The summer feels like one long night, an unending sleepover. A storm sent an oak straight through the back door, and it’s been replaced with a tarp that breathes with the wind. When the two boys emerge from the wetlands behind the house, we make them take off their muddy shoes outside. To get to the basement, where it’s cool, we crouch past parental snores. We dig our nails, pointed and long, into each other’s wrists to keep from laughing. Following behind, the boys barely breathe.
We sit across from the boys on the scratchy rug, mismatched sofas and chairs all around us. Our guests wear Red Sox hats and nearly identical silver chains that blink now and then in the lamplight. Their eyes are bloodshot, glossy. One has large, slick front teeth. We run our tongues across our own, metallic and rough. We consider ideal pairings.
The boys pull tiny bottles of Captain Morgan from their pockets, their fee for entry. They roll one to each of us, and we gag when we sip. We usually mix it with Coke, we explain, but when they get up to find some, we tell them to sit. It’s not worth the sound of their footfalls.
The rum goes down straight, and our shirts come off. We smile to each other before unhooking our bras and letting them drop, aware that the boys will compare the traits of our nipples: one set pinprick pink, the other soft and russet, which we already know because we’ve been cataloging each other’s parts for months.
❦
We’ve taken countless photos on a hidden digital camera in which we are slightly less bare than the women in the Playboys we found at a friend’s house. We stole one for reference and keep it concealed inside another magazine, the one with the Salma Hayek quote about how she prayed at church for curves. At mass on Sundays, we repeat revised Hail Marys with each rotation of the ceiling fan, summoning desirable shapes.
Our photoshoots are experiments in cause and effect. We figure out that the swivel of a limb can transform a shy body into a solid one. We pick out our good sides and learn how to make use of them. We watch the skin spread across our hips, leaving shimmering streaks. We add glitter, bronzer. We find the wild, goosebump feeling of showing ourselves.
Admiring our images, we joke: Our prayers are working. We decide one has the better tits, the other has the better ass. We lament: If only we could merge, for maximum effect.
❦
The basement smells like damp socks and Davidoff Cool Water. We look at each other more than the boys. Our bodies take on tested forms: torsos arched, shoulder blades together. Like in our daydreams, we imagine the boys are nervous, not expecting what they’re getting and uncertain what comes next. Now you, we instruct. They pull off their shirts, and at the sight of their angular frames, so sharply different from our own, our skin starts to gather heat.
We’re unbuttoning our jeans when we hear the clink of a belt buckle. Not yet, we tell them, It’s our turn. One says, Come over here. His voice cracks, making us all laugh. Maybe later, we say, wanting to decide what happens when. We take our jeans off, leave our underwear on. Come on, the boy pleads, annoyingly. The other one snorts and swats him with his hat.
Headlights from a passing car drag across the wall, and the height of the basement window, so far above our heads, gives us the shivery sensation that we are suddenly unbearably small. Our shoulders droop. We feel our command evaporate, along with the thrill. We say the words we know will end the night: Wait—did anyone hear that?
We re-dress in a tangle and creep up the basement stairs. The way out is riskier than the way in; last time, we were almost caught, with different boys—ones who were actually cute, we’ll snark later, unable to come up with a harsher edict than plainness.
We make it to the tarp undetected and push it back so carefully we barely feel it. And when, thank god, the boys duck under and out, we run breathlessly to a window, near tears from muffled laughter, to watch their twin shadows recede into the oaks. ◆
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