When dusk fell, the crowd would gather at the fire pit. The adults smoked sweet-smelling cigarettes, flames playing on their faces, orange against the blueing dark, and laughed at jokes that Elisabeth didn’t understand and so stopped listening to. She stepped closer to the fire, bracing against waves of heat. Above the flames the air rippled like warped glass, and gold sparks spit and sizzled in the sky.
Then hands gripped her waist and she was pulled back, settled onto a man’s lap. He was a friend of her parents and didn’t have kids of his own. Everyone had been swimming and she still wore her one-piece, pink with small black polka dots and a short, wavy skirt around the hips. Damp, it stuck to her body. On the man’s lap she pulled the fabric from her skin with a sucking sound, creating a bubble of air, and then popped it against her belly. The man laughed. He said her hair smelled like lemonade. From across the campfire her mother explained that she squeezed lemon in Elisabeth’s blond hair so the chlorine wouldn’t turn it green. The man held her close against his chest, big hand blanketing her belly, heart beating fast against her back. Her swimsuit pulled against the secret place between her legs and there were sudden little stars bursting all over her body that made her face burn and she thought if she stayed absolutely still maybe nobody would notice and she would not have to explain.
Then the grown-ups wanted to have grown-up time, so the kids had to go to bed. They slept in tents on the lawn; there weren’t enough rooms in the house for everyone who wanted to shower and change and sleep, and grown-ups needed privacy more than kids did. So Elisabeth changed clothes in one of the tents, quick quick, no lock on the door—not even a door, a half circle of shiny nylon, so thin, and the zipper dangled there at the end and there was no way to hold it closed and change at the same time. She could only stand and watch the zipper as she peeled the damp swimsuit from her body. Her skin was cold and clammy underneath and her thin hair crunchy from its lemons and its hours in the sun. Her dry clothes, a purple T-shirt and shorts and pink cotton underwear dotted with tiny panda bears, lay on the sleeping bag beside her. As she reached down for the underwear, there was the shriek of the tent unzipping. The friend was there, looking. She froze with her panties in her hand. What was she supposed to do? Scream?
But he acted like there was nothing wrong, he saw her there and he didn’t say Excuse me and he didn’t leave. He told her to hurry, her mother wanted her, it was time to toast the marshmallows. She didn’t answer. She thought that if she didn’t break her silence this thing would not be real, this thing so small it almost didn’t happen.
During middle school, the greater world began to pursue her more aggressively, and in response she clung more stubbornly to her policy of silence.
There was the time her dad took her to visit the properties he owned in the city’s Sunset District. When he had to meet with a tenant, she went to get a soda at the convenience store he promised was just around the corner.
The store was nowhere. There was no store. She was wandering the sidewalks, counting blocks and squinting at street signs, when a strange voice lapped the back of her neck.
“Your back is real straight,” the voice said. “You work out?”
She glanced over her shoulder. The man was skinny and short and wore a tank top: thin white cotton over scarred white skin. He was loping along like a wounded deer and staring at her and sliding his tongue over his teeth. “Where you work out at?” he said. “Around here?”
“No,” she whispered. She closed her elbows around her ribs and hurried, but the man caught up to her and now they were side by side.
They walked for a few seconds more, the man considering something.
“You’re cute,” he said finally. His eyes ran down, up. “Very cute.”
Sweat broke out on her palms and under her arms. The smell of her own orange-flower perfume released from her skin, and she willed it back like a scream he must not hear. She scanned the street for a store or restaurant to duck into, but there were only more and more stucco houses, windows latticed and barred. “I have a boyfriend,” she said finally, quietly. When she reached Taraval Street, she turned.
The man turned too. “He’s a lucky guy. Very lucky.”
Her throat felt strangled. Her breath too loud. Her T-shirt shrugged up in the heat and she could not move her arms to pull it down. She tried not to look like she was hurrying.
“You could be more lucky, though,” the man said, showing crowded yellow teeth. He reached, and pinched the bare flesh at her hip.
She jumped. A small yelp escaped. But she couldn’t speak. There was a tingling behind her nose and tears in her eyes.