We turn to each other. He kisses me as he slowly lowers me to the ground. He fumbles with my clothes. His callused hands tell me that he works hard for his family. He squeezes one of my nipples, and a foreign-sounding yip escapes my lips. I haven’t practiced with other boys, but I yearn to touch the flesh beneath his tunic. His chest is smooth. His muscles are firm under my palms. He pulls up my skirt, reaches above my leggings, and touches that part of me that has become slick and wet, but he’s the one who moans. He stares into my eyes. I see all the way to his soul. Whatever he has between his legs has to find what I have between mine. I may not have done this before, but I’ve seen roosters mount the females of their species. Pigs, dogs, and cats too. San-pa helps me flip over until I’m on my hands and knees. Something hot and hard slaps against my rear end. I arch my back at the feel of his fingers. I’m so happy for Ci-teh’s advice, because he’s making a way exactly as he should.
“San-pa.” His name is an ocean in my mouth, carrying me to a place I never knew existed. His hands come to rest on my hips. Then that hot thing back there finds my entrance and begins to push. I push back . . . Waaa! Such pain—like the blacksmith’s poker stabbing me. I collapse to my elbows. We both hold completely still. He leans down over me, putting his mouth close to my ear.
“Should I continue?”
I take a breath and nod. Slowly, slowly, he moves back and forth. The startling pain is gone, but I don’t feel anything close to the urgency I felt before. San-pa does though, and he picks up his rhythm—just as I’ve seen all those male animals do. When he’s done, he falls onto on his back next to me, hiding the hot thing under his tunic before I get a chance to see it.
“Next time it will be better,” he says. “I promise.” He kisses me and smooths my skirt down my legs. “Will you stay the night with me?”
When I nod, he wraps his arms around me, pulling me to his chest. I close my eyes and listen to his heartbeat.
* * *
“I was an unmarried girl too . . . once,” A-ma comments when I arrive home the next morning. “Just remember today is a day of ceremonial abstinence for the entire village. That means—”
“I know what it means,” I retort. What I’m thinking, though, is that my sore parts will have a chance to heal.
“You were supposed to be different with your school and your plans—”
“None of that has changed.”
She doesn’t believe me. “You’re no different than any other girl on this mountain. Stupid with love.” She sighs and goes back to her grain grinding.
It may be a day of ceremonial abstinence—the requirement that we must be careful with our arms and legs has new meaning to me—but San-pa and I go to the forest anyway. “Just to talk,” he says. We return to the spot where we did the intercourse. We sit, and he tells me how he’s loved me since he first saw me at the tea collection center. He couldn’t say anything to make me happier, and he couldn’t do anything to make me happier than when he reaches into his pocket and gives me the eye of a peacock feather.
“For your headdress,” he says.
“How did you get it?” I ask.
He juts his chin. “It’s enough for you to know that I found something that might bring you joy.”
Our future is clear. Now that he’s given me a gift, all that’s left is for his parents to send emissaries to ask my a-ma and a-ba if he can take me to his village in marriage. We’ll graduate . . . Go to university . . . Join the market economy . . .
* * *
The following week, I’m surprised to discover Teacher Zhang in the school yard during lunch. Rumors travel fast, and I suspect he’s come to congratulate me. I’m wrong.
“Are you sure marriage to this boy is what you want?” he asks. “You’ve worked so hard.”
I try to be polite. “You’ve been my greatest teacher.”
“What about the gaokao?”
“San-pa and I will take it together.”
Teacher Zhang shakes his head sadly. “You know he’ll never be invited to take the test, and even if by some miracle he is invited, he’ll never pass, while you have a future. You could be the first on this mountain to go to Ethnic Normal College, or maybe even Yunnan University.”
“You’re wrong about San-pa—”
“If you marry him, tradition will weigh on you,” he insists. “Your families will want you to stay home, have babies, and heal like your mother.”
He hears what he’s saying as a threat, but San-pa will never let those things happen.
“Tell me you won’t stop studying,” he persists.
“I won’t stop studying,” I promise. “I’ll take the test even if San-pa doesn’t.”
Teacher Zhang nods his head three times very sharply, and then shifts his shoulders within his jacket. With that, he leaves, going back to the primary school for his afternoon class.
I look around the yard for San-pa. I spot him sitting on a wall with some other boys, their legs dangling. I realize he’s watched my exchange with Teacher Zhang, but he doesn’t cross the yard to ask me about it.
* * *
I still love my family and do my chores obediently. And I still cherish Ci-teh but reveal little to her of the dreams of the life I’ll have with San-pa. Ci-teh, perhaps sensing this new and growing space between us, finds excuses for us to leave the village—“We’re going to gather firewood. We’ll be back soon”—so I can open my heart to her without fear of others eavesdropping. I understand her desire, because we’ve always shared everything. But even as Ci-teh wants to hear every detail, I find myself hoarding them, speaking insignificantly about my emotions and skirting her questions by asking if her father has received any proposals since the Swing Festival. (Her family is once again the richest on the mountain, having recovered from the setback caused by the sacrifices required to absolve and cleanse them of human rejects. As a result, Ci-teh will go into marriage with many gifts.) She tells me about this and that boy, but it doesn’t make me any more forthcoming.
My evasions must hurt her feelings, because she strikes out at me by saying, “People say San-pa still visits other girls in their villages’ Flower Rooms.”
“I don’t believe it,” I tell her, and I don’t.
When she hints at names and places, I can come to only one conclusion.
“Are you jealous?” I ask.
She gives me a haughty look. “Of what?”
“Of me, because you visit the Flower Room and steal love in the forest with different boys, and none of them have asked to marry you?”
“That’s a mean thing to say when I’m just trying to be your friend.”
“Waaa! Don’t you think it’s mean to repeat gossip? And even if he does those things, what makes him any worse than you—or any other boy or girl on Nannuo Mountain—who tries the intercourse? That’s what we Akha are supposed to do before marriage.”
She remains silent for a long while. Finally, she asks, plainly and simply, “Are you one of those girls who forgets her friends when she does the intercourse? I didn’t forget you when I started doing it.”
That I don’t have an answer causes both of us anguish. But isn’t this how it’s always been between us—with one falling and the other rising?
* * *
San-pa comes often to Spring Well Village. We’ve met in the Flower Room. We’ve gone into the forest. I went ahead and asked him about other girls, and he asked me about other boys. My answer: “None.” His response: “No other girls for me either.” I’ve come to enjoy the intercourse, and we’ve even done it not like animals but face-to-face. I like that especially. Being able to look into his eyes. Kissing his mouth. Wrapping my legs around him. Afterward, when he walks home, I stay perched on our pine-needle bed, and we sing call-and-response love songs across the hillsides.
“The flowers bloom at their peaks, waiting for the butterflies to come—”
“The honeycombs wait for the bees to make honey—”