Girls Girls Girls

1

Sam doesn't think I'm weird. I know by the way she rolls toward me, by the way she reaches for me, her fingers tangling in my hair. In the damp of the van, she bites my neck and wraps a leg over my hip, her knee high on my ribs, the weight of her thigh rolling me onto my back. Our sleeping bags have shifted and the industrial carpet scrubs against my skin, the smell of the life it had before us souring the air. She finds my mouth with hers right as the storm cracks, the rain pecking at the roof like gravel. I feel my heartbeat rise into my neck and ask, "What if a cop pulls up?"

Sam doesn't say anything. She sinks me in her hair, still wet from our swim; her warm breath; her dewy skin. She pushes her hips into me like, Come on. Why are you so scared? Do it.

I slide my hand between her thighs. I want her more than I'm scared. We aren't in Long Beach anymore. I don't have to listen for the sound of footsteps in the hall. I don't have to double-check the twist lock on my bedroom door.

Even though we left Long Beach early this morning, we've only made it to the swimming quarries on the outskirts of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. One of Sam's pockmarked cousins told us about this place, described the graffiti on the turnout sign, marked the spot on our map with an X.

Sam led me by the hand, out of the van and into the woods, through the buggy shade of the birch trees until they stopped abruptly, dumping us into sun. A rocky bowl the size of a football field pitted itself in the earth before us, the sky mirrored on the water. It was like looking into an enormous eye.

We ditched our clothes, scattered them on a boulder, and spent the afternoon spitting long streams like fountain cherubs, jumping into backflips, doggy-paddling wide circles around each other. Treading water in the center, I watched Sam's head ride the surface toward me like a magic trick. We explored a shelf of granite, stood naked on it, shin-deep in warm water. I pushed my short hair back with both hands, closed my eyes, and opened my chest toward the sun, thinking about the last time I'd felt its heat on my naked body. I was four, maybe five years old, decorating the sukkah in the backyard with Bubbe and my sister, Rachel, in preparation for Sukkot. My clothes were itchy and tight, so I'd wriggled out of them. It was late September and my mother had objected through the kitchen window. "She'll get cold!" she'd shouted, eyeing my dress and underwear discarded in the crabgrass. "Nu?" Bubbe said, and shrugged. "So she'll get cold." A frown had settled on my mother's face before it migrated like a bird into my chest.

Sam yelled my name and it echoed through the quarries. I opened my eyes and found her with a half smile, her hands cupped and dribbling, a tadpole circling the pool in her palms, like a turd with a tail doing laps.

"Let's get you pregnant," she said.

"Gross!" I laughed, covering my crotch with both hands. "Marriage before babies!"

"We'll have nine months. We'll get married when we get to San Francisco," she said.

"You're such a dork." I shook my head. "And girls can't get married anyway, not even in San Francisco."

"Who says?"

"The law?"

"Then we'll break the law," she said, grinning. I pushed her wet hair from her shoulders, leaned in, and kissed her. She must have dropped her tadpole, because her hands moved to my waist, her breasts and belly pressing into mine. Away from Long Beach we could do this in daylight. We could swim back across the quarry when the clouds rolled in, make it to the van before the storm. We could find each other in the mess of sleeping bags and wet towels and empty coffee cups. She could pin me against the industrial carpet, and I could move inside her until she quaked in my hands, the sound of her free to rise now, free to lift in the hammering rain.


Sam and I met on the first day of eighth grade when our science teacher, Mr. Jeeter, plucked her from a group of chatty girls and punished her with a seat between April and me. April had crossed her arms over her chest and shot me a smirk that drew a circle around the two of us, a signal we shared a disdain for this particular type of girl, the overly friendly type who took a crimper to her blond ponytail. But when Mr. Jeeter turned his back, Sam told April she liked her thick black eyeliner, she said it was cool and she wished her mom would let her wear more makeup than just lip gloss. April, disarmed by the compliment, opened her mouth to respond but said nothing. I watched Sam pinch her palms between her knees, cross her ankles and swing them back and forth under her chair, before turning to me.

"And you," Sam whispered. "You have pretty eyes."

I remember sitting there feeling like I'd won a prize, the sleeves of my Esprit sweatshirt pulled over my hands, my long mousy hair matted privately at the nape of my neck. I studied her. She had a gap between her two front teeth and amber eyes with dark flecks in them.

"Yours are amber with little-"

"Little bits of prehistoric insect legs," she said.

That day after class, Sam followed us out to eat our bagged lunches on the field behind the cafeteria. She asked us if we'd heard the new Smashing Pumpkins album, then looked shocked when we told her no.

"Why aren't you sitting with them?" April asked, angling her chin in the direction of the girls Sam had been talking to in class.

"They're fine," Sam said, "for normies. Maybe I like you guys better."

April shot me a glance, this time curious, while Sam explained she'd just transferred in from a Catholic school and was looking for friends who weren't 110 percent lame like the ones she'd had in seventh grade. She said her parents were splitting up and splitting up was expensive. They couldn't afford private school anymore, but it was fine since she'd hated it anyway.

"We're not even Catholic, and dress codes are idiotic," she scoffed. April agreed. I did too. The circle was redrawn.

We spent eighth grade in cahoots, complaining about everyone and laughing at everything: our buzzkill teachers telling us to spit out our gum; George Bush's comments on his distaste for broccoli; the boys who yelled "Booyah!"; and the girls who called the guys "toys," cackling audaciously like they'd really flipped the script.

By the time summer rolled around we were jumping the waves at Neptune Beach with our hands clasped together. We shared Popsicles and popped each other's zits. We passed a single journal between us, taking turns entering long-winded whiny rants and cataloging our big dreams: where we would go and what we would do. Promise we'll be best friends forever, April had written. To seal the deal, Sam made us promise bracelets. They were like regular friendship bracelets but better, with beads knotted into the threads. "You hold each one, make a vow, and say our names," she explained, "like rosary beads." She wrapped them around our wrists and tightened them with her teeth.

On the night before we started high school, Sam brought us to her house and painted my nails gold, while April and I hung open our jaws watching the "Pretend We're Dead" music video on MTV. Neither of us had that channel.

"That drummer's a girl," I said.

"They're all girls," Sam said. My eyes bugged wider.

"I can't believe your mom pays for MTV," April said.

"She can't afford it, my dad pays for it even though he doesn't live here anymore," Sam said. "He's an alcoholic. He just moved in with his fake-boobs girlfriend in Manhattan, and I think he feels guilty."

I darted my eyes at April, wondering if she'd say anything about her birth mom, the addictions that had crumpled her childhood up like paper. Instead, she offered, "Well, my real mom doesn't even know who my dad is, and my foster dad is so not cool. He's obsessed with baseball and collects Yankees shit and puts it up on the walls like it's decoration."

I thought I could win the Disappointing Dad prize. "Mine died when I was three," I chimed in. "I don't remember him at all."

We looked at each other knowingly.

Once we started ninth grade, I began taking them to Bubbe's after school. We'd sit on the stools at her counter, devour hot apple cake, rugelach, warm challah, while she told us stories about growing up in the tenements, her father schlepping her up and down the stairs on his back until she was strong enough to climb them with her arm crutches. Sam's mom had recently taken a job at a car dealership an hour and a half away in Yonkers, and Sam was hungry for baked goods but also attention. Bubbe provided both. "The three of you eat like soldiers," Bubbe would tease before sliding another serving onto each of our plates. "Samantha, come. See if you recognize who's in here," Bubbe would say, lifting her chin and pointing to the gold locket slung from her neck. And Sam would happily oblige every time, prying it open with her fingernails to coo at the baby pictures of Rachel and me inside.

April, on the other hand, moved shyly around Bubbe. She'd learned the hard way to keep her mouth shut around adults, especially adults as warm and kind as Bubbe. It had been warm and kind adults who'd gently asked about her homelife, the scant contents of her Care Bears lunch box, softly eyeing her dirty clothes, her unwashed hair. April had tried and ultimately failed to protect her mother from CPS intervention and was placed in foster care at age ten. A home with kind Christian parents doing "the good work of God," a foster dad who loved the Yankees, a foster mom who taught Sunday school. At church, adults leaned in to tell her how lucky she was.

"Are people constantly telling you you're lucky?" she asked us once. Sam and I both said no. "They took me from my mom! Why do people always tell foster kids they're lucky?"

"Because they're stupid," Sam offered.

"Yeah. Stupid," I agreed.


Nearly all my high school memories feature the three of us together: the goth foster kid, the awkward Jewish girl, the pretty one who could have been popular if she’d tried a little harder. It was always the three of us, until something shifted. Sam and I shifted.

The summer before our senior year I started to feel Sam's gaze holding me when I wasn't looking, and when I'd glance at her and ask, "What?" she would smile at me until I covered my face with my hands. Sometimes, just looking at each other would trigger a long bout of the giggles. April kept telling us we were being super weird. I could see by the way it quieted Sam, super weird was a slight she couldn't bear. That's when she started asking me to hang out alone, without April. Not all the time, but enough that it wouldn't go unnoticed.

When classes ended on the first day of our senior year, Sam and I snuck off, just the two of us, to her house. On the count of three, we fell backward into the hammock that hung between two trees in her yard. She wrapped her legs around me. I swallowed. She took my hands in hers, examining my fingernails, praising the ones I hadn't bitten to stumps, testing the length of each by dragging it across her cheek, then her lips. I couldn't speak.

It went on like this, ditching April a few times a week to sneak off with Sam. April was losing her footing, and she knew it. She'd ask where we'd been, why we hadn't invited her. I'd flush with guilt while Sam stumbled through excuses. And April would pretend to buy them-put on a forced smile, the hurt seeping through her stale grin.


One afternoon, Sam and I sat side by side in front of her closet-door mirror. We made up a game where we pretended to be conjoined twins in one stretched-out T-shirt. The goal: to suck each other’s thumbs without laughing. Impossible. It took a zillion attempts, always aborted by someone’s cackling. When we finally pulled it off, our eyes caught in the glass and went soft, the heat we’d stumbled upon undeniable. It was silly, but with Sam even childish games had become seduction. When she slept over, the lights would go out and she would pull me closer under the covers, falling asleep with her nose against my back. I would lie awake for hours. My heart thudding, judging the gravity of the situation. I was falling for a girl, and the girl was Sam. There had never been anyone more compelling, or anything more terrifying. I would never act on it, I promised myself, never admit it to her or anyone else.

But then, on a regular old Wednesday in November, Sam and I were bundled in coats, hoods pulled up, sitting in the dirt underneath the bleachers while the sun went down. Her amber eyes practically glowed. She slid her ChapStick over her lips and then held it up in front of me.

"You want some?" she asked.

I said sure. But instead of swiping the tube along my lips like she usually did, she capped it, pinned my head in her hands, and wiped the ChapStick on me with her spearmint-flavored gooey lips. Then she paused, my head still pinned; looked me in the eyes; and kissed me for real. Her mouth was warm and wet and slow, and I melted into it. Even after she pulled away, my whole body continued to hum.

"Did you get enough?" she asked.

I rubbed my lips together, while heat spread across my face, burning my ears. I knew I had turned splotchy and red, and the thought of turning splotchy and red made me more splotchy and red. I looked down at my shoes.

"Why are you blushing, Hannah Banana?" She laughed. I wanted to look up and see if she was blushing too, but I couldn't. The only thing I could do was grin, keep my eyes on the ground.

After that, I was wrecked. Totally dead. At that point I still thought boys were inevitable, and eventually I'd have to find an entire husband, but with that kiss Sam became everything, blotting out the rest of the world. I wanted to tie myself to her like a carnival balloon, string knotted at her wrist. How would I ever find some tolerable Jewish boy, invite him to Shabbat on Friday, when I belonged to Sam? Sammie, Sam, Sam. Sammie with the thick thighs, Sammie with the amber eyes.