Sister Mischief (11 page)

She takes another big gulp of air.

“Sure, what the hell. It’s about time I get going in this department, right?”

I giggle. “Glad to be of service?”

We pause awkwardly for a second.

“So, are you going to —?”

I don’t have the patience to wait for her to finish the sentence before I grab her face with both hands and kiss her. I grasp handfuls of her hair as I kiss her hard. I pull away for a moment, resting my forehead on hers, searching her lips, their improbable color. She kisses back and it frightens me how much I want to keep kissing her. This is an unbearable kiss, unbearable, unreal, unimaginable. Tentatively, I part her lips with my tongue, meeting hers. She doesn’t resist; her tongue tastes sweet. I can feel her beginning to respond. She arches her back a little, and I can feel her small breasts press against mine. I imagine for a moment what they must look like under her dress: brown, round, perfect, her nipples like twin figs.

I feel her hand rest on my midsection, cautious as a moth’s landing. I pull her closer. It doesn’t seem like she wants to let go, either.
This is what it feels like to be completely human,
I think breathlessly as I grasp her. Rowie’s face is so soft, so much softer than Charlie’s or any other boy’s. Her skin is like warm caramel in my hands. No Camry, no Leinkugels, no cops, just this girl and her impossible handfuls of black hair and her delicate hand on my waist. I tingle inside out; I pull away to catch my breath. I look her dead in the dark velvet morass of her eyes. She is so luminous I can’t speak. Rowie is alive in a way I’ve never seen a person be alive; she emanates something sweet and warm and the color of tea, something that smolders, something I lack. Something I’ve always been missing.

“Does that help?” she asks. She smiles. Her white teeth are chattering a little, terrified and exuberant.

I nod. “What about you?” I manage.

“No,” Rowie says, just before she leans in and kisses me again.

 

The wind rushes into the moment after I pull away and look at her. My ears are attuned to every detail of sound as acutely as a wolf’s; I hear a rustle of leaves in the bracing darkness, the thump of my heart in my chest like a midnight visitor insistent at the door. I hear Rowie take a shuddering breath.

“Oh, my God,” I say. “I’m sorry. I mean. I didn’t mean to —”

“No,” she says. “You didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like —” She falls short and I feel her breath on my mouth, her face an inch from mine.

“What are we doing?” I ask.

“Something we’re — not supposed to do,” she says.

“Why not?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I wish I could be like you,” she whispers. “I want some of — whatever it is you have.”

“You can. I mean, you are. I mean, take it.” I kiss her again, feeling drunk.

Sometimes I think that
you
is the most beautiful word in the English language. The proximity of it, one to another.
Do you? You are. I want you. What are you?

“You know,” Rowie says shyly, later that night, “you could come over sometime after my parents go to bed. You could just wait in the treehouse if I left it unlocked.”

The conditionality of her language pulls at me:
If
I left it unlocked.
If
I let you in.

“You’re sure the doctors upstairs wouldn’t hear you come out?” I say, my hand jerking as I go to pass it through her hair.

She shakes her head and her cheek lands in my hand; I feel her jaw tense and release. We’ve been kissing for hours.

“I don’t think so,” she says with a note of uncertainty. “They sleep pretty sound.”

I look down, smiling, then up at her through my hair.

“Well . . . what would we do then?”

She giggles, shifting nervously. “Um. We could, like, listen to music, or something. We could play Scrabble. We could —”

“Not what I had in mind.” I tackle her, whole in our laughter, pulling her down to the treehouse floor.

The first night I go to her alone, I bury my bike in a leaf pile and wait in the distant reaches of her yard, afraid to enter the treehouse until every window in the house has blackened. Rowie’s mom works the night shift four nights a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and her dad goes to bed every night between 9:45 and 10:10 p.m. The autumning air is getting cool enough to frost, but I’m sweating so hard I begin to wonder what I’ll smell like later. At 10:27, I see Rowie’s bathroom light flicker off — a signal! My heart is racing as I MacGyver silently across the wet lawn and up the ladder. That door in Rowie’s treehouse floor is a bastard. I try to open it to sneak in, but it shuffles too loud and gets stuck. I push it slowly and it won’t give. I push it harder and it makes a protest noise. My gut clenches.
²¹

21. Scribbled in Notebook:
I have to get in again / Give me my sin again.


I wait under my headphones in the treehouse. She texts me.
²²
She doesn’t know I’m already there, doesn’t imagine me sitting vigilant in the elevated place, not seeing her but sensing her just on the other side of the wall. And suddenly there she is, a dark shape at the source of the tree, slouchy and shy and muffling her bangles.

22. Text from Rowie:
All in.


“You,” she whispers, her teeth glinting in the moonlight.

She’s brought out a sleeping bag, a few pillows, a blanket or two to soften the wood floor. Neither of us really knows what comes next.
²³
We lie down and at first she giggles so much I have to smother her with a pillow for fear her voice will carry.

23. SiN later, furiously:
How do you keep your hair out of your face while you’re kissing? Why is it hard to unfasten a bra when it’s on someone else? Has Rowie ever
come?


“All right, all right, don’t go all psycho on me,” she says, laughing and clutching a stitch in her side. She calms, watching me, and begins to work the axis of buttons down her orange shirt. My hands, my skin, on hers are a negative relief of her color.

“God, Rowie,” I say, startled by her radiance. “You’re beautiful.”

“Shut up.” She twists against me. “Beautiful doesn’t do shit.”

“You’re right. But you’re also beautiful.” I gaze at her from across the pillow, wishing I could never look at anyone else. A beat goes by. I take a deep breath and pull off my hoodie. My hair lies beside me, a pet on the pillow, merging with hers.

“Um,” she whispers, one jack-of-hearts eye obscured by the black stream of her hair. “Do you know what to do?” I shake my head, sealing her mouth with one finger.

“Um.” I inch closer. She still has her PJ pants on, a worn pair of blue scrubs I’m assuming she inherited from her mother. I ask her
Can I?
with my eyes and she nods. I pull the drawstring loose and slide them down her thighs. I notice for the first time that Rowie shaves her legs above her knees— I never have. A thrill radiates from my core when I see her black underwear. My hand hovers above it like a helicopter for a moment, unsure how to land. She lifts her chin and I sink my face into the brown arc of her jaw.

“I think I know where to start.”

“Rowie,” I say, pulling away for a necessary breath, “you don’t kiss like you’ve never kissed anybody else before.”

“Well, shucks,” she mumbles. “Actually — I did something once, but I don’t think it really counts.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t really count?”

“I mean, it’s such a cliché.”

I crack a smile. “What
kind
of cliché?” I grab her yellow bra strap and kiss her mouth.

Her chin tilts down as she grimaces. “It may have been . . . a summer camp cliché.”

“Oohhh!” I say. “I’m intrigued. Who was she?”

“Um.” She clears her throat. “Samir Mirza.”

“Oh.” I feel like a dumbass. “The plot thickens. Continue.”

“It happened so fast — that’s why I figured it didn’t count. I was asleep.”

“You were
asleep
?”

“It was on a dare, I guess. He was supposed to sneak into my cabin and kiss me on the lips without waking me up.” She looks away.

I make a face. “That’s skeezy.”

“Yeah.” She shrugs. “I woke up.”

“What’d you do?”

“Punched him,” she says simply. “He got kicked out of camp.” She grins a little.

“You!” I grab her around the middle. “
You,
girl.”

It gets easier once we’ve done it a few times, once it starts getting dark earlier. I can’t even tell you how much it isn’t like with Charlie Knutsen. I’ve never felt
big
before. When I’m with Rowie, I feel
enormous
— God, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not like feeling fat or anything. I’m just, I don’t know, aware of my
magnitude
in a way I wasn’t before Rowie happened, or aware of hers. I bend over to kiss her and she feels so small beneath me, fine-boned, pebble-smooth, a feline thing, a fuse. I lack the ability to deny her anything; the way I feel when we’re in the same room is like she’s electricity and I’m water.

“I feel like —” I peel off an orange section and feed it to her. We’ve built a stockpile of snacks out here ever since Dr. Raj caught Rowie prowling the kitchen at three a.m. and she almost died of shock. She takes a bite and juice dribbles down her chin. She starts laughing and almost spits it out. I laugh and push it back into her mouth. “Anyway, I feel like there should be, like, a
NO BOYS ALLOWED
sign on the door of this treehouse. Like it’s our clubhouse.”

“Thhppp Unndweep Cwshubbb,” she mumbles incoherently around the orange piece, losing herself in laughter again.

“What?” I dissolve into giggles, never wanting to be anywhere but here.

She swallows. “The Undies Club.”

I lean in and kiss off the orange pulp. “I like it.”

“Rhyming with you girls feels like that too. A clubhouse, I mean. Or a club,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean. We got an A-team.”

“Our songs are sick. Being onstage with you, Ez — it makes me feel — I don’t know. Alive. It’s like working muscles I didn’t know I had.”

“Me too.” I smile. “You said it just right.”

“What day is today?” she asks. “I can’t even remember anymore.”

“Thursday,” I reply. She hooks a finger in the elastic of my underpants and laughs.

“It says Lazy Tuesday on your hoo-ha.” She laughs harder.

The treehouse is private, but small in a way that makes me wonder if it’s really big enough to contain us. We meet at school, and with Marcy and Tess, but in different skins. At first it feels delicious, our secret, though it swells, conspicuously, every day giving us more not to tell.

“Am I slutty for not making you take me out on a date before I showed you my boobs?” I ask. “Do you think I’m easy?”

She giggles. “I don’t even remember the first time I saw your boobs. So yeah, you’re easy. Ho.”