Chiara wasn’t too beautiful herself, but she’d done it already with one boy. The wrong kind, sexy anyways, his skin so black it was almost blue like the night sky in the heat of a summer storm. His name was Danny, which she always sort of suspected was a lie. She was eating a vanilla ice cream cone when they met. It was the soft kind from the Daisy Mart that dribbled quickly in the heat if you didn’t keep your tongue moving around it. Chiara liked to think about that ice cream cone from time to time, the taste of it, and how it had changed with the sudden way Danny showed up on the corner, looking at her mouth like soft serve vanilla was the most intriguing thing. His eyes were the deepest ones she’d ever seen and they never seemed to move. Mostly they ended up walking around in the dark after the town went dead, playing the portable radio real quiet—like whisper-quiet—necking in the grass. Sometimes, somewhere between night and morning, they’d go home and she’d fry five eggs sunny side up and stack them with jellied toast on a too-small plate, just to watch him scarf it down nice. He never said, Thank you, Chiara, or much of anything at all, but she just liked to watch him eat in giant ravenous gulps, and when they did it, it was the same way he ate and so talking just didn’t seem to matter.
It took a few weeks, but eventually he left for good, though she never knew exactly when he’d gone or that he had gone at all except that he left something behind. Chiara discovered it stashed beneath the mud mat at the front step where Amelia kept the spare key.
At first it was just her misspelled name, Cheearah, written crudely on a battered envelope, a dirty thumbprint stuck to its seal. There was no letter inside, but two Tahitian pearl earrings. They were not his to give, of course, almost certainly the property of a drunken heiress or some lazy moneybags down in Naples. Either way Chiara could not have cared less.
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She messed around with a couple of boys after Danny but nothing serious. Danny just knew how to make it feel right so she’d want to do it a lot, and he knew how to make it seem like she was the one thinking it all up. Constableville boys were pushy, pesky shits. No respect for anybody, all ready to shove your head into their crotch. She thought most boys were probably like that everywhere and it bothered her. It seemed plain dumb that they wanted something so bad but weren’t much good at getting it and even worse at doing it. |
Sometimes she just got tired of the whole damn thing. Because she wanted it all too. She missed the dizzy feeling of her own mouth on somebody else’s. When it was good she could feel it all at once, her breath rising, thighs trembling; it was like having a special kind of power. Maybe she wanted to do what those boys did, to be a bully. Maybe she wanted to be the one shoving somebody’s head into her crotch. She was tired to tears of the same old thing. So she found this one girl. Her name was Gerdie, or Gertrude, which was a pretty stupid name if you asked Chiara. It was like she was already forty-five and fat, stuck with a hairy lip. That’s what her name said. Really, she was so skinny she was almost transparent.
Gerdie was a transfer student. She came a few weeks after Christmas holiday, smack in the middle of the school year, an unkind time for making new friends, but especially hard for someone like Gerdie. Beneath the paper-thin skin at her temples were lots of tiny spidery blue veins that crept toward her hairline, which was colored mousey-red and receded in a very unnatural way for such a young girl. She had a pretty mouth, full and heart-shaped, but her gums showed too much when she smiled and she reeked of somebody else’s smoke and gardenia musk, that ultra cheap drug store stuff. There was something about her though, as shy and simple and pale as she was. Her uniform was always smooth. Spotless.
The day it happened Chiara was smoking dope with Gerdie behind Mary Mount Carmel. The smoke rolled into soft clouds that lingered above them in the humidity. Chiara’s eyes stayed fixed on Gerdie. The school roof showed through the trees in far off spots of orange-red stucco and Gerdie kept glancing over. But it was summertime; the chances of getting caught seemed slim, anyway, and Chiara wasn’t too scared of the nuns, except maybe for Sister Regina, though she’d barely admit it to herself let alone anybody else.
There wasn’t much, just a pinch of a joint Gerdie had bought off a skinny Cuban with red ears. He couldn’t have been much over twelve years old. All the small-timers were kids; the state was easier on minors. Not that Gerdie was a real dope smoker. It was Chiara who convinced her to try and score, just by acting coy and fake-sweet about it.
After the cherry burnt out Chiara knew she had to get on with it. She fiddled with a match but the joint was toast. Neither of them was good at conversation. She felt her chest rising, late sun blaring straight through the trees. A slow trickle of sweat rolled down her neck into the collar of her shirt. She turned, flicking the roach to the ground all casual-like and took Gerdie by the wrists. Her breath was sticking hot to the girl’s cheek but Gerdie didn’t move a muscle at first, like she was dead in the water, like this wasn’t something new.
Then it was different. Her mouth was softer than a boy’s and she kissed Chiara too, full on, her body tenuous, supple as a blade of grass. It was strange; Chiara felt the burn of Gerdie’s mouth on her earlobe, Gerdie’s tongue moving over the pearl, and suddenly it was gone, lost to a secret place in the parched undergrowth, somewhere below in the tangled, brittle weeds and snapped branches.
She couldn’t bear stopping to find it. It felt more important to save the moment—something that would be easily, inevitably broken—just to put off seeing all that shame on Gerdie’s face. Chiara closed her eyes. It was more than she had hoped, the springy, yielding taste of this girl’s mouth. She pressed her tongue between Gerdie’s teeth, inhaling the salt, the tanginess of stale perfume. Her eyes opened, scanning the oval leaves above their heads peppered with shadow, quivering in a breath of air. She could feel Gerdie’s fingers roaming the small of her back and how she trembled when Chiara moved her hand beneath the front of her shirt, tracing the girl’s ribs, resting her palm in the flat space between Gerdie’s breasts. She wiggled her fingers underneath Gerdie’s bra, a cotton thing that fit loosely around her breasts, which were small and fleshy, strangely pointed.
“No, stop.” Gerdie’s bra strap had slipped down one arm, her mouth was pinched, her eyes glued to the ground.
“What’s the matter, Gerdie? Jesus.” A fly landed on her face. Chiara flicked it away with a finger. Gerdie was sweating, brushing at her hair.
“Nothing. I dunno. Have to go.” She kicked up the dirt at her feet.
“Well, that’s great. Run home, little girl.”
“I gotta go, Chiara.”
The sky had gone red, streaked with gold and now dusk was settling in. Chiara touched her ear, fingering the naked spot where Danny’s pearl had been, and looked at Gerdie in her fawn-colored skirt, cut just below the knees, her complexion turned grayish-blue in the light. Her ponytail had gone undone. She covered her mouth with one hand. Far away they could hear a heron hacking in the lagoon, and all around them the sounds of insects.
“I’ll see you, see you later then,” Gerdie stuttered, waving her arm in the air and turning awkwardly, weaving her way back down the path, her pale legs thin as lines, her skirt crisp and flat at the backs of her knees. Chiara held her breath until she could no longer see her. The light was tawny and darkening by the second.
She had always been the kind of girl who liked to search through other people’s things, wallets and bedroom drawers, looking for secrets; but sometimes there was nothing more to know. It was the same with Gerdie. Chiara tucked her face into her chest, the sound of blood strumming through her ears. She cradled the remaining pearl in her hand knowing she would lose this one too.
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