“Ew, we’re only seventeen,” Courtney yelled when he grabbed at her.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t walk around looking like that,” he snapped back.
Heather kneed him in the nuts; then we took off running down the boardwalk.
“Hey, you little sluts!”
Tourists with sunscreened noses took pictures of us running, our heads thrown back with laughter. But when we were far enough away, we crossed our arms in front of our chests, and Courtney bought a muscle tee with a kitten in a bikini that said “Venice, CA” from a nearby vendor. She threw it over herself like a security blanket.
That’s why we decided to go to Courtney’s house today. Here, we can wear our string bikinis like highlighters, bright neon signs that introduce us as women. It’s better that there’s nobody around to introduce us to.
Courtney gets out of the pool and walks over to where Heather and I lie on the deck chairs. She prances like the show pony she is across the hot concrete and squishes her butt next to mine until we’re both on the chair together. We’re so close I can feel her heartbeat. The hairs on her body are fine and blond; she shimmers a bit.
Courtney threads her arm through mine. The water from her body feels good against my skin.
“Would you rather… make out with Mr. Holmes, or with Steve Ruggles?” Kimberly’s stomach is already bright red. She burns easily, and once, after we went to Disneyland, she spent the whole week shedding herself like a snake.
“Both. At the same time,” Heather deadpans.
Steve Ruggles is built like a Twinkie, round and a little jaundiced. He sucks at intervals along the length of his arms, giving himself little purple bruises like lipstick smears. He has always been nice to me, but he’s also undeniably strange, a boy who kisses himself while we learn about the Battle of Gettysburg. Mr. Holmes is our AP physics teacher, and half his face is cut into jagged ridges like the cliffs along the ocean. The rumor is he was in a fire as a baby. Somebody else said it was a laboratory explosion. Both seem like superhero origin stories, and Mr. Holmes does kinda carry himself like somebody with a secret life. Although maybe that’s just because he’s different, and sometimes being different means hiding pieces of yourself away so other people’s mean can’t find them. Occasionally in class, I used to close one eye and see one half of him, then close the other to try to see the other half, like when you look at one of those charts at the eye doctor’s. When I did that for long enough, both the scars and the good started to fade, so his face was a soft, mostly kind blur. Anyway, I think he caught me once, and so now I keep both eyes open wider than usual around him.
“Leave them alone,” I say.
“I bet Mr. Holmes would be a good lay. Ugly guys try harder,” Kimberly says. Kimberly acts like she knows everything about everything, even sex, which she’s never had.
“So do you think I should do the entire thing or, like, leave a strip?” she says. The moles down the side of her sunburned body look like chocolate chips in strawberry ice cream.
“Leave your muff alone,” Heather says.
Kimberly is getting her hoo-ha waxed for prom next week, and you’d think she was going in for open-heart surgery.
“I think a strip looks good,” she says.
“Definitely.” Courtney agrees with everything Kimberly says. Their moms are best friends, and they were born two weeks apart. They’re more like sisters than friends. Kimberly’s first name is actually Courtney, too, ’cause their moms wanted their daughters to be twinsies. For a while, we called them Courtney One and Courtney Two, until Courtney Two had a growth spurt in sixth grade and everybody started calling her Big Courtney. That’s when she started going by her middle name. Kimberly is superskinny, tall, and blond; Courtney is skinny-ish, short, and blond. Both have fake noses, and I’ve known them since the first day of school when we were five and Kimberly (then Courtney Two) still wet the bed.
Growing older with other people means stretching and growing and shrinking in all the right or wrong places so that sometimes you look at your friend’s face and it’s like a fun-house mirror reflection of what it used to be. Like, I used to have buckteeth that pushed their way into the world well before the rest of me, and a big-ass bobblehead on a superskinny body. I think I’ve mostly grown into myself now—though I do worry that my head might still be a tad big. That’s the stuff you can see, though. It’s easier to see those changes in yourself than what happens on the inside. Easier to see that stuff in other people, too.
For instance, now Courtney and Kimberly aren’t into much other than themselves and boys, but Courtney used to be big into bugs. She used to collect roly-polies and ladybugs and sometimes these nasty-looking beetles. And then when we were in junior high, she got big into lepidopterology, which is all about butterflies and moths and stuff. It’s a bit morbid, if you ask me, taking beautiful things and pinning them down to be admired. But that’s kinda like what happens to some girls between junior high and high school, when being pretty gets in the way of being a full person.
I miss what we used to talk about then, when we’d have sleepovers, our sleeping bags like cocoons, and play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board and lift each other up higher and higher still with the tips of our fingers. I used to yammer endlessly about horses, even in junior high when my friends were more into the idea of riding boys. As far as I was concerned, Jason R. was all right, but he couldn’t cleanly jump a triple bar. And as far as I knew, he didn’t nuzzle you as though you were the only person in the world when you fed him baby carrots. And when Jason was drenched in sweat, it definitely didn’t look majestic, even if Courtney and all the rest of the eighth-grade girls begged to differ. Eventually, I took a jump too fast and fell and broke my clavicle right before graduating from eighth grade. I stopped riding then, which I think my parents secretly didn’t mind too much, ’cause they were paying a buttload for lessons. I was afraid that the next time I fell, I’d break my neck. I don’t remember being afraid much before that. Anyway, Jason R. tried to make out with me at a party last year, but he’s not anywhere near as cute as he was in eighth grade and he smells like spit, so I politely declined.
The other day, I leaned in to Courtney and said, “Remember your butterfly collection?” She scrunched up her new nose, frowned, and said, “That was so lame. Why would you even bring that up?” As if instead of whispering about butterflies I’d told the whole school how she’d wet her sleeping bag at my house that one time in junior high.
We’re cheerleaders, and that makes some people think we’re stupid, but we’re not. Our bodies are power—like what I feel in my thighs when I bend and throw my full weight into a back tuck, that rush of blood to my head as for a few moments I feel weightless, knees tucked into my chest, skirt flying, before gravity catches up to me. Right there, in a tumbling pass, is the light and heavy of being a girl all at once.
“ ‘Woman is the nigger of the world,’ ” Heather declared one day at lunch while Kimberly and Courtney tried on each other’s lip gloss. It was around the time she stopped shaving her pits. At first I thought maybe I’d heard her wrong. But I know what that word feels like in my ears, the way my heart beats faster when I hear it. Even so, I tried to rationalize it. “I’m a Jewess and you’re a Negress,” she used to say as a joke. For a little while in ninth grade she even called us the two “Esses.” I think it was her way of trying to find the black humor in the black numbers tattooed up her bubbe’s forearm, the black humor in my black skin.