The fine metal sweat-stink of thirteen. On the rubble track, some of us sinew and muscle, others soft dough. Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. We slap our hands palm side back side with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back. There are no adults. We know what to do.
Girls jump rope, Double Dutch. I stutter in for a short turn without hurting myself or ruining the rhythm. I delight in my competence. I duck out and sit on the broken asphalt to watch the girls with fancier moves. Thus my habit begins, of sitting down and paying respect.
My knees are perpetually bloody; when not tripping over used car-tire hurdles in PE, I pick shards of track from my skin and pull the hem of my gym shirt over my knees to blot the blood. My hair is still nice, without the coarse underlayer. I am a shy white girl; my friend Lisa is gregarious, half-Cuban, half-Canadian, and it’s the latter I find exotic in South Florida.
Outside of school, we are mostly outside — roller skating, playing shuffleboard, sunning ourselves on the oil-drum raft her father built, anchored in the canal behind their house. Sometimes we walk her neighborhood wearing tight jeans; Lisa carries a small radio blasting Springsteen, Van Halen, the B-52s. We meet boys our age whom we know from school. These conversations by the roadside are like toeing a pebble around and around in the sandy soil. I’m usually looking down. Lisa’s usually laughing.
Once, we meet a pair of older boys, high school age. Lisa arranged this, having met them somehow. At church? Unlikely. We attend Youth Mass Saturdays, mostly to be near boys and to gaze at the handsome married deacon. Lisa looks much older than I do — her breasts, hips, and lips full. I’m tall and lean, no extra anywhere. She tells me her intention: the redheaded boy is hers. We agree he looks like the singer from REO Speedwagon. The other boy is dark-haired like me, and skinny, like me. The redhead drives an antique pickup.
I remember Lisa being far away in the cab of the truck with her boy, just beyond the stand of bamboo that creaks and sways by the shuffleboard court. I stand near the pool with — Ray? — who has impossibly soft wet lips. The inside of me melts. I pull a panicked story from a place I don’t know, about a guy at school I have my heart set on. He smiles and says he understands. Nothing bad happens. He listens to me. I don’t even have to say no, thank you.
The inside of my head and body are never the same. Muddled, congested, buzzed. A new frequency has opened up, not transmitting yet but receiving all the time: at school, on the bus, at church and the grocery store, around the pool, at my friend’s house — transmissions coming in from boys and men of all ages. It’s a noise also found in books, especially the paperbacks abandoned by apple-shaped women in kitten-heels at the condo clubhouse.
Only on the track with Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black is there quiet. Girls lounge on the lower levels of the bleachers, close to the ground, the easier to slide into a turn. I have the wrong sneakers. No one cares. I can be and do girl things well enough to hide a little while longer.
Margaret Luongo is the author of two story collections—If the Heart is Lean and History of Art, (LSU Press). Her work has appeared in Tin House, The Cincinnati Review, Granta, North American Review, DIAGRAM, Consequence Magazine, Five Points, MicroLit, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and other venues. Recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, Hawthornden Fellowship, and Ohio Arts Council grant, she teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Miami University in Ohio, where she lives with her husband, artist Billy Simms, and their feline companions.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Sharon Drummond
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