by Izzy Loiacono

10.

“Say something. Come on, say something now.”

You are staring at the ground, at your sneakers on the wet concrete. The air is sharp and damp in your nostrils, your neck and cheeks bitten raw from the wind. You imagine what she must look like, inches from you, the tip of her elegant nose going red, her cheeks a delicate pink. You don’t have to imagine, because when you look up, she is there, staring at you. Her face is pinched and furious, but her eyes are begging you. The fluorescent light glares through the window, washing out her face. She is twenty-three. She looks ancient.

You open your mouth and watch your own breath fog out, twisting in the air like a preface to the words that should follow. None do. You suck a breath back in, and ice fills your lungs and travels down to the bottom of your spine. You meet her eyes—a mistake, because now your intestines are squirming. Her eyes seem bottomless, impossibly dark and colorless at the same time.

Why are you silent? Why are you cold? Why do you avoid her eyes? Why did you come here? You cannot feel the tips of your fingers. You cannot feel anything. You are disgusting. You disgust me. Did she say that? Did you say that? Your eyes rake across her face again, searching. You look at her perfect mouth, wearing lipstick you bought her last week; her cheekbones, like marble; her furrowed eyebrows, the crease between them you have the intense urge to reach out and touch, because you deserve to feel something tangible of her anger. You wish she would slap you. Your hand itches to slap her, punch her, kick her, pull chunks of her gorgeous hair. The light sparkles on her cheeks; they are covered with tears. She is iridescent. Your face is uncomfortably hot, and you feel fat tears rolling down to your chin. You can see how ugly you are in the way she looks at you. She is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

You swallow once, more tears sliding down your face. Words have failed you. You are encapsulated by her beauty. She shakes her head, speechless, and then she turns and walks away.

9.

She is talking energetically, gesticulating with her hands as she does when she’s excited. You love when she does that. You love how her dull gold hair falls around her ears. She tells you about a coworker who keeps making out-of-pocket comments during meetings. You smile and laugh and gasp in all the right places. The dinner you made is growing cold on your plate. She does not notice. There is a spot of pasta sauce at the corner of her mouth. Instinctively, you reach out to wipe it away. Your hand stops an inch from her face. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t touch her. Your skin crawls as she frowns at you. She knows, you think. She knows.

“What’s wrong?” she says, and rubs her face self-consciously. “What?”

She knows. You cannot feel your own fingers. Why are you silent?

“Nothing. You’ve got sauce on you.”

You wipe the spot gently away from her mouth. She relaxes and smiles. You clamp your mouth shut again. If you open it, you will start talking or start crying, and either way will never stop.

Later, in bed, your skin burns where her fingers slide over you. She is gentle tonight, like you are sugar spun into glass. She knows something is off. She knows. You kiss her, and her mouth tastes like fire. She says you are beautiful. She says it quietly, timidly, like an apology, and your stomach burns with shame. You feel your pulse in your ears, pounding. You hate her. You hate yourself. You kiss her again, again, again, desperate to feel the burn.

8.

The other woman has a tiny, cramped apartment. It smells like paint and cigarette smoke, and blankets are tucked against the windowsills to keep the cold from getting in. She says she is an artist, and she has to move several rolled-up tarps and one canvas aside to clear the way to the bed. She did not know anyone would be over tonight. Your room back home is covered in papers, pens always cluttering your side of the bed. You shake your head to clear the memory of home away, and then laugh, because you must look silly. The woman laughs along with you. She is fuzzy at the edges, a river of dark hair swinging across her face. You watch her hands as she tucks a strand behind her ear again. Her hands are not very elegant. The air is chilly when it touches your bare skin. You are trembling. You remember the many shots of vodka you had without remembering the exact number. She kisses you then, hard, and she smells like cheap wine and some kind of musty perfume, and you have to resist the nausea that suddenly rolls over you. You tumble into bed, a tangle of limbs. She is nervous; she says she’s never been with another woman before. You lie and say you haven’t, either. You kiss each other like it’s the first time you have ever been kissed. You push the thought of dull gold hair out of your mind. Later, you slip out of her bed and slip into your wrinkled clothes, and leave her sleeping body behind in the apartment, and try to keep the pounding headache away.

7.

“Is that high enough?”

Your arms ache from holding the shelf against the wall, but you stand there anyway, waiting for her instruction. You turn your head at a ridiculous angle just to look at her. She looks particularly pretty today, even though you have been moving things. You want to see her golden hair pulled up above her neck the way that makes your stomach churn, but she is just out of your view, turning a critical eye on your positioning. You have been holding this shelf for what feels like hours. Is she looking? Has she turned away? Has she gone to the other room?

“Lower,” she says, still here. “Not that low. Higher. There.”

You mark it with a pencil, and finally put the shelf down to turn and smile at her. She is halfway into the other room.

All that night, you lie awake in the dark, entire body buzzing with the knowledge that she is next to you. You sleep on a mattress pushed up against the wall among towers of cardboard boxes and unassembled shelves, like two kids in a blanket fort, and just before daybreak, you sit up and find yourself trembling at the sight of her. You cannot put into words what it is that makes you shiver. You feel the urge to shout as loud as you possibly can, and the only way you can tamp down the urge is to slow your breathing to match hers, as if she has given you her lungs, and as pinpricks of sunlight make their way through the newly-installed shades you admire her sleeping form and feel so lonely that all your bones ache at once.

6.

When are you getting home? Where are you? Do you need me to come get you? Are you safe?

Your eyes are boring a hole in the ceiling above your bed. You wait for your phone to buzz again. It does not. You should have gone with her. You do not like parties. You did not go. Your blankets are too hot. You kick them off, and your entire body shivers. Is she home? Is she safe? Why did you not go? You want her to call you and be angry at you. You want to hear the click in her throat when her voice goes hoarse from shouting at you. You inhale so deeply your ribs hurt, and clamp your mouth shut at the last second to keep from screaming. Is she safe? You lie on your back, your fingers flat on the too-hot mattress, unmoving. You pretend you are a corpse lying on a concrete slab, naked and primed to be taken apart bit by bit until all your bloody secrets are spread out on a tray under fluorescent lights. She did not tell you where she was going. Yesterday she held your hand and kissed you gently. You remember light from a romantic old movie playing softly across her face and hair while her head rested on your shoulder. Lying on your bed, you can feel your breath whistling in and out of your aching lungs.

The next morning, you march to her apartment and shout at her until your head hurts. She screams back at you, and you feel relieved. The air smells stale, like it was waiting for you to arrive and move it around. She comes back from the shower, and you tell her you love her. Why did you say that? Where did it come from? Is she speaking to you? Is she here with you? Are you listening to her? Do you feel anything?

Later, you trudge side-by-side on the boardwalk, not speaking. You risk a glance towards her and see her aglow in the watery sunset. Her hair is going to smell of that strange mix of garbage and seawater all night. Your elbow brushes hers, and you feel it like a spark traveling all the way to your neck. You don’t say anything. Words have failed you both.

5.

The color of your graduation gowns does not suit her, but she looks radiant anyway, jabbering excitedly with her friends in the corner. You are fighting your way towards her through crowds of people. The crowd is damp–sweat, tears, the slight drizzle outside. It is raining on your graduation day. You don’t care. You push past a group taking pictures and wait for her to see you. Your face hurts from smiling. Your heart hurts from pounding. She turns and catches your eye and shines. There is no brighter thing in the universe than her. You get to her, and she dismisses her friends, and you are fiercely glad that you are more important.

“Are you happy?”

Did you say it? Did she say it? Did you say it at the same time? Either way, the answer is yes. She pulls you in for a kiss. Her hands are warm on your face. She is smudging your makeup. She pulls away and you relish the taste of her lip gloss on your mouth.

Her back is pressed against your chest, and she is talking to your parents. You can smell her shampoo, the perfume you bought her. She is something you could swallow whole. Your head is spinning. You feel twice your normal size. You want to go out and dance in the rain, the pathetic gray drizzle spattering all over your graduation. You look at her and you see dinners made for two, and a quilted bedspread, and an apartment with rose-colored walls, and shopping for a couch and a refrigerator full of groceries it was her turn to buy, and her clothes in your closet, and little feet on the kitchen tiles, and a small head with her golden hair, and sorting the laundry, and the smell of coffee, and counting the gray hairs on her head, and putting money aside for someone’s college fund, and her eyes, her hands, her skin, her smile. You are eighteen, and you can see that you will be beside her in a hundred years.

4.

“Can I kiss you?”

In the movie you watched last week with your mother, the guy did not ask the girl if he could kiss her. He leaned in and did it, and she did it right back. Then they did it some more. You think that it must be because you are both girls that she asks you.

You are staring at her eyes, which have not left your face in a long time. You seem to have aged centuries since the moment she sat down in front of you and fixed you with her green gaze. You want her eyes to stay on you forever.

She is staring at you with a question between her brows. Why don’t you say anything? You open your mouth and wait for words to come out. They do not. In fifth grade, a boy tried to kiss you by the swings, and you ran all the way to the end of the playground, and he did not come after you. Your heart feels like it might burst at the seams. You want your breath to leave your mouth and form a picture in front of her that tells her Yes. You want to say yes to her no matter what she asks you.

You nod your head up and down slowly. She smiles and you are fixated on the quirk at the corner of her mouth. She leans toward you. There is a freckle right underneath her cheekbone, and your hand moves to touch it before you can stop. Then she is kissing you, and the world tilts on its axis, and her lips are warm. You feel a burn start in your face and travel all the way through your head and down your spine and out through your fingertips and pool in the very bottom of your stomach, the place you would bury a deep secret, which clenches a hand around your intestines every time you think of it and makes the burn come back, and all the rest of the week when you see her, and when you talk to her, and when you think of her, the hot hand rises up and squeezes your guts until you feel the burn all over, and you pray that it never stops.

3.

You are lying in the grass and trying not to feel it poke you. The sky is a dusty purple. The moon hangs low over the trees. You think that someone should paint it. You look over at her, sprawled on the ground next to you, and think that someone should paint her instead. Golden light from the glass door behind you is thrown over her, her face, and hair, and clothes, and you have to keep from staring at her. She is talking fast about your shared social studies teacher, and her friends at lunch, and her brother’s favorite television show. You feel out of breath trying to keep up with her, even though you are both lying on the ground. You want her to talk like this to other people about you. You want to be a topic in her tornado mind. She moves from one thing to the next like water bouncing off of endless diverting boulders.

You turn on your side just so you can look at her without your neck hurting. Sometimes you think she wears her hair the way you like just so you will notice it all day. The light across her body makes her look like she is glowing, lit with an internal light, and you have never seen anything like her in your life. The gentle dip right underneath her nose draws your eyes. She asks you who your favorite singer of all time is, and if you like Thai food, and what your favorite movie is. You cannot believe that she wants to know things about you. It seems like you remember things about yourself you did not even know. Fireflies dance on the lawn, and she gets up to dance with them; they flash around her, and it seems like there are sparks coming from her very body, and you watch her and like this about her, that she dances with fireflies, and she is so beautiful in the measly half-light from the kitchen door it almost moves you to tears.

2.

You find her everywhere. You find her in the hall and in gym class and in social studies, and in the cafeteria. You find her flashing hair and perfect cheekbones, and purposeful smile. You find her when she and a bunch of others laugh at a sixth grader who pees their pants at recess, and her laugh rings out among the others’ and gives you a shudder all the way down your spine. You start listening for her smooth voice above everyone else’s. You can’t help but like it even when it tells you with no trepidation that your idea for that project is stupid, and you like it even more when it gives you a compliment, and you know that you would skewer yourself on her sharp tongue over and over to hear her say it again.

Mostly, you find her eyes. They find you at strange moments, and you feel like something is suspended in the air between you, passing a private joke back and forth, as if you already know each other inside and out. You meet them across the room, and it sends a spark of electricity through your entire nervous system and you wish to swim in their rich color forever.

1.

“What’s your name? Do you want to be friends?”

You are staring at the ground, at your sneakers on the dirty tile. The room is filled with incessant noise. You imagine what she must look like just from the sound of her voice. You look up and find she is even more beautiful than you expected. Dull gold hair falls over her smooth face, and you are entirely drawn in by her eyes. They are the green of sparkling life and innocent hope and boiling jealousy all at once. You know you could look at them forever, two pieces of seaglass found in a great rolling sea.

She is staring at you. Why are you silent? How could she want you? How could she have eyes like that and willingly train them on you? Your skin is crawling, and you wish she would look away, and you wish she would spend the rest of your life looking at you. You are twelve years old. You cannot believe that there is someone who wants to look at you.

You take a deep breath in and out and quiet your racing head and focus on her, her hands, and her hair, and her eyes.

“I’m Emerald,” she says, softly.

Emerald–it vibrates through your chest, through your feet into the floor–Emerald.

She must have been named for her eyes.

“Yes,” you say, sticking out your hand. “Let’s be friends.”