You might think that a year would be long enough to get used to constant touch, but in my experience the longer it goes on the more you simply become attuned to it. On the same quiet walk, I might see two second-years approaching on the path, and they’d knock their shoulders into mine, tossing my body first one way and then the next. Two would become four would become six would become ten: neat shoes crushing down on my toes, an unlikely heel kicking my Achilles tendon and leaving a bruise that would persist for days. Girls seeming to run for their first class, but slowing to a walk once they’d swatted my thighs with the books they were carrying. Pinches in the lunch line, pinches in the greenhouse. A hand reaching for my cheek and then snatching at my ear, giving it a tug.
When I wore my hair back it was always pulled. When I tucked in my shirts they were always yanked free, and objects were inevitably knocked out of my grasp. After Kay tripped me my palms scabbed over, and the scabs were so large I could feel them bend. And this—this is the part I could not tell John, or anyone—my body buzzed with the sensation, and I didn’t want it to stop.
Here’s what a bruise can do: ache and ache. You press your thumb to it and there it goes again. Purple pain, morning pain, private pain to explore in one’s own bedroom. Tear a piece of skin off like you’re breaking the peel of an orange. Snap a rubber band on your wrist until the flesh gets vivid.
On the whole I did not want to hurt myself. But I kept walking into the cafeteria, didn’t I? I kept letting myself stray into the part of the campus where I knew girls took smoke breaks, noting the uptick in heartbeats per minute that felt like fear but also desire. My system was nervous, sympathetic. The more blood in the room—but let’s not get macabre; I mean swimming in veins, beneath skin, blushing lungs—the more blood in my cheeks. A senior let her cigarette fall onto my bare knee, and I gasped at the burn with an interest that covered more ground than just pain or surprise. They still infuriated me, these girls with their dads and their cars and their beaus, their sweater sets and tennis whites and ski vacations and beautiful, terrible smiles. I hated them because they were so cruel to me. But I needed the cruelty, because it was the only way I felt hands on my shoulders, fingers down my spine. Pull my hair, push me over, grab my wrist and draw me close.
My body: I knew it, all of a sudden. And if I didn’t love the life I was living, at least I knew I was alive.
John kept pestering me, and over the course of that spring I did agree to several dates with boys from town. “Young men,” as John called them, who had jobs at the soda shop or the local factory, packing spring coils into boxes to be shipped to another factory and used in who knows what contraption. One of my dates was a veterinarian’s assistant, and I enjoyed meeting him at his clinic: he took me to the back where there was a wall of cats in tight cages and a row of kennels full of dogs experiencing various degrees of distress. It was like a more boisterous version of the greenhouse, and I told the boy this. His name was Colin.
“It’s like what?” he said.
“You know, they’re all separated by type, and you have to do tasks to keep them healthy. Trim parts back, give them a drink…”
I trailed off, seeing Colin’s frown. I was reasonably certain John had told Colin what my job entailed, so I wasn’t sure what he found so strange in this comparison.
“It’s an entirely different thing,” he told me. “Plants can’t think.”
“I know that. I’m just saying there’s a likeness—”
“Hey, uh, the movie’s soon.”
Colin put his hands in his pockets and looked towards the exit. I followed him out, and we hurried to some ridiculous matinee, having rushed to make the cheaper show so Colin could also afford to buy me a popcorn. He kept trying to put his arm around me, and though I wasn’t opposed to the idea, it made walking to the theatre difficult and watching the movie impossible. Every time I shifted in my seat he tightened his grip, so whatever new position I worked myself into was made uncomfortable in a different way. Popcorn kernels got stuck between my teeth, but I didn’t want to pick them out while he was so near to my face. There they remained, and when he tried to kiss me at the theatre’s exit—I’d refused to be walked home, not wanting to bring a boy to campus—I turned my head aside, and Colin never asked me out again.
We did run into one another a few weeks later, though. Colin was coming out of a bar, and I was walking home from Sugar Books, where I’d been disappointed. Nothing special, nothing new.
“Hey Zoooeeeeee,” he shouted, half a block away. “Hey Zoe, you know me, we went to a mooovieeee.”
I stopped and let him catch up; Colin’s friends laughed and kept walking in the opposite direction, so when he reached me we were alone.
“Zoe,” he breathed, reaching out and tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. During our entire date he hadn’t said my name half so many times. “Why were you so mean to me?”
“I was—what?” Colin smelled sweet and like sweat. He hummed and fizzed. “How was I mean?”
“You said the animals were plants. You wouldn’t let me kiss you good night.”
“Oh.” He was now fiddling with a button on my green jacket, so the fabric pulled against my shoulders and chest. I looked down, suddenly shy. “I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t like it.”
“Come here.”
Colin stepped away, and walked into an alley behind the tailor’s shop. They appeared to have abandoned the process of changing their window display, and several dummies languished there, headless and half-dressed. The alley was full of sickly brown puddles from the spring melt, but I went anyway. Colin took me by the shoulders and pushed my back against the brick wall, and there he kissed me. His breath muggy. His thumb resting on the place between my bottom lip and chin. He pushed his legs against mine, and let his free hand move down to my waist, and I kissed him back, little knowing what else to do, and also—wanting to. With each breath, I seemed to be taking air right out of his lungs, and this puffed me up until I grew light-headed. For a second I was sure my feet had lifted off the ground. That my skirt had lifted from my knees.
“Hey!” A voice called out from somewhere around the corner. “Lover boy! Come out, come out!”
“Ah—” Colin drew back with a look of fleeting regret. But then the wolf whistles started, and he seemed to remember something. “Well,” he said. “Fair’s fair, now. Done is done.”
“Done?” I repeated. I was not done.
“See you around.” Colin touched my chin one more time. Then he jogged out of the alley and shouted something I didn’t quite catch, which was met with hoots and more whistling—the sound of which diminished down the block. I leaned against the wall and listened to their footsteps disappear, and when it was perfectly quiet again I straightened my skirt and went home and put myself to bed.
In the end, Kay didn’t do anything. That is, if you don’t count telling the other girls to be increasingly nasty without ever telling them why. More vile names were whispered to me when I walked across the commons, and a gutsy squad of seniors broke into the kitchen to steal a dozen eggs, which they waited half a week to use, ratcheting up my anxiety by the hour. I kept waking up and running to the greenhouse, expecting to find a smear of yolk and shell on every pane. But at last they threw a few each at my back, making two hits and several near misses which smashed on the sidewalk and were washed clean by the rain. I didn’t tell anyone, though it meant dry-cleaning my coat mid-season.