Novel Excerpt
Cathi wraps her lips around a four inch doobie. She’s eighteen, glamorous and worldly wise to my fourteen years on the planet. Quotes Neil Young to me out of a songbook. You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain, shit like that.
We're lying on a long, flat slab of stone beside a river in New Hampshire; water runs over its edge in a thin, clear sheet. Cathi kicks off her thin soled leather moccasins, and the clear polish on her toes shimmers like mother of pearl under the cool silver of its surface. She doesn't paint her fingernails, just her toes. It's private, she says,just for her. I want to nibble on those toes the way a mother uses her own teeth to clip her baby's soft, new nails.
Cathi wears rings on all her fingers. Silver bands with turquoise. Stuff like what Pop makes. Biker girl, or Indian wannabe. Sunlight glints off her knuckles, sparkles along with the ripples in the stream.
"We were out in the garden, one time,” she says, sucking in a toke and talking in a wheezing voice, holding the smoke in deep like I haven't learned to do without hacking my brains out, "I was weeding out the chard while Dad hoed up a new row for the peas. Sun shining just like it is today. Clear blue sky." Smoke flows out dim and slow from her open mouth. "All of a sudden, he walks over to me, doesn't say a damn word, and just plants that hoe in my calf like it's another row to open up." Her left hand strays down to a white scar above her ankle. "That's how I got this, here. Look, run your finger along it, it feels like a snake."
She has a braided rope wound around her ankle, shrunk from the sun and water. Her leg is tan and smooth.
"Go on, feel it, Sue. Doctor said it was keloid. That means I scar easy."
Cathi smells like coconut. Tanning lotion smeared all over her body. The scar is white and glossy like a nightcrawler drowned in a mud puddle. Puffy and kind of sore looking.
"Does it still hurt?" I ask as I put a finger along the ridge of it.
Cathi lies back against the smooth coolness of the stone. "Only when it gets cold. If I go swimming, or forget to put on wool socks when I snowshoe." She stretches, a cat in the sun, her scarred leg spread a little out from the unmarked one. Her belly button peeks out over the waist of her cut off shorts. My elbow rests near her knee where it cocks out at an angle of laziness. She tosses me the brown plastic bottle of lotion.
"I have to make sure it doesn't get burned, though. Could get cancer, then they'd have to cut it off. Put some more lotion on it. I wanna just lie here and look at the clouds."
The lotion is swirly white and cool in my palm. I push it around with my fingers to warm it up before I carefully smooth it over the scar, trying not to get oily stains on her anklet. Just the tips of my fingers, cautious little circles over sharp bone.
"That tickles. Hey, put some on my feet, too. The bottoms. I don't want them to be all peely and itchy when I go back to work."
Her toes are short and stubby, little almonds with shiny shells. I hold her heel in the palm of one hand and press more firmly so as not to make her burst out in giggles.
"Mmmm. That feels good." One hand glides across her belly. "How about here, too. You don't mind, do you." She starts to pass me the joint, then pulls it back. "Better wait for that. Your hands are all greasy. I'll light it up again when you're done."
I finish both her feet, then sit up beside her. The stone is hard and slippery. I roll up my sweatshirt and stick it under my knees. More lotion to warm in my hand. Cathi has an outie, the kind of belly button that protrudes instead of going in. Thin streaks of white gather around its edges because I'm afraid it will hurt her if I bump it. Her hand comes down again from beneath her head to smooth the lotion in.
"It's not sore, or anything." The rings sparkle in slow circles, like when you try to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. Her skin is shiny and slick.
My face hurts from the perma-grin being high gives me. I try real hard not to stare at the rising pink nub on her belly, the line that starts where her halter top rides on her ribcage. She lays there humming Sugar Mountain, watching for faces and omens in the sky. My knees are tired from my weight on them so I lay face down beside her. Sweaty legs next to smeary oiled ones. Our knees almost bump together.
"Sue, you're gonna fry up like a catfish. Where's that lotion bottle?" Her shadow crosses my back, shivery goosebumps rise beneath the lost sun. Cathi grabs the bottle and squirts a cold puddle on the bend of my knee.
"Jesus H. Christ! That's friggin' cold as shit!" Obscenity spills out of my mouth like smoke from a chimney.
Laughing, Cathi starts to work the lotion up my leg with broad sweeps of her wide, flat palm. "Shit ain't cold, Sue. S'hot. Like you." Her hands push up underneath the frayed ends of my own cut-offs, tickling the backs of my legs where Mom says if I ever shave, I'll regret it.
Shivery all over, even where Cathi's shadow is gone. She leans close to me, body heat and reefer breath. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up in little waves.
"I'm not too hot. The breeze off the river helps, some." I shift my legs and turn my face away from hers, resting my cheek on my left elbow.
Cathi's hands rub lotion long since absorbed by my skin. "Not the weather, stupid. You. I said you're hot. When you were sitting up, I could see your titties getting hard. The boys are gonna start wanting to kiss you, bad." Her lips make wet noises. Her fingers knead up where my legs meet my hips. I get all shaky and lightheaded, then sit up, leaning away from her on my elbows.
"All the boys I know are nasty. They don't brush their teeth, and if they try to kiss on me, I'll push them down their throats."
"You ever kissed a boy?" Her eyes look over the surface of the water. Dancing light reflect on her cheekbones, bright enough to make her squint.
"No."
"Then how do you know you don't like it?"
"I just know, that's all." I turn on my butt so I'm facing an old pine tree on the opposite bank, its roots gnarled and exposed where the dirt washed away. I feel a breeze, softer and warmer than that other, ruffling all those waving little hairs, then Cathi's lips, teeth on my ear.