WHEN THE YOUNGEST of us slept with Marcus Bell, we pretended she hadn’t. Marcus Bell, who mowed yards all summer and whose sweat smelled like fresh-cut grass. Marcus Bell, who had a collection of creepy baseball player bobbleheads on a shelf above his bed, and dark red areolas like pepperoni slices. Marcus, off-limits because the oldest of us had gone out with him. The youngest of us never told about Marcus because it would’ve changed everything, even though that’s why she did it: to change everything. But the change that it brought surprised her. Something about Marcus moving inside her on his lumpy bed made her think of a boat lost in a vast sea. She buoyed him up. He was just a small thing, hardly there at all. She rolled on and on. Filled up with only herself. It was a lonely feeling. She wondered if to Marcus it seemed like he was lost in a sea of grass, like an unending prairie. She tried to explain this lonely feeling to him when he drove her home afterward, but grass clippings had filled his ears and he grew nervous and stared straight ahead at the road and said something about how pretty she was and how he hoped they could have more special times. But she knew they would go on just like before, in ignorance of each other, and she would see him at Mangia Pizza that next week and he would stop by our table and smile the way he did and ask if he could have her pepperoncini and one of the boys with him would laugh. But she would see in Marcus’s eyes that part of him knew he was a boat lost in a vast sea.
So we pretended about Marcus because if the others of us knew, the youngest of us wouldn’t be allowed to go riding anymore with the horsey girl or be invited along to scavenge for theater costumes at thrift stores. But of course we knew. Knew from the smallest things. The way she stopped wearing so much makeup (except a little base and powder to hide the hickeys Marcus had given her). The way she hugged the others of us for no reason. The way she absently cocked her head and listened to the vast sea inside herself.
See how we are? We know and don’t know.
I just wish I had more memories, one of our mothers says from somewhere, and we know we are near our anniversary. Jesus H. Christ, we think, because we know what’s coming. Suddenly one of us has her pixie haircut from sophomore year. Another of us wears the round glasses that made her face look fat before she got contacts. The youngest of us feels her retainer push against the roof of her mouth and can’t help but lisp.
I can still smell their hair after a bath.
We suspect she’s doing laundry, because that’s when these thoughts often come, while matching socks. Laundry is dangerous that way.
They are a great comfort, the firefighter said.
Then we see one of our mothers on the laundry room floor, hands bound with a bra, mouth harnessed with a ligature made from panties. We’re afraid. Don’t leave us like this, we say (the retainer gets in the way, so it sounds lispy and far off).
The firefighter knows something, one of our mothers says through the ligature.
He just might, we say. The new guy always seems to.
Maybe I’m imagining it.
Even so, we say. The plot thickens. We go forward rather than back.
Maybe I’m going crazy.
Her cheek against the floor tile, one of our mothers is conscious of her heart beating. How it sends itself away and returns to itself.
We’ve been there, we say.
She watches the clothes tumble in the dryer window and thinks of tiny particles falling through an endless void and how by chance a few collide with others. How all the stars, planets, animals, and people came to exist by collisions like this and will one day fizzle out into nothing. But in the meantime the particles keep going. Maybe sadder and wiser, but they mosey on (okay, our words, not hers), colliding here and there, a part of us remaining a part of them. And though the physics of all this is over our heads, we’re suddenly there under the utility cabinets in the fluorescent light that’s always on the fritz. Our mother matches socks in her head on the floor and thinks for a moment she can smell our perfume but decides it’s just the fabric softener. She stares into the flickering light for a moment, narrows the gap. See? we say. See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?
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