Pucker by Melanie Gideon Page A

our insane past.
    There are many trails in the woods behind my house and I know them all. I don’t need a flashlight, nor do I need to drop any crumbs. Even if I wandered three miles into that thick, dense woodland, I could find my way out. But I’m not alone tonight.
    The sight of the couple enrages me at first. These are my woods. Everybody else has the entire world.
    â€œHere. Sit,” the girl says, patting the plaid blanket.
    She lies back, arranging her hair so that it streams out from her head in ribbons. She rolls up her shirt, exposing her stomach. Her belly is taut and tanned.
    â€œYou can touch me,” she says to the boy.
    He hesitates.
    â€œI’m not a slut,” she says, sitting up on her elbows.
    He doesn’t need a second invitation. His hand descends and he lays his palm flat on her stomach. I imagine the heat of her skin. It would be like holding a little rabbit.
    Everything is connected. You can’t touch one thing without sensing the presence of another; it’s simply not possible.
    She rolls her shirt up to her clavicle. Suddenly, with a sigh of impatience, she sits up, unhooks her bra, and drops it to the ground. Her breasts are perfect, silvered by the moon. I’ve never seen real breasts before. For the first time in my life I forget I’m burned, and I’m just a boy and there is a girl and some invisible cord connects us.
    But there’s also another boy and it isn’t me, and it’s he who gets to touch her, he who gets to make her gasp.
    I need to leave before I do something I’ll regret, like stay longer than I should. Quietly, as has become my way in this world, I go.

ELEVEN
    â€œW HERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” MY mother asks.
    â€œOut,” I say.
    My mother stiffens. “Traipsing around town with your friends when I’ve just told you I’m going to drop dead any day!”
    I stare at her emptily. “I don’t have any friends,” I say softly.
    Slowly the anger drains from her face. The cynic in me whispers that she can’t afford to stay mad at me for long—I’m the one who makes sure our electricity doesn’t get shut off.
    â€œThat’s not true. Stop exaggerating. You have friends,” she snaps.
    I’m breaking our unspoken agreement. Because my mother has been sick, part of what’s required of me is a certain amount of dishonesty, or withholding of information. She’s not strong enough for me to add the burden of my suffering to her own, and up until this moment I’ve abided by this rule. Suddenly, though, I need her to know who I am.
    â€œYou don’t care about me. You left me here alone,” she sobs.
    Her emotional theatrics are exhausting. I drop down on the bed. I feel like I did just after I got my first skin graft. I remember lying on a gurney in the recovery room. My morphine had run out and the nursing staff hadn’t noticed. I was an eight-year-old boy dog-paddling in the middle of the ocean, waiting for the next giant wave of pain to pin me to the seafloor.
    My mother’s tears dry up and she finally notices me, as if I’ve appeared by some sleight of hand. For a second the mother who would be rightly mine had I not been burned, had her Seerskin not been flayed, looks benevolently at me.
    â€œI miss Dad,” I say.
    The corners of her mouth pleat in sympathy. “I miss him too.”
    She reaches over and strokes my hair. I’ve been touched so few times in my life by anyone other than surgeons and nurses that I’m starved. I make the mistake of scooting up closer and her face clouds with despair.
    â€œWhat am I going to do?” she moans. Her head lolls back on the pillow and my thirty seconds of being a kid are over.
    I sigh. “First, you can stop being so melodramatic,” I say, sitting up. “I’ll go.”
    â€œYou will?” she says, propping herself up on her elbows.
    â€œYes, but you need to give me some