She didn’t move, but when I leaned up on my elbow and reached for her hand, she didn’t pull away. As I tugged on her arm to turn her towards me, I let the sheet fall back so her tits were naked in the moonlight. They were beautiful, and she trusted me enough that she’d let me touch them. She stared at the stars on the ceiling while I put the ring on her finger.
“It’s not dirty,” I said. “I was stupid to say that. It’s not dirty if you love me as much as I love you. And I love you all the way. But we gotta go slow. We went too fast tonight.”
She wiggled the ring on her finger, and I worried she was gonna take it off again.
“That night I first saw you, I was going too fast. There I was rubbernecking at you and dumped the bike. Wrecked me up. I don’t want to wreck us up like that. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She eased her hand up my arm to touch the scar. The ring was still on her finger and she looked at me, looked me in the eye. Real slow, like a striptease going in reverse, she pulled the sheet up to cover herself and nodded.
12
WAVY
March–June 1983
Kellen was unhappy. I could smell it on him.
I went with him when he got his hair cut, and the barber said, “Hey, this ain’t your daughter, is it, Junior?”
“No.” Kellen swallowed hard and said, “This is my girlfriend.”
I was happy to hear that I was his anything, but the ring was heavy on my finger and I wished he’d said, “This is my fiancée.”
The barber looked at me while he cut Kellen’s hair. The way Kellen looked at engines, to figure out what was wrong with them.
To see what the barber saw, I looked at myself in the mirror behind the barber chairs. Too young. I tried to be more like Sandy, but I still looked like a little girl.
Opening my jacket, I pushed my shoulders back against the chair and slid my hips forward. I crossed one leg over the other so that my foot dangled. Then I rested my forearms on the chair and let my hands hang from the wrists. Slowly, I leaned my head back and made my eyes soft. The look Mama used to make Liam come to her after they fought. The limp limbs that invited, the soft eyes that promised things.
The barber would have come to me, if the invitation had been for him, but Kellen blushed and looked away. I didn’t know what to do, because the things Mama and Sandy did when Liam was upset, I wasn’t allowed to do those things to Kellen.
Night after night, he sat next to me on the sofa, watching TV. Never on my bed or the recliner. He held my hand, but he didn’t put his arm around me or touch my hair or kiss me.
If he didn’t want to touch me, I could accept that, but I wanted to touch him. That was never against the rules before, but it was now. All of December he didn’t let me touch him, and then I spent winter break at Aunt Brenda’s without him. Now January and February were gone, and I still wasn’t allowed to touch him.
Even though he wouldn’t say it, I knew what he felt. I’d felt it enough to know. Dirty. Too dirty to touch. Too dirty to be touched.
If he wouldn’t touch me, that was bearable, but to have him look away from me wasn’t. I needed him to see me.
On the sofa that night, after the haircut, he reached for my hand. I looked down at his jeans, the ones he wore for his birthday that got ruined by bleach. Bright white spots already going threadbare. Because of me. I pulled my hand away and said, “I’m too dirty to touch.”
He jumped like a bee had stung him and leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees.
“No, sweetheart. I told you. You’re not. You’re beautiful. I love you, but you’re only thirteen. So we can’t be fooling around.”
He didn’t look at me when he said, “You’re beautiful,” so he might as well have said, “You’re invisible.”
“I’m sorry I made you dirty.” Saying the words felt like swallowing burning cigarettes, but I had to say them.
“You didn’t make me dirty. You couldn’t, because you’re not dirty, okay?”
“Then you’re not dirty.”
“Okay, I’m not,” he said.
I slid my hand along his belly toward his buckle, but he shoved my hand onto my leg and pressed on it to make it stay. “Don’t, Wavy.”
After that my words were hot enough to burn my tongue, but I couldn’t swallow them, either. They stayed in my throat, so that I almost couldn’t breathe. I stood up and went into the kitchen, because I wasn’t going to cry in front of him again. As quietly as I could, I pulled on my coat and slipped out the back door.
Orion was in the sky, but the clouds hid him, so there was no sense cutting through the woods, where it would be dark. I followed the safety rule—walk facing traffic—and made it as far as the second stoplight before the Panhead rumbled up behind me. Kellen rode ahead and turned around to pull up facing me.
“Get on. I’ll take you home if that’s where you want to go,” he said.