doorframe, leans against it, and looks back at Tina.

“Hey, kiddo?”

“Yeah?”

“Should I turn this off?” She points to the light switch in its doll-pink plastic cover.

“Sure.” Tina presses the heels of her hands into her eyes in the dark. “Wait.

Mom?”

“Yeah?”

Is this what being a woman feels like? Is it supposed to feel like your body is a car and you’re behind the wheel, but your hands are behind your back, and you’re drunk, and people keep grabbing at the wheel from the backseat, through windows, directing it where they want it to go?

“You can actually leave the light on. I’ll be up for a bit.”

Sunrise sends shocks of color across the dark sky, red like a stain. In Tina’s neighborhood, people don’t walk outside, but she has two feet attached to two legs, and they take her on autopilot the mile to the strip-mall-cluttered main drag. The stores look asleep in the dawn glow. Dick’s Sporting Goods slumbers next to BJ’s Wholesale Club—a joke Tina knows she’s supposed to laugh at. The yellow McDonald’s arches shine, the Walmart sign behind them, both awake, open 24/7. 

Tina makes a point to arrive just before Sam starts his 7:00 a.m. shift at McDonald’s. They talk, or at least Sam talks to Tina, and she tries to squeeze out words that sound flirty or self-assured, but more often than not her lips feel like deflated balloons making low embarrassing noises as air leaks out. Today Sam is sitting on the curb outside with his visor in his lap. He chews the straw of his orange drink, waiting for his shift to start. “You can’t walk through the drive-thru.”

She knows she can’t. It’s a safety thing. People say Grace Hendrin got clipped by a Chevy Silverado making a tight turn into Mighty Taco, so regulations for fast-food restaurants were cranked up across Western New York. Tina knows that’s just suburban legend, though. Grace moved to her grandma’s in Saratoga Springs to pursue dancing after she got tall enough from the hormones her mom shot into her flat bony ass.

“You say that every day.” Tina yanks the fabric of her shorts riding up her crotch. How do girls wear anything short without having to constantly adjust?

She walks up to Sam and knocks his checkered Vans with her checkered Vans.

“Nice shoes, kid.”

The saliva in her mouth evaporates when she tries to give a clever response. If he’s looking at her shoes, he must see her legs. Does he see dark stubble? Ripples of baby fat? Goosebumps that creep up as she feels him looking at her? Sam graduated two weeks ago, and Tina is sure that under normal circumstances he wouldn’t talk to her because she is only going to be a junior. He famously fingerbanged someone on a trampoline at his neighbor’s graduation party. Tina and Elle call him Slam because they want to slam him, on or off of a trampoline.

“I’ll meet you on the other side.” Sam salutes Tina and heads in. Tina walks over to stand outside the window, and she picks at her fraying shorts while she waits. A few minutes later, he meets her at the drive-thru window. He hangs out the window, props his elbows on the small metal shelf where people leave their change, and hands over a bagel wrapped in grease-smeared yellow paper.

“I love this sauce. Such a weird highlighter color.” She presses down on the bagel and the neon liquid gloms out. She licks around the circumference. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. I don’t eat this shit.”

“Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s totally gross.” She pokes the bagel and feels choked by never saying the right thing to boys with swoopy hair, big white teeth, rough fingers with jagged nails. She rewraps the bagel.

Tina orders coffee to feel more adult; it feels like the type of thing she needs to get through today. That’s what her mom would say. Please, Tina, I need my coffee first. But the coffee is hot and bitter. She spits her first sip into a napkin.

“Yikes, kiddo, have some class.”

She squints at Sam, flips through her brain for a retort, comes up empty. She plugs her nose and takes a long slug as if downing cough syrup. She gags.

“Fine, you’re right, I’m not going to finish this.” She puts the cup on the shelf next to Sam’s elbows.

“Since you said I’m right—” he takes a sip “—coffee is on me.”

“You sure?” Tina hooks a finger into her pocket to fish for crinkled bills, uneasy at the implication of owing anyone anything.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it. I’m going to finish it anyway.” He winks, or at least tries to; his face just jerks. “Plus, I see the S.S. Elle sailing in the distance.”

Tina isn’t sure if Sam likes talking to her, likes the way her shorts strangle her butt, likes the way she burns him CDs. She’s not sure if he likes her, or if he is kind to her in the way that everyone is because they all know. Even if Sam knows what happened, though, he doesn’t know how Tina feels. Maybe he heard about how R’s dad grabbed R’s collar and dragged him out of school. Or how Tina emptied her locker into a plastic shopping bag while most of the school watched. Or how Tina’s mom idled in front of the school and honked the horn when Tina walked out, as if to say hurry up. But he couldn’t have heard about how Tina had to sit in the gym taking her global exam, after it happened but before R was kicked out. R must have known that she had said something to the principal, because he didn’t pick up his pencil once during the exam. He just sat across from her, watching her shake.

Still, Sam is nice to her. Tina is in no position to turn down nice.

“Oh no! Vamptina! You’re out in the sunlight. I hope you don’t melt.”

Tina shoves Elle’s right shoulder and Elle shoves Tina’s right shoulder back. For a second they hold each other’s shoulders, shove gently without letting go, and create a half-open, dizzy, swaying kind of hug. That hug is what Tina and Elle’s friendship feels like—half-open, dizzy, swaying.

“Rude. I brought you breakfast.” Tina tosses the rest of her bagel over to Elle.

They plop onto the curb and Elle rolls her eyes into the back of her head, mixing pleasure and disgust as she sloppily bites into the breakfast sandwich. While Elle eats, Tina explains that she needs to buy a pregnancy test. Elle stops chomping and nods. No questions.

“Let’s go, ma cherie.” Elle crumples up her sandwich wrapper, pushes herself up, and dramatically curtsies before grabbing Tina’s hand to pull her up.

“We’ve got sticks to pee on.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?”

“Don’t be gross, I’m going to get my own one, we’re not going to have to squat in the same stall together or anything.” Elle bumps her hip against Tina’s as they make their way through the automatic doors.

Elle has kissed more boys than Tina, and even though her boobs are smaller she has let them be touched more, but she still is a virgin, as far as Tina knows. “You haven’t . . . have you?”

“Come oooon, Teensy Teen, you know I would run over to your place if that had happened,” Elle purrs, “but I did freak dance with Pat at a party last week and his crotch had to drip-dry by the end of it, if you know what I mean.”

People say Francesca Morris got pregnant when Mike Ellis blew his load in his jeans while front-grinding on her at a St. Rose Dance in middle school. Tina knows, though, that Francesca had an older boyfriend who parked cars at the Seneca Niagara Casino and knocked her up in the back of some rich stranger’s Porsche.

Elle lets out a little “ooooh—eeee—oooh,” echoing the intro of a popular hip-hop song on the radio by Lil’ someone. She twirls Tina past the Walmart greeter in the blue vest and pulls her into the women’s clothes section, bumping and grinding against Tina, flanked by racks of discount muumuu-esque tye-dyed T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon cats, roaming buffaloes, a cheeky Tweety Bird.

“I’ma blow it home, you’ll see,” Elle sings down the aisle.

“I’ma bake a scone merrily,” sings Tina.

The song goes, “I’ma take you home with me,” and they know this. This is a game they play, have played ever since the time in kindergarten when Elle farted with her armpit and squawked “BINKLE WINKLE FIDDLE CAR” to distract from a pee puddle under Tina’s chair.

Elle and Tina spin, step, and wiggle their way to the pharmacy department. They approach their destination and stop to giggle, scream, and squirm over condoms, douches, feminine creams. As they walk farther into the family planning section, unease creeps in and they stop giggling. They are kids and they are adults, and they are neither all the time.

“There are so many.” Tina pulls at the collar of her T-shirt and sucks on it.

“I read online that this one is the best.” Elle pulls the collar out of Tina’s mouth and hands her a baby-pink box.

“OK, OK,” Tina cradles the box. “Thanks.”

“Thank gawwwwwwwd for self-checkout.” Elle loads up their shopping basket with candy to obscure the EPT box from view. “There are so many moms here, Teeny!”

“Shit, you’re right. We shouldn’t do this here, there are always so many screaming kids in this bathroom.” Tina swans her arm out, gesturing to the overwhelming buzz of people under the fluorescent lights with nowhere better to be at seven in the morning. As soon as they finish paying at the self-checkout, they sprint across the parking lot back to McDonald’s and the force of running makes Tina laugh as she pants.

“You’re back!” Sam seems genuinely excited to see Tina as she walks in, and she imagines the rest of the summer ahead of her. What would it be like to spend hot, sticky nights biking around with Sam and Elle, going to Dairy Queen for Blizzards with Nerds, spitting sunflower seeds in the stands at Elle’s little brother’s baseball games?

“Can we just use the bathroom, Slam the Slamwich Man?” Elle coos and crisscrosses her legs at the ankles.

“Uh, yeah, of course.” 

Tina and Elle stand in stalls next to each other kicking each other’s feet, too anxious to drop their pants and sit on the toilets.

“If someone walks in, will they hear?”

“They’ll hear peeing, Tina.”

“Yeah, but what if they hear that the stream is muffled?”

“Follow my lead.” Elle bangs a hand against the plasticky wall between them, “OOOOH-EEEH-OOOH—”

The girls scream-sing the wrong words to Lil’ someone’s hip-hop song while slamming their free palms against the stall walls. After their interlude, they tumble out, dripping tests in hand.

Tina and Elle press their foreheads together and pass the tests back and forth, losing track of whose is whose. It reminds Tina of the graphics on the screen between periods at Sabres games, the bit with a digitized hockey puck, a modern version of an old shell game. An older woman exits a stall. She’s not a friend of Tina’s mom, but everyone here is a friend of a friend of a friend of someone’s mom. Tina and Elle hold their breath, and they hold the tests tight against their bellies. The pee drips down Tina’s baby fat belly and kisses the edge of her shorts.

“Ladies.” The woman nods and smiles at them in the mirror.

As soon as the woman leaves, the girls exhale laughter in sputtering mouth farts. The laugh rips something open, untamed and uncontrollable. The girls crumble in pink-faced, hot-teared joy. Their hands and backs and elbows press against the dark gray linoleum bathroom counter. Elle, or maybe it’s Tina, loses hold of her pregnancy test and it clatters to the floor. The second pregnancy test drops seconds later. For a moment they are silent, and then they are carried further, louder, deeper into their laughter.

“That woman—”

“No idea—”

“Pregnancy tests—”

“Both virgins—”

Tina catches Elle’s eyes in the mirror as Elle sputters this out. She echoes it back.

“Both virgins.”

Light tears of laughter turn into heavier tears of something else.

“We’re both virgins, you’re right, we’re both virgins.” Tina cries. Really cries. It feels like a thousand popcorn kernels loosed from cracks between a thousand teeth. Like your best friend cleanly getting a huge chunk of gum out of your hair with peanut butter. Like the moment you push up through the surface of the pool and take a big gulp of air after a breath-holding contest. No, it feels better than all that. It feels like nothing Tina has ever felt before.

Elle wraps her arms around Tina from behind and pulls her close. “Of course we are.”

The girls pick the tests up off the floor, and it doesn’t matter whose is whose because both display a single dark pink line. Tina knew it would show that, but the relief still lashes at her, hot and fast. Her body is processing the last few months how it needs to, and maybe that means not bleeding until she feels steady and whole and like a woman again. Like a woman for the first time. She looks in the mirror and she sees herself and her body. She sees the places where Elle’s skin touches hers, and she knows that those spots of her are there. She also feels the parts that aren’t touched. She feels snot and tears on her cheek and face. She feels her bare feet squishing in sweaty sneakers. She feels the places where her clothes grip and kiss and slide across her body. It is a miraculous thing, being here in this body, alive with her best friend.

“It’s so early, we could get more breakfast sandwiches.”

“Ohhh, and I bet that you can convince Slam to give us free ice cream cones.”

Elle throws out the tests, and they rush out of the bathroom and through the restaurant. The bright light of the day streams in through the plate glass windows by the row of cashiers. A little kid drops a plastic superhero. Moms fumble through purses. Teenagers build pyramids with mini coffee creamers. An old pop song warbles through the speakers. The world is awake now. Tina is a part of it.

“Slam! Elle and I are about to walk through the drive-thru.”

“You can’t do that!”

“We can do anything we want.”