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Coach Martinez hands Shauna the game ball after they beat Red Bank, and she clutches it to her body like it will sustain her through a hard winter.
(She doesn’t know what hunger is yet, but that’s okay. Good things come to those who wait, and plenty else does too.)
Everyone stares at her, and with good reason. Shauna can remember Coach handing out the game ball exactly twice: once to Laura Lee’s older sister after the very first game of Shauna’s freshman season, when she was so far down the proverbial totem pole that she watched from the bleachers and not the bench; and once to Helen Jones, which was just as much about Angie Russo transferring to Our Lady of Lourdes as it was about her banging in a true hat trick against Ridgewood Prep. All wins are team efforts, he says.
It’s not as if Shauna performed exceptionally well on the field. She didn’t score, she made no tremendous effort other than a few crisp, clean passes to Jackie and Tai that flowered into goals, but no one protests or argues when Coach holds the ball out to Shauna.
“So, who are you going to pick?” Lottie leans over the back of the bus seat in front of Shauna and Jackie as if speaking from a dais.
“What are you talking about?” Shauna asks.
“Laura Lee told me all about it. You got the game ball, so someone has to be your bitch all next week.”
Laura Lee peeks her head up from the space next to Lottie. Her cheeks are flushed pink, watercolor apples on a cream canvas. “I didn’t say that. But it’s kind of a tradition, you get to have somebody carry your bag and stuff. It’s just for fun.”
Jackie’s arms straitjacket her chest. “That sounds like bullshit, Laura Lee.”
“It’s not.” Lottie stares at Jackie, and Shauna feels unmistakably that Lottie would be glaring if she gave even a fraction of a shit about what Jackie believes.
True or not, it spreads through the bus like a contagion, and by the time they disembark the asphalt of the Wiskayok High parking lot is made into a proving ground. There are protests, and jokes, and protests disguised as jokes.
“Well, I’m safe,” Tai says. “It’s not exactly PC to pick me.”
“Hey, then I should be fine too,” Van says. “You know the Irish were—”
Tai glares at her, and Van lifts her hands.
“I’m kidding.”
Nat bugs Laura Lee until she gets an explanation that satisfies her, and then she bristles and bares her teeth as if daring Shauna to pick her. Shauna nearly does, just to see what would happen. Would Nat bark, bend, break? Would she crumble, collapse, catch fire? Part of Shauna yearns to see it, wants to know.
Instead, she picks Laura Lee, who acquiesces with a mild smile and a furtive glance at Lottie that Shauna pretends not to notice. Laura Lee is the eminently reasonable choice: her sisters still live close by, and can tell Laura Lee the unspoken rules that Shauna is too new, too clumsy, too other to have learned. Laura Lee accepts her fate with poise and grace.
Shauna drives Jackie home in silence. Jackie pouts the whole way, clearly jealous that Shauna and not Jackie gets a little servant for the week. (There is little that Laura Lee will do, according to her and Lottie, that Shauna doesn’t do for Jackie already, but Shauna knows she doesn’t count. Jackie didn’t earn her or win her. She just took Shauna, claimed her so long ago that Jackie might have called dibs while Shauna was still in the womb.)
But it doesn’t take long to see why the tradition fell into obscurity even notwithstanding Coach’s sparse distribution of game balls. For one thing, it’s not exactly practical: the only time Laura Lee and Shauna see each other during the day is lunch, and while Laura Lee is game to get Shauna’s tray for her, she only has two hands and Shauna isn’t about to make Laura Lee go through the line twice. Jackie rolls her eyes every time Laura Lee asks if there’s something she can do for Shauna, and the whole thing becomes tight and uncomfortable and Shauna hates it.
That’s probably why she pounds Malibu and milk like she’s hammering on a railroad when Friday night comes around and they’re all crammed into Jamie Hoffman’s full-to-bursting kitchen. She wishes her head would stop throbbing, wishes she could just throw up everything inside her and feel normal again. She can’t, so she keeps drinking until she starts doing what she always does.
“Jackie,” she says, but it comes out gooey and garbled. It’s a sign, a signal, a plea to take Shauna to a bed or a sofa or a soft carpet where she can be horizontal and Jackie can rub her back and stroke her hair and tell her stories about the girls they used to be until Shauna can pretend she’s snoring and not sniffling. She let Jackie pick her dress like she always does, and this time she didn’t even complain when Jackie stuffed her into the boob dress because she knew she would need Jackie tonight, just like she always needs Jackie.
But when Shauna says her name, Jackie serves her a look as cold as a shot poured from the vodka bottle in the freezer, even as she’s helping Shauna into the queen bed in Jamie’s guest room.
“I’ll get your special little friend.” Jackie’s liquored tongue stirs the words together, more sludge than soup. “I’ll get your special little fucking favorite.”
Shauna keens. That’s exactly who she wants, she wants her special friend and her little fucking favorite, but Jackie has already stormed out. The room spins, but fortunately the door stays still enough to admit someone who moves with an unnatural gentleness, or maybe that gentleness is natural and it’s Shauna who has been unnatural all this time.
“Jackie says you’re not feeling so good.” Laura Lee shuts the door behind her. “How can I help?”
Shauna flops awkwardly to face her, and winces from the brightness of Laura Lee’s yellow jacket. (“Get it?” Laura Lee said, twirling to show it off. “A yellow jacket, for a Yellowjacket! Lottie got it for me, it was on sale.”) Tropical flowers bloom on Laura Lee’s dress, printed on a red so bright and peppy that it has been purged of any carnality. Her hair shines, her skin glows, she glitters like a stained glass window.
Whatever Shauna says, it brings Laura Lee closer. She sits the side of one slim, shapely hip onto the bed, because Shauna’s big chocolate brown eyes do nothing but notice, see, gaze, stare. She cannot help what she is, she knows that, but she needs to not be what she is for just a few months longer. Providence is deliverance, like the proverbial farm upstate for old dogs and little baby queers like she’s beginning to suspect she is. Come September, she can weigh her fingers down with chunky rings and pierce her nose and date waspish WASPs who don’t tell their parents they’re getting licked out by a Jew from Central Jersey. For now, she has to be normal.
“It’s a nice party,” Laura Lee says. “Lottie found Jamie’s guitar, she’s taking requests. Do you want to go see her? She’s actually pretty good.”
Shauna shakes her head.
“Do you want me to go get Jackie?”
Shauna tries and fails to nod. It comes out wrong, just like her.
“Did you two have a fight?”
Shauna groans and buries her face in the pillow. She explains it all, and then she has to repeat it without a mouthful of cotton pillowcase.
“She’s mad about all of this,” Shauna says. “She’s mad Coach gave me the ball and not her.”
Laura Lee puts a hand to her lips. Snickering is an unsightly look on a pious face.
“I don’t think that’s why she’s mad,” Laura Lee says. Her eyes dance, sparkling laughter flits like fireflies within the crystalline blue. “She’s just jealous.”
“That’s what I said. It’s stupid.” Shauna pouts, sticking out her lower lip like she’s trying to trip someone with it. “Who cares who Coach thinks played best? I don’t even like soccer, anyway.”
“How much have you had to drink, Shauna?”
“Two drinks.” Shauna swallows, and finds she’s almost forgotten how. “Big drinks. Lie down with me?”
There’s still a few hours left on Laura Lee’s tenure as Shauna’s whatever-she-is, bitch or gofer or special favorite girl, and maybe that’s why Shauna finds herself staring into the twin ponds of Laura Lee’s eyes. She is a beautiful reliquary, ornate and fragile and storied, and whatever her temporary obligations she belongs not to Shauna but to all of them, their collective human patrimony, or maybe to God.
“Like this?” Laura Lee asks, and then Shauna kisses her.
Laura Lee goes still but not stiff, and her lips part as much in surprise as in invitation. Shauna slips her tongue between them like she’s reaching past the velvet do-not-touch rope at a museum, oily and mark-leaving and tainting. Shauna loves the way things break, the way they shatter when dropped or when a careless kick sends a ball careening into them or when Shauna so much as breathes. She loves it because when someone breaks things like she does there is no choice but to learn to love it. But Laura Lee doesn’t break, her pretty vanilla cream windowpane doesn’t so much as rattle. Instead, she threads fingers into Shauna’s hair, soft fingertips pressing on the back of Shauna’s skull, and lets her explore.
Shauna finally tugs away, and Laura Lee smiles, faint but not weak, gentle but not regretful.
“Oh, you’re really drunk, aren’t you?” Laura Lee says.
“What’s it to you?” Shauna asks.
“Well, for one thing, you taste like coconut,” Laura Lee says, but Shauna kisses her again before she can finish her point.
Kissing Laura Lee in the dark of Jamie Hoffman’s guest room sings like poetry, buzzes like a fire alarm. The walls sweat, or maybe that’s just Shauna. It’s only when Laura Lee’s tongue wriggles in counterattack that Shauna tastes the peach schnapps on Laura Lee’s breath, the sickly sweet stuff that Nat carries in her flask and tries to pretend is something harder. Shauna closes her eyes and imagines the blondes, blessed and bottled, passing the stainless steel between them to quench their stainless hearts while Lottie plucks chords and chirps like birdsong through lips painted with blackcurrant lipstick.
“What are you doing?” Laura Lee asks, and Shauna finds her hands bunching Laura Lee’s dress up to her hips.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“I don’t—I’m not—”
“Me either,” Shauna says. There’s a script for this sort of thing, a compass and sextant for nights when the only polestar in Shauna’s sky rests beneath a triangle of scrupulously trimmed hair, bright and flushed and swollen with need and yet unfindable by a boy who proclaims himself a man. She says what she’s said to Jackie every time it’s happened since homecoming freshman year: “I’m pretty drunk. It doesn’t count.”
“Bullshit,” Laura Lee says, and her hand claps over her mouth.
Shauna, or something wearing her face, grins. Her fingers brush below the bunched-up hem of Laura Lee’s dress and stroke her soft, bare thigh. “Okay, maybe it counts. Does that freak you out, Laura Lee? We can stop.”
Shauna doesn’t want to stop. She never wants to stop, no matter who will get shaken, or embarrassed, or hurt. She is hungry and she has subsisted on so little for so long, scraps of heaven in seven minute portions and rationed fingers and tongues in basements and bathrooms. She sees the heliotrope laces of Lottie’s Doc Martens and wants to wrap them around her fists and tug Lottie’s thighs apart and fill her mouth with Lottie’s cunt; she sees the curve of Nat’s little ass and wants to lay her flat on her belly and jerk her hips into the air and bite; she sees Tai’s long legs and wants them over her shoulders; she sees Van’s sturdy hips and wants to thrust her fist between them. She wants to shove four fingers in Jackie’s mouth and say suck, to make Jackie taste all that Shauna has been and has done, make her finally and irrevocably see Shauna.
She wants to plague them all with what plagues her, stain their souls and watch them fester. She wants to kiss one and taste another. She is a fucking pervert freak and she needs the life choked out of her, but until that happens she will replicate her sickness like a goddamn, God-damned virus.
Laura Lee touches her cheek gently.
“What would Jackie say?” she asks.
Shauna sneers. “What would Lottie say?”
A crack appears in beautiful, ornate glass, thin and easy enough to hide unless one knows where to look, and Shauna knows nothing better than exactly where to look. But beneath the bright surface of Laura Lee’s eyes something stirs, dark and unholy or perhaps holiest of all but no less dark for it, and Laura Lee rolls away and shimmies the hem of her dress back into place.
“You should find someone to drive you home, before everyone left is too far gone.”
Shauna does nothing of the sort, though she waits for the room to stop spinning before she tries to move. It gives her time to marinate in the hot flush of shame, or the hot flush of something else from watching Laura Lee’s dress smooth out over the gentle curve of her butt.
She avoids more drink, but only because Randy Walsh insists on making some foul concoction that will probably turn Jamie Hoffman’s kitchen into a Superfund site. She avoids Jackie too, which is easy enough because she has likely piled into Jeff’s station wagon and is already halfway through her weekly handjob.
Shauna is terrifyingly close to sober when slender, soft fingers tighten around her wrist and drag her into Jamie’s dad’s study at the back of the house, far beyond the clearly demarcated off-limits point.
Light refracts kaleidoscopically through spiderweb cracks in Laura Lee’s stained glass facade, perhaps new or perhaps long-present but always unnoticed even to Shauna’s searching eye. Stains of purple-black makeup bruise her pale neck in messy ovals that look thick and sweet like overripe dates, like flowers blooming in the blood-drenched no man’s land between the soft curve of her jaw and the silky, thread-thin chain of gold that clasps at her nape. Laura Lee’s eyes burn with blue Bunsen burner fires, twin AP Chem experiments waiting for their reactive agents. Shauna avoids them, and instead lets her eyes follow the gold chain to the simple cross that sits above the gentle slope of Laura Lee’s breasts.
Shauna means to say something witty, something with sharp nails and sharper teeth, but Laura Lee’s lips are on hers before she can put her 800 SAT verbal to work. Laura Lee’s teeth tug at her, and Laura Lee whimpers and whines at the slow opening of Shauna’s mouth. Shauna takes her by the shoulders and holds her at bay.
“What the hell, Laura Lee?”
“Want to,” Laura Lee says, more animal than girl. Not a gentle animal, doe or filly or kitten. She is something with slavering fangs and snapping jaws. “Don’t you want to?”
“What’s gotten into you?” Shauna asks, but the dark blossoms on Laura Lee’s neck remind Shauna of those purple flowers that chase the golden warmth of the sun. Laura Lee surges like a storm against Shauna’s hands, and Shauna steps back until her ass hits Jamie’s dad’s desk. It’s wide and wooden, the whole study reeks of upper-middle class pretension. A stuffed stag’s head stares down at them with unseeing eyes. Shauna wants to push Laura Lee away again, to make her boil like she made Shauna, to stew in a stock of shame and a broth of self-doubt.
But then Laura Lee kneels as if in prayer, and Shauna doesn’t want to push her away at all.
“Let me do this for you? I’m still—it’s still—Coach gave you the game ball.”
Shauna almost laughs, but instead she spreads her thighs just enough to make her dress creep up toward her waist. “Are you serious?”
Laura Lee’s cheeks turn pink. The light that illuminates her shines brightest on her chin. “I’m not as goody-goody as you think I am.”
“You’re on your knees begging to eat me out, Laura Lee. I don’t think you’re all that goody-goody.”
Pink becomes red. “I’m not begging, I’m asking,” Laura Lee says. “Emphatically.”
Shauna looks down at her, and her jaw slackens. Laura Lee always puts herself together well, but it doesn’t reek of vanity like it does on other girls (one other girl, just one, because how can Shauna avoid the conclusion when she sees how the sausage is made?)—instead, there is an unvarnished humility to it that feels loathsome in Shauna’s stomach. It’s as if Laura Lee does nothing to make herself so perfect, as if God sends a flock of cartoon birds down to Wiskayok every morning to ensure Laura Lee doesn’t have so much as a flyaway hair. It makes sense, when Shauna thinks about it: God wants to make sure His representative is putting on a good face.
But God and his animated avians didn’t count on this, on the blackcurrant tornado that swept Laura Lee up from her pious, chaste Kansas and deposited her in an Oz of need and desire, kneeling in front of a wicked witch who offers a yellow brick road paved in wiry brown hair. It’s easy enough to scoot her ass back onto the desk, to rest just her toes on the carpeted floor, and to spread.
When Shauna speaks, the words come slowly. They ooze out of her, thick and sticky like molasses or blood. “Well, I did get the game ball,” she says.
Laura Lee’s shoulders fall, articulated like a doll waiting to be posed. The fires in her eyes soften to embers, ash to be drawn on with the tip of a salvaged stick. Her lips part and her jaw slackens in a way altogether unlike the slackening of Shauna’s own. There is no awe or surprise to be found in Laura Lee’s face, just acquiescence and surrender.
Nat or one of her friends seizes the stereo in a bloody coup, Shirley Manson croons through the staid wallpaper as Laura Lee tugs Shauna’s panties aside. She presses her lips to Shauna’s flesh, pressed together and unyielding. Shauna is hot and slick like oil spill, an ecological cataclysm, but when Laura Lee’s tongue touches her, Shauna feels like nothing so much as a scoop of ice cream, dessert for a good girl.
Shauna will sell her soul for something pure and true, but Laura Lee will get the worst of the bargain. Cheap nickel-plated substitutes, fool’s gold for a fucking fool, but what does it matter to Shauna? When her thighs are spread and Laura Lee’s tongue finds her clit and Laura Lee’s finger—no, fingers—plunge inside her and her body is on fire, a message for Moses in the dark, there is no haggling over the value of Shauna’s cleaved and fractured heart.
When Shauna comes, she sees Laura Lee awash in honey, darkening her hair and her eyes. The wet of Shauna coarsens her voice into something throaty and fried, life-sustaining bread toasted golden-brown and soothed with sweet strawberry jam for balm. She slouches back, and only the heels of her hands on the desk prop her up.
Laura Lee wipes her chin with her palm, not the back of her hand, and she cups it to her mouth afterward. Jackie does something similar, when she eats. It’s not ladylike for a girl to be seen chewing, consuming, eating. Women are givers, not takers. Theirs is to be pursued, to be wanted.
Laura Lee gazes up at Shauna, and Shauna doesn’t know when God’s cartoon birds arrived to straighten her out in more ways than one. Maybe it was while stars and sparks burst behind Shauna’s eyelids, but the way Laura Lee’s fingers curled expertly inside her didn’t suggest Laura Lee was distracted by divine intervention.
“Good game, Shauna,” she says. “Coach was right to give you the ball.”
Shauna doesn’t touch another drop of alcohol that night, nor does she need to. She is come-drunk and high off the way she’s sure everyone is staring at her, the way that she smells like a good fuck and trembles with sated desire. She wanders out the sliding glass door to the back patio.
“The lady of the hour joins us,” Lottie says, veiled in shadow except for the orange-red end of her lit cigarette. There is no us to be seen, just Lottie in a short pink skirt, though her legs are long enough to count as companions. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“I think I’m done for the night,” Shauna says.
Lottie leans forward, lips curled in what Shauna thinks is a sneer until she sees that Lottie’s blackcurrant lipstick has been smudged beyond the borders of her mouth. Lottie has never been one to color within the lines. Shauna has always liked that about her.
“Well, good game,” Lottie says, close enough for Shauna to smell peach schnapps on her breath. “Here, you’ve earned it.”
She holds out her cigarette to Shauna’s reaching hand—
—Shauna takes the knife from Lottie, blade first like Coach Scott taught them never to do before they grew beyond what Coach Scott could teach them. She grabs it tight enough to feel its bite but not so tight as to break her skin. The cabin reeks of wet fur and young bodies, the fire crackles alongside the moon-tide ebb and flow of the girls’ breathing.
Their bellies are full, one last meal from what Shauna has so carefully rationed, and that is why Lottie gives her the gift. Not the blade, which belongs to Shauna as much as anything out here can. The gift is the choosing.
The others sit in a ragged circle, oblong and irregular like a beauty mark gone cancerous, and Shauna circles them like a carrion bird. Some make themselves smaller, others sit up straighter. Lottie watches her from her perch by the window, dark eyes hungry as if she hasn’t eaten at all, but it’s not meat for which she is hungry. She is hungry to see, to hear, to watch, to feel. She is hungry for Shauna to make what she will with Lottie’s gift to her.
Shauna’s heart pounds against her chest like it’s trying to get a message to its hollow gold twin, nestled against her flesh beneath countless layers. Lottie’s eyes never leave her, and so her heart never slows. They have made so much out of what has come to them out here, clothes from fur and crowns from bone, and toys from each other.
(There is a clumsily carved wolf that keeps watch from the attic windowsill, a memento of the last time one of them tried to make a toy. Javi simply used the wrong material. Wood is no substitute for girlflesh.)
Shauna did well, not just what Lottie asked of her but what Lottie needed from her and could not bring herself to speak aloud, and so Shauna gets to pick a toy to play with. In the morning, all will return to equilibrium once more.
Lottie watches Shauna with eagerness, not envy. What they have become to each other goes beyond possessive want or jealous love. Lottie has taught Shauna and Shauna has taught Lottie, and they have picked at the carcasses of the girls’ offerings and shared what they took between them, ruminants in their den. Shauna has shared the taste of Nat’s cunt with her lips, burrowed fingers on a path trod first by Travis’s cock. The others are what they are, to each other and to themselves, but they are not what Shauna is, part of a flesh-thing that sometimes goes by Shauna and sometimes answers to Lottie.
Shauna no longer knows where she ends and Lottie begins, but she has not made a lie of her last and truest goodbye. Lottie is not and will never be her friend. They are queen and knight, bone and flesh, sorceress and familiar, tongue and hand.
Her arm moves unbidden, as if it has grown impatient with waiting. Mari jolts as the leather handle of the knife rests heavy on her shoulder. She cranes her neck to look at Shauna with gleeful, faithful eyes. Tai and Van murmur to each other: even if Shauna has fucked Van and Lottie has fucked Tai (or was it Lottie who fucked Van, and Shauna who fucked Tai?), Shauna could not choose one without choosing the other. The Wilderness abhors gluttony. They must ration their pleasures as carefully as their food.
Mari scrambles to her feet even before Lottie beckons her up. They vanish into the bedroom. Misty takes Travis to keep watch while she fills the bucket with snow. It will take time, and Misty has grown fond of watching how Nat squirms when someone takes Travis anywhere. (Shauna has never taken Travis anywhere. She loves Nat too much, loves her the way that only one betrayer can love another.)
Nat gives no one the satisfaction of her discomfort. She inspects the furs, and enlists Van to help move them closer to the fire. Morning will come sooner than any of them realize, and to traipse through the snow in still-wet coverings is a misery unlike any other. The rest occupy themselves doing anything but looking at Shauna, avoiding her bark-brown eyes as if reproaching her for choosing Mari, or for not choosing them.
Misty heats snow into water, life-giving and body-cleansing alchemy, and hurries into the bedroom. She reemerges just as quickly. The faint tinge to her cheeks suggests that her ejection from the bedroom was not entirely her idea. Things change, but not all things.
When Lottie floats out of the bedroom, not an angel but something more, she finds Shauna’s chin with long, clean fingers and tilts it up and she kisses Shauna in front of everyone, hot and wet, tongue moving like meat. Gone are the days when someone would hoot or cackle at such a brazen display of physical affection between two of the girls.
But they are girls no longer, nor are they women: they are something else, flesh and blood and muscle and bone, and what is a kiss? Just the beginning.
The only reaction that Shauna recognizes is Nat’s stare, and the way Van and Tai look anywhere but at each other. In each of their eyes, Shauna knows she could see the empty spaces beside their bedrolls, but she has no desire to see that. She has lived it, first and cruelest. She will let them shiver through the night. If that makes her bad, it cannot make her worse than what she is.
Lottie pulls away, and she nods. Words are useless here. Better to save one’s breath, energy, lifeblood—there is no greater sin than to be asked to give and have nothing left to offer. Shauna trundles into the bedroom, still layered in fabric and fleece and furs.
Inside, the tub sits full of water that is only slightly filmy from what has been scrubbed off Mari. Small clumps of white froth float on the surface like algae. Coach packed more shaving cream than any of the girls, and he doesn’t need it anymore. It is just one more part of him that has become theirs. Shauna’s stomach growls. All appetites blur together out here.
Mari sits on the bed in a white nightgown, one that Shauna recognizes from a designer-branded two-piece luggage set that belonged to a girl who no longer exists. The nightgown is almost clean, it hurts Shauna’s eyes to look at it for too long. A candle burns on the sideboard. It is little more than a lump of wax with a wick, the world’s saddest birthday cupcake. Its paltry light draws out the caramel glow of Mari’s still-damp skin. Her legs are bare and smooth, showing none of the dark, fine hairs that dust Shauna’s own legs. Shauna’s mouth waters. A razor sits beside the candle on the sideboard, plastic painted pink like cooked meat or raw cunt. A gift, and a message: Shauna is not the only one who can work a blade.
“Lottie said you’d like it,” Mari says, following Shauna’s stare. “Lottie said it’s what you would want, and that it’s important to It that we give you—”
“Stop talking,” Shauna says.
Mari scoots back on the bed, legs splayed awkwardly as if posed by two months’ rigor and clumsy, worshipful hands. Shauna lays her knife on the sideboard and sloughs her layers like names, like roles: daughter, friend, mother. Mari remains hatefully herself, her nose crinkles as the soft-hard shell of Shauna’s clothing cracks open and the sweat-meat-blood stench oozes out.
“Did she leave the soap?” Shauna asks. The little that remains has lasted them a long time. They only use it for special occasions, and they know who decides what those are. Shauna knows she will be granted this dispensation. It’s not like Travis, who stole a bar to hoard for himself for those nights when he brought himself to trust that Nat could hold meat in her mouth without biting, chewing, tearing, eating. It struck him for that, a price paid in two toes turned black with frostbite. Misty helped guide the knife, but Shauna did the cutting. She watched Nat the entire time.
(They were the smallest toes, thankfully. Whatever small satisfaction they might have yielded was far outweighed by the risk that something deadly festered within them, or so Tai said. Lottie burned them at the tree stump altar, made a little pyre for them like Shauna should have done with a fleshy ear before, before, before.)
Mari nods, and doesn’t stop nodding until Shauna remembers to look at her. She points at the little lilac-colored bar that rests in a dish of waxy paper on the floor beside the tub. Shauna finishes undressing, and ignores Mari’s curious stares: at the thin white lines that stripe her belly where her skin remains marked by the choices of the girl she once was, at the tangles of dark hair beneath her arms and between her legs that whorl like a Dutchman’s starry night, at the red-pink marks and blue-purple bruises of what Lottie gives her when she begs for relief, for sharp pain to supplant the dull ache of living.
Shauna steps one bare foot over the lip of the tub, and sinks it into water. It is no longer hot but still holds warmth, gentler than the fire and softer than the furs. She steps her other foot in, and sinks lower.
“Come here,” Shauna says. Her throat hurts from so many fucking words, but Mari hasn’t yet learned to read faces and hands like the others. If she had, her eyes wouldn’t glitter so brightly in the bedroom’s dim candlelight.
Mari takes instruction well, at least, and bathes Shauna slowly. The stroke of the lathering soap is almost soothing. She lingers on Shauna’s stretch marks.
“Are these from the baby?” she asks.
“Shut the fuck up, Mari.”
“Sorry,” Mari says.
Shauna thumbs the gold heart that hangs between her breasts.
“It’s okay,” she says, recitation from hazy memory. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
Mari stirs the water, rinses Shauna. “Do you want me to do your hair?” she asks. “Lottie did mine. It felt nice.”
Shauna nods. Mari fumbles a hand beside the bed for a brush, and slowly works through Shauna’s dry, brittle hair to erode the knots with short, gentle strokes.
“You have nice hair,” Mari says. Her free hand touches the unevenness at the right side of her head.
“You do too,” Shauna says, because Mari needs to hear it and Shauna’s job is to keep them fed.
“Thanks.”
Mari’s hands get less steady as she continues, as tangle after tangle falls to her rhythmic brushing. Shauna stills her with the touch of her fingertips.
“I’m just—and I’m not—” Mari’s own words stifle her, a pine cone gag.
Shauna wants to laugh. Gay, straight, none of that matters out here. Each day can bring death, sudden or slow, and what does it matter whether one dies with the taste of cunt or cock on her lips? It chooses, they just keep going.
“I’m a virgin,” Mari says. That makes sense. Mari’s taste for boyflesh has always had a frenzy borne of inexperience, and what Shauna remembers of before brings names and kinships. Blood ran thicker than affection, betrayals for blood. David-Derek-Danny on the couch with his cousin, a ritual imposed on Mari, a flag she did not fly, a standard she could not meet.
It doesn’t matter. Shauna and Mari are kin too, in a way. They can betray for each other, all of them, they can betray the girl-women they were supposed to become. They are bound by blood and meat that was once not their own but is now all too much their own.
“That’s okay,” Shauna says. “Just do what you did with Akilah.”
Mari turns dark red, the layer of plum beneath dark skin and pale flesh. “We never—”
“With Misty and Crystal, then.” Shauna’s patience fades with the heat of the bath water. “Use your fingers.”
The shame in Mari’s face shuts her up. There is nothing to be ashamed of, but Shauna stays silent. She herself has shoved Misty’s face into her cunt, has thrown her over the butcher’s bench in the meat shed and fucked her with fingers and more to keep warm through a hard day’s labor. As for Crystal, well, there were times that Shauna could only think of one way to stop all that goddamn humming. If Mari is too blinded by before or stupid with ways of being that no longer matter, that is her problem and hers alone.
Mari still hesitates, so Shauna grabs her wrist and thrusts it beneath the filmy water. She guides Mari to her cunt, lets her feel the heat that radiates like a makeshift brazier, snow-coated and smoky. The angle of her wrist is bad and her confidence is worse, but Mari finds Shauna’s entrance and pushes two fingers inside. She can’t see what she’s doing and Shauna doesn’t care to enlighten her. The sight of Shauna splayed open, the ruin Shauna has made of herself, the cunt of mighty Ozymandias, is not for Mari’s eyes.
Shauna helps how she deigns to let herself: a hand on her own breast, thumb circling the nipple and then fingers pinching, tugging, clamping and jerking, too hard and yet never, ever hard enough. Mari plays with her other breast, trying to replicate Shauna’s motions with the gentleness of a coward. Shauna climbs the sheer, slippery bluff of sensation, slow and halting with Mari’s inexpert touches until Shauna finally claws at her peak, releases with a shudder and a groan that is empty and echoing.
Mari pats her dry when she emerges, using something soft and fluffy. When she slips Shauna’s arms through the sleeves Shauna recognizes it for a bathrobe, flower purple so faded it might be mistaken for flesh pink. She can think of precious few of the girls they used to be who would have brought this, and the faint smell of jasmine and clove cigarettes confirms Shauna’s suspicion. She wraps it tight to her, feels the embrace of a lover. Mari lies back on the bed.
“So, are you going to eat me out or something?” Mari asks.
“No.” Shauna lingers next to the sideboard, the razor and the candle and the knife arranged like offerings at an altar. She picks up the knife, feels the heft of its rounded, leather-wrapped handle. She strokes her thumb along the rounded end.
“What, are you too good for it?” Mari’s words bite. She has cause for bitterness but she hasn’t earned it. Shauna rewards her only with a baleful glance.
Mari shrinks. “Did Lottie say—I didn’t mean to—if you say no, if she said—I don’t—if you don’t want to eat—”
“Maybe later, that’s all,” Shauna says. She holds the knife loosely as she climbs onto the bed. Light catches on the blade, and Mari eyes it warily.
Shauna grins, bares teeth, and flips the knife so that the sharp edge caresses her palm. “So, you’re a virgin?”
Mari nods.
“A virgin-virgin? Or did you play just-the-tip or something?” Shauna’s eyes search Mari’s face for dishonesty, or its opposite. “I saw the way you used to look at Travis. Now’s the time to tell me.”
She prods the side of Mari’s knee with the knife’s handle, and drags it up Mari’s skin. Mari swallows.
“Virgin-virgin,” Mari says. “I didn’t even ride ponies as a kid, I’m not Ja—”
Shauna jabs the handle into the flesh of Mari’s thigh, and hisses as the knife’s blade digs deeper into her palm.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Mari says. “I didn’t mean to. Don’t be mad. Don’t tell—”
“I’m not mad,” Shauna says. “Spread your legs.”
Mari hears the proxy in Shauna’s voice, and obeys even as she holds the hem of her nightgown down to keep it from baring her slit and her mound. Shauna lets her. She knows better than to look too closely at what sates her.
She is not cruel—not in this way, at least—so she tests the path with her free hand, feels the slick and the hot and the ready. Mari is not, as she said, but for Shauna she is. There is power in that transmutation, in the ability to transform one thing into another. Straight to bent, flesh to meat.
“It’s okay,” Mari says. “Anything you want, that’s what she said.”
Shauna takes, and pushes, and plows through what Mari withheld from boyflesh and girlflesh alike, and she drinks up Mari’s pained cry like mother’s milk. She works the knife, inverted from her normal rhythms, feels the sharpness of the blade work back and forth over her skin, catching on the creases, digging into her lifeline. Mari gasps, and badly hides a wince when Shauna’s eyes track the noise. Shauna’s other thumb finds Mari’s clit, gives her one last lesson as she shepherds Mari up the mountainside, and she squeezes the knife hard and feels blood release and ooze and spread warm and sticky around her flesh-knife juncture as Mari releases and oozes and spreads warm and sticky around her own shaved-smooth juncture.
Mari draws a slow, shaky breath and Shauna pulls the knife out of her, stained with blood on both ends. It clatters to the floor, used and now useless, and Shauna closes her fist to disguise her bleeding palm. Blood and Mari’s wetness stain the sheets, but Shauna has slept in worse detritus.
She climbs up Mari’s body and kisses her, rough and fast, and when Mari parts her lips to deepen the kiss, Shauna yanks herself back. She savors Mari’s brilliantly wide eyes and unmarred open mouth, just for a moment, before she pushes her bleeding palm against Mari’s mouth.
Mari sups at Shauna’s wound, the blood trickles freely. It is warm, and thick and the sting of Mari’s teeth and tongue flutters in Shauna’s stomach like the kiss of an old friend not forgotten. There is too little, there is too late, there is nothing left to protect, there is only what’s left to take.
Shauna takes her hand away and smears spit and blood on Mari’s face, and runs her tongue over the huntress-marked paths and tastes coppery penance, diet salvation, empty calories.
“Not a virgin anymore,” Shauna says, because fuck you, Mari seems redundant at this point. She holds Mari from behind until her breathing slows and deepens, and Shauna wedges her arm over Mari’s middle and beneath her waist so that she will not wriggle away in the night.
The gray light of the winter morning just begins to stream through the bedroom window when Shauna shakes Mari awake. She plants a kiss like a graveyard flower behind Mari’s ear, and strokes the uneven patch of hair where Lottie took her portion before presenting Mari to Shauna. Tai and Van will have finished stitching it to Lottie’s robe by now. Shauna is hungry again, and hungrier still because she feels the others just as hungry, their need seeping through the bedroom walls like pus, like rot. Shauna reaches for the clasp of gold behind her neck, and thumbs it open. When Mari stirs, Shauna drapes it around her slim neck and remembers blackcurrant bruises on paler skin. Gifts from her lady and her lover, her leader and her light. Gifts from her deity and her damnation.
She fastens Jackie’s heart necklace around Mari’s neck and whispers one word against the shell of her ear:
“Run.”