“It’s your last year, Grey,” she says. “Make a difference for your school.”
I’d burn this place to the ground before I’d ever willingly make a difference for it, but I’m smarter than saying that out loud and she should be smarter than tempting me. I shake my head, wave her off. Her thin lips twitch with disappointment before melting into all the other lines on her worn face. I don’t much like Coach Prewitt, but I like her lines. No one fucks with her.
I fall in with the rest of my classmates and we stumble through the back entrance of Grebe High on spent legs, quietly moving past classes still in session. At the fork in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, Brock reappears, looking awfully satisfied with himself.
“Cat okay?” Tina asks.
“She’ll live.” He runs his hand over his head, flattening hair that’s barely there. “Why you want to know?”
“Did you even take her to the nurse’s office?”
He peers cautiously down the hall but Prewitt never follows us in, never sticks with us a second longer than she has to. We screw around in the halls, she hears about it. Makes us pay for it later.
“Eventually,” he says.
“That’s what I thought.”
“You jealous, Tina? Fall tomorrow. I’ll pick you up.”
She rolls her eyes and heads for the girls’ locker room, down the hall’s right tine. Not being outright rejected makes Brock man of the hour, so slap him on the back and tell him, I bet she will. I bet tomorrow she’ll be riding your dick. Do it; you’re so cool.
Brock punches Trey Marcus in the arm. “See that? That’s how it’s done.” Then he catches my eye. “What, Grey? You want to ride it?”
I follow the other girls to the locker room, where I get undressed. My fingers curl around the edge of my limp and dusty shirt. I bring it over my head and then I’m in my bra, sneaking looks at the other girls’ ribs, ridges, innies, outies, A, B, C, D and—Tina—E cups. Yesterday, Norah Landers learned something new about nipples. They’re not all the same, you know. We did, but the types apparently have different names. She ran us through them. It’s not like that in here all the time. Norah just couldn’t keep it to herself, I guess. So after we listened, entranced by this unexpected piece of information, and after we all glanced down and cataloged ourselves, we told her to shut the fuck up so we could go back to pretending we didn’t exist in this space together while being all too aware that we do.
“So she was faking,” Tina says to no one. Everyone.
I take my bra off. “If Brock Garrett said it, it must be true.”
Tina faces me and the faint tan lines on her light brown skin is all she’s wearing. She’s always first undressed. Confrontational nudity. I don’t know. Everything with Tina is a confrontation.
“What would you know about the truth?”
“Fuck you, Tina. That’s what I know.”
“Give it a rest,” Penny Young says.
“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” Tina asks.
Penny shimmies out of her shorts.
“Because I said so and you’re supposed to listen to your elders.”
“Well, my birthday’s next, so watch out. And how was Godwit, anyway? You didn’t call me back like you promised.” Tina arches her eyebrow. “Good weekend?”
Penny doesn’t answer, busying herself with the buttons of her collar. Tina stalks into the showers and I hear her muttering about what a whore I am before she slips into one of the curtained stalls because Tina always gets the last word, one way or another. The rest of the girls trail in after her and then it’s me and Penny, alone. She clutches a towel to herself but she doesn’t look like she needs a shower. No trace of Phys Ed on her, her hair no worse for wear, her skin sun-kissed instead of sun-killed. Penny Young is the most perfect girl you know and those kinds of girls, they’re put on this earth to break you. Peel back her skin and you can see her poison. Peel back mine, you can still see traces of where her poison’s been.
“Moving day,” she says.
She’s talking to me except we don’t talk. Sometimes a word or two will slip through, but only out of necessity. This is not that. I never told anyone about the move, but nothing stays secret long in Grebe. Word travels. Slurred in bars, murmured over fences between neighbors, muttered in the produce section of the grocery store and again at checkout because the cashier always has something to add. Cell phones don’t run as fast as the mouths in this town.
“What did you say?” I ask.
But she’s not looking at me and I wonder if I imagined it, if she said anything at all. I leave her there and find a shower stall for myself where I run the water hot as the sun. It stings my skin. I imagine it eroding lines into me, all over my pale body, my arms, my legs, and especially my face until I look like one of those women. The kind no one fucks with.
I’m last out, I make sure of it. I turn the water off and stand there a minute, my wet hair clinging to my neck, drying fast and frizzing. When I get back to the change room, my locker is open and my clothes are on the floor.
My bra and underwear are gone.
My bra, one of the two I own, is an embarrassment. That’s what Tina called it, once. It’s a thin strip of material with skinny straps because there’s nothing on me that really needs to be supported. I wore black bikini-cut underwear, nothing special. I grab the rest of my clothes. Today was cutoffs and a flimsy black shirt that needs something underneath it, but I try not to think about that. The others silently watch me dress. They watch me take out my lipstick and press it into my lips. They watch me check my nails for chips. As soon as I’m gone, their excited voices drift from behind the door.
Was it you? Did you do it? You’re so cool.
I think of myself naked in that shower, think of the water running over me while someone moved around the next room and took the things that touched the most intimate parts of my body. I make my way down the hall with my arms crossed tightly over my chest.