You shake your mane loose from your satin scrunchie, press your perfect chin to the receiver and purr.
What are you waiting for? Call NOW.
Soft cable light soaks the family room. I squirm in my sleeping bag while the other girls dream. Girls who shave their knees clean and sweat powdery desire. Girls who plunge into the deep end of the pool, holding their tatas tight so they won’t flop out of their tankinis. Girls who smell like fruit and white lies.
I can’t help myself. I’m dying to tell you all my secrets.
I stuff secrets wherever they’ll fit. But I’m running out of room. Dreams I can’t make sense of, shame I can’t speak. Like today. Before the summer light faded and the pool party turned sleepover, I spread my legs wide atop my floatie to flaunt what sprouted from my swimsuit, hard evidence of the ways I had grown. Kimmy’s head bobbed to the surface, caught a glimpse of it and stammered, her eyes squinting into the sun. Um, your stuff is showing down there. You might wanna shave next time. I closed my thighs so hard they burned. My eyes, too. Too dumb to know what to show off and what to shield.
I know you won’t tell anyone because you’re not even listening.
Ask me anything. I’m ready to share everything with you.
What’s it like to watch TV, to focus on the storylines and easily insert yourself within them? Tell me what it is to be hot and know it, what the sun feels like or walking through a mall or using the movie theater bathroom and having the courage to primp while you inspect your reflection, to not feel it a futile embarrassment.
Who taught you how to curl your bangs, to line your lips, to sculpt a smile that’s both an invitation and a dare? What’s it like to ramble on about your hopes or desires or whatever and have the conversation inevitably turn to your body, how it flashed across the screen when their midnight movie cut to commercial and how it was worth paying the 95 cents for each additional minute if it meant hanging on the line with legs like that?
What I would give to hear someone talk about my body. To remark upon the ways in which it succeeds. Anyone. Anyone at all.
I wish you could see me in my baggy pajamas, my big nose and small lips and short legs. No, I wish you could see future me and tell me the ways in which I’ll change, how my hair will thicken and so will my butt. How everything will turn long and sleek. How I’ll hold private dreams that everyone will want to know because of the shape they’re contained in. But you’re not psychic, you’re just a babe.
Pure pleasure is just a call away.
I know what pleasure feels like, though maybe not pure. A locked door and a pillow between my legs. Something private, something my own, a feeling I create from the inside out. I know, I know. I’m supposed to wait for that feeling from the outside in. Someone else is supposed to give it to me. But I don’t want to waste precious time because it’s likely that person will never show.
You’re not supposed to laugh. This is my fantasy.
Pick up the phone. I’m waiting.
I imagine you alone when the phone goes cold. Shadows slicing up your face. No saxophone music or strong perfume or candles around the tub. I imagine the ugliest things you tell yourself about yourself, the things you know better than to reveal to anyone. I imagine you tearing yourself apart to the sound of a dial tone or a man’s voice cackling while you cry about what he can’t hear no matter how hard he listens, and then I’m able to sleep undisturbed, like the other girls, open-mouthed and ready to receive whatever comes next.
