I'm sitting in my friend’s car in Idaho Falls. We’ve just come out of a ska concert, the first concert I’ve ever been to; ska or otherwise.We were practically breathing salt with all the sweat in the air, lungs calcifying.
In the parking lot, it is 11:03, past curfew for BYU Idaho. But my roommate is an insomniac, and she doesn't care, and I think we're friends. I want to go to Chile like my dad, and his brothers, and learn Spanish and talk to them like I've never been able to talk to them. But they can't find out that I'm a rule breaker and a budding slut.
My friend, Jacklyn, has convinced me to go out. I sit next to her now, listening to My Chemical Romance in her boyfriend's car while he smokes outside. She's the best kind of bad influence; a kind I needed at that time. She's tall, with curly hair and freckles, and she's so so pretty, and she makes me feel like this college thing might work out (oops). My first day of choir she picked me out of a line-up to talk to me. At that school, there were no outward signs of doctrinal defiance like tattoos or piercings or black clothes. Some days I thought she could see right through me, to the beating heart of my sin. We would go out to the only park in town in the brown hours of night to look at the weird statues and talk about what porn we liked to watch. She liked to suck on her vape pen and impress me with the kind of shapes she could make with the smoke. Every time I asked for a drag she would laugh and say: no way, gotta take care of your voice.
She glances out the window; it's moon gray and translucent from our warm bodies pressed against each other in the compact car. Her boyfriend is outside; distracted. So am I, I don't notice that Jacklyn has been staring at me until I notice the absence of her voice. Her eyes are brown (I've always liked brown eyes) and her lipstick is red. Candy-red blood-red apple-red. Red’s platonic ideal.
Radiant girl, warm and hot and close to me. Red lips move: she's asking me something I can't hear. The song Thank You For The Venom is playing too loud. She turns the music down.
“Do you wanna make out?” She says.
“Oh,” I say. I do.
“Tommy doesn’t care. I know you said you kinda wanted to before.”
I did say that. “I do kinda want to.”
“But you won’t?”
White hot heart strangled in ice water, "No. I still want my first kiss to be a guy, I think. That feels right." My skin itches. Velcro rip as I unstick from her side. I laugh to get out of the tension, "Not that you aren't really fucking hot."
She laughs with me and shrugs. "Hey, I wouldn't want to kiss you if I didn't think you were hot too." Then she winks. It's an inside joke, us winking at each other. It makes me redden in a boiling blush, another tension-break laugh.
She honks lightly to get her boyfriend's attention. It startles me more than it does him. Suddenly I'm not ready for the moment to pass. I mumble something else, but I don't know what I'm saying. She rolls the window down to shout while falling rain makes the curls in her hair wilt. I wonder what her wet hair would feel like, and then the passenger door opens and I'm out in the parking lot. I stumble; there's grass growing in the cracked pavement. Smooth as smoke the boyfriend moves past me and gets in the passenger seat and shuts the door.
I get in the backseat. All at once I'm aware that I reek of other people's sweat. The boyfriend and Jacklyn start talking about the concert, how cool it was, how good the music sounded from that close. They don't ask me anything. I think they think I'm asleep.
Jacklyn changes the music to something unfamiliar and they both start singing to it. After we get on the highway, it's a 45-minute stretch of nothing until they drop me off at my apartment. They find ways to pass the time. I press my forehead against the vibrating window, watching the shapeless, unlit wilderness rush past me, far too fast to make anything out.
Paige Cook is a recovering Mormon and massage therapist that resides in Orange County, California. She writes flash fiction, personal essays, and horror. Her work is heavily influenced by her upbringing in the Mormon church, and explores the relationships of the body, spirit, and soul to sense of being.
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