Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins Page B

his collared shirt, buttoned up. His bare ass glows blue in the light from the TV and he holds his dick in his hand. She forces herself to wonder what they want from her, though she knows. Permission.
    Once, before Lena got her license, the girls were waiting at the county clinic for Lena’s mother to drive them home, and they found a file folder filled with pictures of diseased genitals mounted on heavy card stock. Lena said her mother used them when she gave sex-ed talks at the high school. Our girl flipped through them. Lena giggled and looked away, saying the pictures were gross. Our girl went on. They
were
gross, but in a curious, enthralling way, like a topographical map of a place she would never visit. But then there was one photograph in which the photographer, or the doctor—Who takes these pictures? she had wondered suddenly, then thought, A nurse, probably, or an intern—had captured the patient’s thumb and index finger where they held the penis. She could see the man’s grooved thumbnail and a little rind of skin peeling back from the cuticle. It made her wish she weren’t a woman.
    In the hotel room, Lena reaches for her friend. She says her name. The boys look to her too, even the one called Tom, above her. Our girl takes Lena’s hand.
    It’s okay, she says. We’re having fun.
    She urges her friend back to the bed, gently, as though pulling the last bit of something shameful and malignant out through the tips of Lena’s limp fingers.
    Afterward, on the way down to the lobby, our girl watches her own face in the polished doors of the elevator, and then Lena’s, puffed around the eyes and mouth, her hair clumped to one side where they’d poured something on her. Through the summer, the tight circles in which the girls circumnavigate the pizza parlor will overlap less and less each day. Sometimes our girl will be at the oven, watching Lena’s back as she works the line, and the heat will well up in her and she’ll want to cry out. But what would she say? Sometimes, as she cuts a pizza, boiling grease cupped in a piece of pepperoni will spatter up and burn the back of her hand, or her bare forearm. This will bring her some relief.
    That summer, Lena will shrink and yellow. Her eyes will develop a milky film. Even her big teeth will seem to recede into their gums, as though the whole of her is gradually succumbing to the dimensions of their town, its unpaved streets, its irrigation ditches and fields of stinking alfalfa. The four walls of the pizza parlor, the low popcorned ceiling of her mother’s manufactured home. When Jeremy the delivery boy shuffles back to the walk-in where Lena stocks the commissary and asks her to come over to watch his band practice, she’ll say yes, her voice wet with inevitability and exhaustion. The master bedroom of his trailer will start to feel like her own. Jeremy’s love for her will be an unquestioning and simple thing, with rising swells of covetousness. It will be this particular strain of love—that’s what he’ll call it—that makes him hit her for the first time, on the Fourth of July, on the darkened plot of packed dirt in front of a house party where she’d danced too closely with a friend of his. Our girl will watch this from the porch of the house, where a crowd will have gathered. She will do nothing.
    By September, she and Lena will not even nod in the halls. When the announcement comes over the intercom first period, our girl will try to make herself feel the things she is supposed to feel: grief for dead people in buildings she didn’t know existed, sorrow for a place she can’t envision. Deadened, but afraid of the deadening, she will look across the classroom to Lena, hoping to inflict upon herself that sickly shame that the sight of her old friend now evokes, thinking it the least she could do. But Lena—standing humped beside her left-handed desk with her right hand over her heart, crying—will be barely recognizable. This will bring our