The pills crammed in the pocket of her jeans popped out onto the cement floor before I even had a chance to tell her. We stood under the fluorescent light of the single stall bathroom—the kind of light that purples lips. Multiplies blackheads. Darkens scar lines. The brick walls were painted a sloppy white and marked up with vulgarities in red lipstick and love notes in black sharpie. She had to tell me something too, so I let her go first. Because I was holding a packed bag, but her hands—they were empty.

I’d known Emily since we were kids. We played in the public pool together. Lifted our exhausted bodies out of the water and onto the hot cement as the chlorine turned to steam all over us. We had sleepovers. We talked about kissing and how to practice. We talked about touching. And how we’d never done it with anyone, but we would one day. Emily told me what “doing it” was because she saw her mother “doing it” once. And she was pretty sure that guys’ penises broke off and grew back. I thought they were gross, but I hoped for the penises’ sake she was wrong. I asked her if she’d ever thought about doing it with a girl.

“Girls can’t do it with each other,” she said.

She always knew how to taunt boys—staring into their eyes, telling them how interesting they were. But when they asked her to a dance, she’d snap.

“No way!” she’d say.

And just like that, they never existed to her. One time she even screamed “Rape!” when a boy asked if she wanted to see a movie with him. She didn’t know exactly what the word meant—just that her mother said it to her: “Emily, if someone tries to rape you, run. But if you can’t then just close your eyes and think about something else.”

As long as I could remember she had a scar on the right side of her top lip. The only thing her Daddy gave her, she’d say. I was thirteen when I knew I wanted to kiss it. I wanted the raised scar to fill my lips. I wanted to bless every scar on her body. In many ways we were still kids doing handstands in the pool. Sharks and minnows in the deep end. We would always be mermaids under the sea—lifting our heavy bodies out of a weightless abyss after puberty turned our gills to lungs.

We were each other’s into and through every fit of mania from our mothers. Whenever she was banished to her room when her mother needed silence, Emily would call me to come over. I’d ride my bike and climb in the window just to lay with her in the carpeted closet and stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars. I’d bring neosporin and dab it on the half-moon slits in her arms made by her mother’s acrylic nails.

“Are you okay?” I’d ask.

But she’d stay quiet.

“Just hold me,” she finally said. So I did.

Emily had a reputation in our town. My mother didn’t like her around. She wanted me to spend my time with good girls and to find a nice boy to go to dances with. A boy who came from good parents. Someone who’d take me to church on Sundays. She pushed and pushed until finally I told her I had no interest in boys.

“Shut up!” my mother shrieked, plugged her ears, and ran upstairs crying.

We never spoke of it again. That night I snuck Emily into my room. Once we were safe behind my locked door, she pulled out an Earth Science textbook—disguised inside was a twenty-page collage she’d made for me. I giggled nervously at the beautiful, nude women.

I never went to a single dance. Even senior year we skipped prom together. I called her crying from my bedroom. I’d never planned on going, but she left her date at the front door the second she heard my shaky voice. We walked barefoot down the road. I remember the sound of her prom dress swishing against the pavement. We smoked pot in the tobacco barn. She got high as a kite, glazed over like a milk drunk baby. But I only held the smoke in my mouth, then blew it out. I remember watching Emily laugh hysterically at the smoke swirling around her. I was certain at any moment she could break into sobs.

We talked about leaving town all the time. One night she called and held the phone out so I could hear her mother screaming.

“You’re gonna suck the life out me, aren’t you?” her mother said.

I finally convinced her to go after that. We would leave the next morning, I told her. I’d take care of us. We’d ride the bus to Chicago and leave our shithole of a town behind.

But somehow I already knew what she was going to say when she pulled me into the bathroom of the bus stop. Her pulse thumped in the maroon scar above her lip as she fished for a cigarette from her pocket. And all of a sudden the sentence that sounded something like, “I’ve loved you my whole life,” evaporated from my tongue, unspoken. She picked up the scattered pills, lit up the cigarette, and blew a tunnel of smoke into my face that made me cough.

“He’s sexy as hell and—” she took another drag like the cigarette was helping her breathe, “twenty-five—works on cars mostly.”

She had that seductive smirk pasted on her face like someone smacked it there so many times it finally stuck. She wouldn’t tell me when she met him or where. She wouldn’t say a word when I told her I knew she was lying. She stayed quiet even when I screamed at her for the truth of why she wouldn’t come. She just stared up at me, silent, as tears delicately pooled in her eyes. I  stormed out and let the bathroom door slam behind me.

I boarded the bus and took a seat in the back. A hollow nausea bloated my stomach until I turned around and saw her. Emily was staring up at me with those same soft eyes like she wanted to be sure I saw them. Her face was sober, unphased by the steady, streaming fumes of the bus’s exhaust. Her white knuckles gripped her white arms. Her precious scar trembled from her righteous lie. I forced out a smile. She blinked out tears and forced one back. As the bus began to move, I turned to face front. And for a moment my body was covered in scales. I was having a tea party under the sea. I was breathing underwater.

# # #

Jenna Dorian is a writer based in Nashville, TN. She was raised in the mountains of North Carolina in an unstructured classroom from home by her mother, an author and nutritionist. Jenna is an active member of The Porch Writers’ Collective, and a past writer-in-residence at Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She self published her first novella, “You Holy Screaming Symphony,” in March 2016, and has published works of short fiction and poetry in Perjus Magazine. Read more here: http://jcdorian.com

Photo:Vincent Anderson