dig

Age
by Hetre

At eighteen, Jessica is apple candy in a halter shirt, a slow drip of caramel when she walks across the parking lot. Summer feels later than it used to, waking up and sleeping, but your hands want Jessica's shoulders early, before you even open your eyes, while you're still dreaming.

You work at the dollar store, because they hired you and because it's funny. You are worth five and a half jumbo packs of Wrigley's per hour, or four flame retardant oven mitts plus tax, or a nest of plastic food containers, the ones with JFMAMJJA and so on in small raised type on the lid.

Jessica doesn't walk into your store. She walks past it sometimes, wearing cut-off shorts or wife-beaters, and once a yellow dress. You don't know where she is going, but after she passes you imagine her hand on the door, the rustle of magazine covers when the warm air pushes in, and how she would spill out the heat of the day into the air-conditioned shop, lifting her hair off her neck to let it out, rubbing her hands over her arms, wiggling her toes. Eyes closed. You think maybe you don't understand necks anymore, the way you keep watching hers like it's going to tell you something. As if you've never seen anything just that shape before.

You play soccer during the school year; will probably keep playing once you get to college. You recognize the feeling that's here, like when you've played for too long in winter without warming up, out on the field before homeroom. It's the same, how your throat is a chimney, with wood coal under your ribcage, next to your stomach, and clanking metal arms. How all your outside would be cold, and your insides wrong, too hot, dry and thick and slow-moving, but bright and crackling, too. Even after you got to the locker room and put your skirt back on, after you showered and your breathing went back to normal and you got your books and went to class, there would still be a space inside, next to your heart or at the bottom of your throat, that was too warm, that stumbled when you walked. It would stay with you all day.

Maybe at college there will be girls who like you. Girls with curly hair who don't mind that yours is straight. Girls who will take off your eye shadow with their thumbs, who'll wear tall boots but no underwear. Nobody in your town does that. You hear the boys making jokes sometimes in study hall. It's a bit as if you were a grape tomato growing in a vineyard. The rest of the time you feel like a potato bug or a spider, the way you look upwards and she's there.

At eighteen, you are behind a counter and drifting. Some days you move so far backwards that your shoulderblades touch the wall. You are overcooked chicken in the refrigerator, and half-stale ginger cookies -- fresh like looking, but hard and old and sad from knowing why you can't.