“I was so flip,” Eve says.
I dialed her when the sun came up and she told me to heel it on over.
We’re sitting on the hood of my heap-a-junk banger hatchback, shoulder to shoulder, Eve munching her morning bagel. Her mom opens the front door and waves as she strolls to her mailbox and snags the morning paper. We’re hush and smile and wait for her to leave. Beneath my sailor hat, my skull whirls with words. My anger stirs and yanks at my chest.
“Why did you lie?” I say, on edge. Her arm stiffens and pulls away. “I would’ve been hit.”
“No. I don’t think you would’ve.”
I shrug, trying to lift the hurt hanging like chains around my neck. “This is massive hard,” I say. “This whole just-scatting-with-Nate-to-figure-stuff-out thing is rough for me.”
“Word,” she says. “Me too.” She scowls and licks her gorgeous lips. “I’m flip in the skull. What can I say?”
“You can say…” I tap my cheek with my finger. “You can say you’ll only scat with me. Ever.” I glance out of the corner of my eye.
“Eggs, Beatstreet. You got it.”
“And you can say Nate Gray is a Blimp-Skull-McPopsicle-Mug and you’ll never see him again.”
“He does have a big skull,” she laughs. “Word. He’s a Blimp-Skull.”
“McPopsicle-Mug…,” I prompt.
She smiles mop sad at me.
I finish, “… who I’m never gonna see again. Ever. Or scat with. Ever.”
She looks at me, resting her chin on her open palm. “I can’t say that.”
I sigh. The noose of my anger dissolves and I’m hacked and feel wiped clean. Like something’s changing. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
“I’m sorry I lied.” I watch her as she takes a big bite from her bagel. A car drives by, honks its horn. Eve looks up.
“You seem different,” I say. “Or something.” She looks at me, tilts her head.
“How so?”
“Well, you’re, like, eating. That’s one thing.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Yeah?”
“Crisscross my heart.”
“How come?”
“I’m hungry?” she laughs and I shove my shoulder into hers. “I’m happy, too—or at least, getting there. I’m happy you called me,” and she smiles soft golden suns. “When I’m happy, I eat.”
“Being with Nate didn’t make you happy?”
She sighs, looks down at her lap. “Sometimes it did, in the get-go. But looking back on it now, it was like he was erasing me to see himself more clearly. And I was letting him. If that makes any sense.”
“Um.”
“I mean, it was like I didn’t wanna take up space. If I did, then he’d see all the flip things about me I knew he thought were ugly, boring, whatever. After a while, I told him this was okay. So I just didn’t eat and got smaller and smaller and harder to see. So he could become bigger, easier to see.”
I can’t imagine this. I had no idea.
She goes on. “But last night, with Nate. It was kind of amazing.”
My veins and arteries go cold. “Oh?” I manage.
She nods. “I think it’s why I flipped on you, told you not to come.”
I can barely look at her.
“’Cause Nate, he, like, didn’t get to me. Or I didn’t let him. And it felt so good, but also kind of bad. Like I knew exactly what he wanted from me and I couldn’t believe I had ever given it. And he got all pissy, like his trained monkey wouldn’t perform. And I could see it. And yeah, I wanted one of us to disappear. But it wasn’t me.”
I let out the gallons of breath I realize I’m holding in, find her eyes. “Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t massive tweak and assume the worst.”
Eve laughs. “Word. Good thing.”
We go quiet, the whole of it, of us, hanging silently between us.
“But, listen, Thumbs,” I finally say, clearing my throat, desperately willing away the heartache of it all. “I wrote you this crank, lame-o poem. Like, a million and five days ago. I dunno why I just thought of it. But I have it here.”
She holds out her hand and against my better judgment, I slip it from the pouch of my hoodie and into her hand. She reads it and I look away, smooth down my bangs, my face burning red-hot. Spell a few sentences of the poem in my head. None of them fit. When I turn back, she’s looking at my lips.
“I wanted to kiss you just then,” she says.
“If a kiss is an idea, it should just be a kiss.”
Her mouth opens in a laugh and she grabs me, heeling it to the side of the house where she pulls me by my earlobes and presses me into the plastic siding and her smiling eyes cross just a little bit and she kisses me. In the broad orange light at the cusp of daybreak, her mouth, her smell, her touch, warm my chill and cloak my sorrow. I’m horizon and she’s sun and we are joined as the day is just begun.
We are illuminated.
We sit cross-legged on her futon to share the dregs of a stick of canna pinched tight between tweezers. I fool about rolling the canna with my flip poem and Eve says, “You touch that thing and I’ll ax you, Bug-Jack.”
She flicks my Zippo on and off on her leg—a trick I taught her.
I sink into the smoke and rub at the rough sting of my rattling heart cage.
“I sorta feel like someone took a garden hoe and scraped the insides of my chest out,” and Eve looks at me with big, sad eyes, the canna in her digits glowing red and hot. I tell her about my panic attack and yakking all over Zoë’s car. I tell her about telling my Jacks about her and how I had to shoot Oma with the morphine and nearly lost my marbles in the meantime. I try and laugh it off, say, “It’s been a real peach of a week.”
Then we go silent and I start picking at a scab till it bleeds. She slaps my fingers away and I grab her wrist, count the freckles marching up and down the crests of her knuckles. I say I wonder what freckle tastes like and try and gnaw the ridge of her thumb. She smiles, says maybe we still need to talk about stuff.
I shake my head.
“Okay,” she says. “Well, whaddya wanna talk about, then?”
I shrug. “Good recipes for freckle? I mean, what kind of wines pair best? Red or white? I don’t know.”
“Nate?” she says.
“Nope.”
“College?”
“No.”
“Gun control?”
“Um.”
“Okay.” She smiles. “Masturbation,” and I choke, cough, wheeze, nearly die. Then Eve’s cracking up and she lays the canna down smoking in a vast white oyster shell spotted with our ash. Her cheeks flush red. “I do it,” she says, daring me with a look and I’m silent. I’m a pin, not dropping. Her smile goes broad. “Like, a lot.”
My heart skips hopscotch in its cage.
This is revolution.
“Like, a lot?” I say, looking down at my guilty mitts lying in my lap.
“Maybe,” she laughs.
Blood rushes to my face. “You know,” I say softly, “I think we have that in common.”
She’s silent. She takes my hand and pushes it down the front of her skinnies and my hand and I slide into the warmest pair of jeans in America.
“Well then,” she says into my ear, her breath coming quick. “You’ll be a pro.”
My fingers fall into her.
She’s so wet, she’s electric. She’s anemone and I am clown and I swim gently into her stunning embrace.