Sarah McCarry - All Our Pretty Songs

He parks the bike and we walk through the trees to a stony beach littered with driftwood. It’s late in the day, but the sun-bleached trunks hold the sun’s heat. I sit next to him, our backs against a log, our legs stretching out toward the water. Great green waves crash against the tideline and I can hear pebbles clattering as the water sucks back out to sea. Underneath the pebbles is another, different sound, like music, but nothing I could recognize or name.

I know how to draw, and I know how to kiss, and I know how to put fabrics next to each other in a way that makes their richness clearer, or arrange a line of glass jars on a windowsill so that they catch the light in a way you would not expect. I know how to run for a long time, head down, knees pumping. I know how to see beauty in other things, but I have never taken much time to see any beauty in myself. I am to Aurora what a gift-store postcard print is to a Klimt hanging on the museum wall. I do not love her any less for it; I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it. I like myself, but I do not have any illusions about what I am. Why me? I want to say to him, but if I ask he might start to wonder himself, and out of all the beautiful things in my life he is already the most extraordinary. He takes a knife out of his pocket and cuts a piece of peach and puts it in my mouth, licks the rivulets of juice from his wrist cat-quick, cuts me another piece. The soft felt of the peach skin is hot, the flesh cool and sweet beneath. I bite his thumb and hold it there in my mouth and he sets aside the peach and the knife and puts his other hand in my hair and kisses me.

Kissing him is like falling into a river, some great fierce current carrying me outside of my body, and all around us the music of the water rises and rises, and I can hear the wind moving over the sand, the distant singing of the stars veiled behind their curtain of blue sky, the slow, resonant chords of the earth turning on its axis. And then the music is gone again and he is only another human, kissing me on a warm beach. His mouth tastes of peaches and his skin smells like the sea. Everything feels real and more than real: the softness of his mouth, the hard pebbles beneath me, the warm wood against my back, the heat of his skin. The sandpapery stubble on his cheeks rubs my chin pink. We kiss until my mouth feels bee-stung and full and all the muscles in my body go liquid, until my knees shake and I know I won’t be able to stand up again without help. He kisses my cheeks, my eyelids, my earlobe, the place where my neck curves into my shoulder. I touch the hollow of his throat and he takes my hand in his, moves his mouth away from mine, kisses my knuckles, opens my fingers and presses his mouth into my palm. The wind coming off the water is colder now. I put my head on his chest and close my eyes and let the thunder of his heartbeat echo through me until it erases my thoughts one by one and there is nothing left but the sound of him.

It wasn’t like we didn’t know there were rules. Or, I mean, I knew that, at least. Maybe Aurora didn’t. It was more like rules were a thing for other people. Like you could be a girl, and it meant dressing in a way that made you pretty and soft. It meant not saying things you weren’t supposed to say, and knowing what those things were. It meant being quiet if you were smart, humble if you were pretty. It meant when boys asked you to touch your elbows behind your back you’d giggle and do it as if you didn’t know what they were trying to see.

Aurora always said everything, anything, from the very beginning. Aurora knew she was beautiful, knew she was smarter than everyone around her except me. Knew she was rich, knew she could do whatever the fuck she wanted and no one, nothing, would ever be able to stop her. Aurora was fierce, funny, mean. Aurora and I learned to smoke together, stole our first sips of whisky out of Maia’s prodigious stash, cussed in class, sealed ourselves in. Aurora and I made a world for two, a secret club that wasn’t a secret because everyone outside us saw the two of us together and knew we lived in a country whose borders they couldn’t cross. We didn’t care that people hated us, didn’t care that no one ever called us after school or invited us to slumber parties. We had no interest in dipping our classmates’ hands into bowls of water while they slept to see if we could make them pee, or playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board with girls whose faces closed up tight when they looked at us. We partied with adults, not little girls.

I had friends who weren’t Aurora, early on. I remember this girl I knew in grade school, this girl Tracy, the most normal name and the most normal girl. Her house had a room we weren’t allowed to go in and all the furniture was covered in plastic sheeting. Her mom made us snacks and we played games in her front yard. Hopscotch and running through a sprinkler in the afternoons when it was warm enough. She had a shelf of dolls in her pink room and all the dolls had dresses. She had a child-sized wooden kitchen, a fake wood stove with burners painted on, an oven with a door that opened. We would make cookies you couldn’t see in a metal bowl that used to be in her real kitchen. It took me a while to catch on. The cookies were pretend. The whole thing was a game. Tracy’s house had cabinets filled with real cookies in packages. Tracy’s house had white walls and clean blue carpet and a walkway to the front door made out of round pebbles set in cement. Brown beds on either side were planted with petunias at precisely measured one-foot intervals.

My house never smelled like Tracy’s house. My house smelled like incense and patchouli and sage and candles burning and soup on the stove in a big pot, and sometimes like weed when Cass had a boyfriend. My house had crooked windows and mismatched curtains Cass pieced together out of scraps. Creaky wooden floors, a bathroom full of chipped tiles, baseboards Cass had to continually tack back to the walls. My house had crumbling terracotta pots bursting over with herbs and tendrilly, disordered houseplants. Piles of records in the corners and books spilling from their shelves onto the floor, the couch, the kitchen table. Set lists and fliers from old punk and hardcore shows that Cass and Maia used to steal every time they went out to a club. Old medical posters and anatomy books, a plastic model of a human torso with transparent skin and multicolored organs. Tracy wasn’t allowed to come over to my house.

Tracy’s house. I liked it, but I didn’t like it. Tracy’s house was a different planet, a planet with order and strict scheduling. Tracy always had the newest Barbies, which she handed down to her younger sister as more current models were released. We ate dinner at the same time every night there, and we had cereal from a box in the mornings unless I slept over on the weekend, and then her mom would make us toast with holes cut out of the center and an egg where the bread had been. Once her mom asked if I wanted to go to church with them and I said okay, and so they took me in their van that smelled like old fast food with her brothers and her sister strapped in the back. Tracy gave me one of her dresses to wear, and I remember it had ruffles and the collar left a red mark on my neck. At church her family sang a lot of different songs they already knew the words to. Tracy liked a boy a grade ahead of us who left her a chocolate bar in her desk. They were going out. “Where do you go,” I asked, and she looked at me funny. Right away I knew that was the wrong question, but I didn’t know why. Cass let me go anywhere I wanted. I kissed Tracy’s boyfriend inside a tractor tire on the elementary-school playground. Three times. On the third time, I let him put his hand up my shirt. I never told Tracy. Afterward when he passed me in the hall he would look at his friends on either side and they would cover their mouths with their hands and laugh.