For my thirteenth birthday my mom let Summerlyn spend the weekend and we danced for hours up in my bedroom, lip syncing to the radio and striking sexy poses in my mom’s old slips. She had a pretty black one from when she was a dancer and real skinny that fit Summerlyn, but I got to wear the red satiny one, even though it’s too short for me. We were tired out, laying on my bed and putting on Dr. Pepper chapstick, when Summerlyn goes: “See, this way when a boy kisses you it tastes good even if you just ate Doritos or something.”
I pretended I thought this was interesting and put more chapstick on. If you put enough of it on it’s like a layer of wax on your lips and it feels good to mash them together and it makes the taste really strong in your mouth.
“You should take all of this more seriously, Thora.”
“Yeah?”
“Practice on me,” Summerlyn said.
“I don’t want my first kiss to be with a girl,” I said, and rolled over on my stomach. Summerlyn was my best friend but I didn’t like her very much. She was smart, but she pretended to be dumb. Or maybe she wasn’t pretending and she was only interested in stupid things. She still liked playing with dolls. But we both liked movies on the Women’s Channel and we both liked reading magazines, so most of the time we were alright.
“Come on,” Summerlyn said. “It doesn’t count as your first kiss if it’s with a girl.”
“How does that make any sense?” I asked. I was starting to get nervous because I was having to lie and I don’t like lying at all. I’ve gotten used to not telling people things, but I don’t like having to pretend I’m a way that I’m not or make up stories. And when I get nervous like this, I don’t get quiet and jittery, I get this big smile on my face that I can’t make go away no matter how hard I try. See, the thing is that kissing Summerlyn wouldn’t be my first kiss. I had been kissing Eddie Thayer for a long time, almost four months, but it was a secret because he practically lived at my house because his mom was a drunk and my mom always said he was like a second son and the brother I never had, so it really wouldn’t be good for her to know we’d been fucking like rabbits right under her nose. Right now he was downstairs in the den playing video games. Even though he’s only fifteen, he looks a lot older. Sometimes he calls me Thora-bird, which I like.
“Don’t be a baby,” Summerlyn said to me, scooting herself around so that we were both on our sides looking into each other’s faces. “First, close your eyes.”
“This is stupid,” I said, but I closed my eyes. I could feel her face getting closer to mine and I could smell the strange smell of her spit. I remember how strange Eddie’s spit was at first, but then over time you get used to it, until that person starts to feel like home, and then the taste of their spit is the most comforting thing in the world. Like the smell they leave on their clothes.
“Open your mouth,” Summerlyn whispered.
“Idiot,” I said, “You don’t open your mouth until after you start kissing.”
“That’s only on movies,” Summerlyn said.
I rolled my eyes even though they were closed, which kind of hurts if you’ve ever tried it. I still had a stupid smile on my face because I couldn’t believe I was getting myself into this predicament with Summerlyn. I tried to make my face real serious while still keeping my mouth open, which was hard. It seemed like a long time, but then I felt her lower her big open fish mouth onto mine. She had no idea what to do but just sort of stuck her tongue in and out of my mouth real slow and like clockwork or something. I let this go on for a minute, but then I closed my mouth a little, which closed hers, and started actually kissing her, working my mouth like I was eating a drippy plum. And for all her fish-mouth bullshit Summerlyn got the hang of it pretty quick and in a few minutes she was kissing like a pro. I couldn’t stop thinking what a kick Eddie would get out of this story. I kept thinking about how I would tell him tonight in the gazebo and how I would show him Summerlyn’s fish-kiss.
And thinking all this, suddenly kissing Summerlyn was kinda nice and I reached around and pulled on her hip to get her a little closer to me. She was kissing like she was in a dream, you know, like a zombie she was so into it. It was kinda sweet, how unaware she was of how turned on she was getting. I realized she probably hadn’t ever been really turned on before, so I started playing with her thigh, running my hand up and down the inside, cause it drives me crazy when Eddie does that to me.
But it was like Summerlyn had a force-field around those panties, because the moment I started teasing the elastic of the leg hole she froze up and said, “What are you doing?”
All of a sudden I felt sick, like I was going to throw up, but I wasn’t going to, I was just so ashamed that my mouth was salivating. “Nothing,” I said.
“You’re sick,” Summerlyn said, sitting up and throwing her hair back over her shoulders. Summerlyn has this blond curly hair that would be pretty if she ever took care of it, but most of the time it’s ratty and tangled up and she has this halo of split ends all around her head.
“My dad told me about girls like you,” she said.
I was still feeling shame like I was gonna throw up, because maybe it was true and I was a lesbian, but then I also knew I liked fucking guys and so it wouldn’t be that bad if I was a lesbian too. But I was also real scared that Summerlyn would realize I was a better kisser than her and that I knew what I was doing. It would be a lot better if Summerlyn thought I was a dyke than if she figured out how I knew to touch her like that. But then again, Summerlyn believed so much that she was prettier and cooler than me that it would take a lot to convince her I’d done something she hadn’t. That gave me the idea:
“You’ve never touched yourself?” I asked. I figured I might as well go with the whole idea that I was a pervert. Besides, I could see her pupils were still real big, like a zombie she was so turned on.
“No, that’s sick,” she said, but she didn’t move further away and she put her hands on her thighs.
“How do you think you’re ever going to like sex if you don’t learn how before you get with a guy? You’ve got to like it. It turns them on.”
She paused.
I was lying like a champ, and the rest of it was like running down hill it was so easy. I told her I read it in a magazine. And when she asked which magazine, I told her I’d read it in Cosmo, which both her dad and my mom won’t let us read because of all the dirty advice and sex quizzes. Whenever we could steal one from the store or from another girl we would read it over and over again for weeks. I wasn’t that into Cosmo anymore, but Summerlyn still worshipped it.
And so I taught Summerlyn to make herself come, just like Eddie had taught me. It was weird watching her. When she came she closed her eyes real tight so they were just an explosion of little wrinkles, but she left her mouth all open so you could see her front teeth which were kind of big anyway and which were whiter at the tips from being exposed to the air all the time. And you knew when she was getting close because she started flexing her feet and when it hit her they went straight up like rabbit’s feet.
I thought it was weird that a person could look so empty, and sort of pathetic and deformed, when their body was feeling so beautiful, all sparks and glowing inside. I’d thought this before one time when Eddie was fucking me in a house they were building in town and we were in the bedroom because they’d put the carpet in there but not in the downstairs yet, and there were sliding mirror doors on the closets and we were watching ourselves fuck. And I just couldn’t see how that girl was Thora. My face looked so empty, like I didn’t have anything inside me at all. After a while I started to get freaked out and in order to come I had to close my eyes. But it’s weird because whenever I remember it, I get kind of turned on at the same time as I start to feel sick.
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