For the Sonorous

First Kiss

 

It happened in the second stall of the girl’s bathroom. Her name was Mariela and she was tall and dark and handsome, her uneven bangs falling over her eyes as she shoved me into the stall with her gentle but urgent hands. There was something about that face that struck me earlier that year, like that jagged piece of oyster shell that sliced through the arch of my feet at the beach. Something sharp pierced through flesh that didn’t feel like my own. I raised my foot above the water and the blood rushed down, staining the clear sea. That was how it was the first time I saw her standing on the steps to St. Thomas High building talking aimlessly with her friends, her smooth, dark brown face peering from a mass of straight black hair, thick and obtuse, like good shrubbery to hide in. But I saw her nonetheless, like a wound just discovered, and the blood rushed through my head.

 

“You know, you should cut your hair,” I said like it was the most natural thing to say at the end of the first day of school, feeling superior as a senior with a rep for bad behavior. And the juniors of section four stopped chattering. Instead, they looked at me with disbelief in their eyes.

 

“Are you talking to me?” she said, not in jest but incredulity; I could tell from her smile—uncertain, suddenly losing bearing. She was found.

 

“Yeah, what’s your name?” I replied in the stillness.

 

“Mariela.”

 

“I just think you’d look cuter with shorter hair.”

 

I heard them laugh, teasing her, repeating my words in hushed, sing-song tones as I turned my back and walked to Michelle’s, my usual haunt, swinging the hand that clutched books back and forth like a badass who couldn’t be bothered with a bookbag, wondering what came over me when I hadn’t even had a drink. Blondie’s latest hit blared through an open car window at the stoplight, and I sang along until it faded away. Cover me with kisses, baby/Cover me with love. Roll me in designer sheets/I'll never get enough/Emotions come, I don't know why/Cover up love's alibi/Call me (call me)/Call me any anytime.Call me (call me) on the line/Call me, call me any, anytime.

 

I saw her again after that, swapping spit with a sophomore named Rosalie in the hallway. In a Catholic school where girls were segregated from boys, that was quite scandalous. Expected but still scandalous. The hall monitor reported to the principal, and the couple got a three-day suspension and told to cut “it” off. And here I thought I was the willful one—the one who went drinking with the bad girls after school, the one who got slapped for answering back, the one who smoked stolen Marlboros outside the window while the teacher taught in the classroom, unaware of the 16-year-old sitting on the ledge, feet dangling three floors above the sidewalk, watching the clouds drifting, the bamboo swaying at the parkette.

 

I wasn’t sure what it was that I felt when I saw her kissing another girl. Girl on girl love was just a thing most of us got into with the boys separated by schedule at St. Thomas High. They had the building in the afternoon, while the classes for girls were held in the morning. We didn’t call ourselves lesbians or queer back then. It was just a thing to do but not be. No one said it but straight was synonymous to square, and we frowned upon girls who stayed behind to wait for their boyfriends who got out of school at six. Even so, I was such a prude, satiated by fingerlocking and sweet smacks on the lips in the dark while watching Blue Lagoon at the Odeon. Mariela’s face was full on Rosalie for a good minute, I thought, before the hall monitor came and broke them apart. I kinda wished that was me on the receiving end. I was just drawn to her like willing kindling to a campfire, and with sweet Rosalie banned from the third floor classrooms, I made my move one day. I wrote her a note and passed it at recess.

 

“Last period. Third floor restroom.”

 

Here now as I looked into her eyes, small and slanted with lashes not nearly as thick as mine, I did not have enough time to wonder. She pinned my hands above my head against the white, ceramic-tiled wall, and I was shrinking. My heart pounded, thumping through my beige uniform like a bright red cartoon, and I was shrinking, shrinking like Violet in distress, looking into the eyes of someone who apparently knew more in this department than I did.

I saw her eyelids close before she dove into my face, her upper lip dipping into the crack between my lips, prodding them to open, and they did. She pushed her tongue into my mouth and it felt like a wet lollipop except softer. Much much softer. I thought I was going to swallow mine. At that point I had to close my eyes, too, and the white spots in the dark were the twinkling stars around Pluto’s head after he gets hit with the back of a frying pan. But I couldn’t stop and she wouldn’t stop, even as the bell rang and the sounds of girls talking, peeing, and flushing made us kiss more quietly and with less urgency, my freed arms now around her shoulders, drawing her closer, as her 15-year-old hands slid up and down the curve of my waist, making me suck my breath in each time she brushed against my virgin breasts with the tips of her tentative thumbs.