by Emily Dalton
I’m in a tight red dress with a green ribbon tied under my chest.
You’re in a pink and green neon jacket and Santa hat.
I’m straddling your lap, admiring your eyes,
maniacally rubbing the stubble on your cheeks.
I laugh at a beer can that rolls down the stairs,
and then you lean into me and say,
“I think you’re so beautiful. Did you know that?
I’ll never stop giving you shit for being a dumbass,
but you are honestly so attractive
and such a fucking cool person.”
My heart, already on steroids from the Molly, flutters.
I grab the Santa hat off your head and pull it onto my own.
“Well,” I begin, “I’ll admit you are seriously
the funniest person I have ever met. And you
have fucking beautiful, mesmerizing eyes.”
You stare back at me with such intensity,
widening your eyes and tilting your head
like an animal, and we can’t stop cackling.
I haven’t felt this happy since
I was a little kid,
when all the scary stuff
was just pretend.
And now,
winning praise from you
gives me a reason
to start liking myself again.
OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK
My family always spends the holidays
at my grandparents’ house near Boston,
coincidentally, just one town over from
where you grew up.
“You must be Susie Q!” you bellow
as you walk through the door
and give my mom a much bigger, warmer hug
than you give me.
I roll my eyes as you chat like old pals.
Then as we walk down the driveway,
you turn to me with a big smile on your face.
“No offense, Dalton, but it really makes
no sense that you’re her daughter.
She is so warm and pleasant.”
I shove you, and we get in the car, and you laugh,
“I felt like Straight Max from high school
meeting a girl’s parents for the first time.”
We drive through the winding streets
of my grandparents’ neighborhood.
Christmas lights twinkle on the fences
and bushes of almost every front yard.
When we walk into your house,
your family is shouting emphatically
about the episode of The West Wing
flashing across the plasma, and
they debate whether I look more like
Claire Danes or one of your sister’s friends.
Then I’m sitting on your bed
giggling at photos in your yearbooks.
This reminds you to dig through
the bottom drawer of your desk.
You pull out a notebook, and
I fall back in gasps.
Written in Wite-Out across the black cover
are the words “Christian Journal”
and your name underneath.
I can hardly contain myself as I flip through the pages.
“Your handwriting is so girly! This is not real.”
“Oh, but it is.”
Like every kid who’s ever written in a journal,
Little Max is
bored, silly, and purely honest—
only, instead of “Dear Diary”
your entries begin with “Dear God.”
And even though I’m laughing uncontrollably
as I read, there is no doubt that my
admiration and compassion
for you are swelling with each flipped page.
When I come to the entry dated 9/11/01,
my giggles subside, and
I look up from the journal at you,
sitting in your desk chair,
and I see you as a fourth grader:
Little Max doesn’t understand exactly why
he has to write to a god who can never
know his true feelings,
or why those planes crashed into those buildings,
but he’s trying to do what he’s told is right.
I stare at you for a moment as a transitive sort
of sadness for Little Max sinks in.
When I was a kid, I hated going to church.
I hated wearing uncomfortable, ugly dress pants.
I hated sitting in the dusty, drab, windowless classrooms
watching weird preachy episodes of VeggieTales.
But most of all,
I hated the disturbing Bible stories we had to read
about children being sacrificed,
and babies being cut in half,
and people being forced into furnaces.
As we come to understand that Santa Claus
doesn’t eat the cookies we leave out for him
and that leprechauns don’t hide their gold
at the ends of rainbows, we’re also told
that there used to be humans who
could bend water and rise from the dead.
Later, Pete comes over, and we sit in a circle
of folding lawn chairs in the shed,
and you and Pete recount detailed stories
of rebelling against your strict Catholic school rules.
And then we laugh all over again
about the traumas of adolescence
because laughing is all we have left
to make sad memories
worth remembering.
At the end of the night, when you drive me
back to my grandparents’ house,
I feel bubbly and warm
and very pleasantly surprised
with how seamlessly we mix into each other’s lives
outside of school.
I smile to myself as I walk up the front steps,
grateful for my closeness with you—like we’ve
been friends for years instead of months.
REFLECTIONS: I’M A LITTLE KID WHO LOVES
sparkly rocks in the stream
and smashing them to pieces
with the hammer from Dad’s workbench.
My American Girl doll, Josefina Montoya.
Playing dress-up and house with Cate from next door.
Climbing trees and building forts in the woods.
LEGOs, and Game Boy, and Nintendo 64.
Hand-me-downs from my sister, Laura.
Hand-me-downs from my brother, Andrew.
Singing Celine Dion songs as loud as I can.
Making up knock-knock jokes in the sandbox.
Barbies, sports, and lots of attention.
MAX AND EMILY WORLD
We’re back on campus in January.
When it’s just us, we like to go to Ross Dining Hall.
“It’s dead in here,” you say as you walk
toward the stacked plates.
I sit down at an empty, gray particle-board table
and sip coffee from a white porcelain mug.
The high ceiling is patterned with glares
of late afternoon sunlight that reflect
off the veneered hardwood floors.
Dishware and silverware clink softly,
and the few other people in the massive hall
make it feel especially cavernous.
Three girls with tennis rackets share a plate of French fries
at a round table near the big west-facing windows;
a
n older man who looks like a professor cuts into a grapefruit
at a long table by the ice cream station;
and a gangly upperclassman wearing a coconut husk hat
stares intently into his laptop over near the doors.
“What’d you get?” I ask as you sit down
across from me with two red plastic bowls.
“Black bean burger.”
We sit in silence for a minute or so,
you biting into your black bean burger
and reading an abandoned copy
of the Middlebury Campus
while I finish my coffee.
“What?” you ask through a mouthful.
I’m studying you cutting off little bites
of the patty in one bowl and then
dipping them in ketchup in the other bowl.
A smirk climbs up my face.
There’s a dab of ketchup
in your dark blond beard.
We are both stoned
and probably reek of pot.
I sing the words
to the tune of “Blackbird” by the Beatles:
“Black bean burger . . .”
You take a sip from one of your two glasses of milk—
you always fill at least two glasses of 2% milk—
and finish the lyric:
“Black bean burger in the dead of Ross!”
I coo back, “Take these broken beans and make a burger . . .”
We sing alternating lyrics
of our stoned rendition of the classic tune,
laughing in spurts through the rest of the meal,
completely oblivious to our fellow diners.
Perhaps they’re annoyed,
or bewildered,
or amused.
But none of it touches us
in Max and Emily World.
REFLECTIONS: FIRST KISS
Eighth grade.
Halloween.
It’s a truth or dare—
Whitney tells Greg
and Greg tells Drew
and then we all go trick-or-treating.
(All my other girl friends
have already kissed boys.)
My heart is pounding
and my hands are shaking
as Drew walks me through the night
behind an evergreen tree
in the side yard of a house
on Fox Den Road.
I’m Raggedy Ann.
Drew’s a soccer player.
He turns to face me.
Is it too dark
to see each other’s lips?
The next thing I know,
we’re hand in sweaty hand,
walking back to our friends in the street.
The following day, I have to ask Whitney
whether she’s sure
I had my first kiss.
Her funny look confirms it.
But . . .
where did the memory go?
For the next week and a half,
I’m trying to put the pieces
of my first kiss
back together.
But all I have
are leftover scraps of cloth,
button eyes,
and some old red yarn.
If I can’t remember,
does it still count?
THE ENTERTAINMENT
We’re waiting in the common room for Luke—
a teammate of yours on the swim team,
a senior. We’re waiting to buy pot,
but he’s not back from his night class.
He tells us to hang here.
A soft buzz from the fluorescent ceiling lights
hums over the bumping of a bass on the floor above us.
“I’m bored. Entertain me,” you say,
shaking the big messy bun
of blonde tangles on my head.
“How?” I say, uninterested,
not looking up from my phone
as I casually readjust my hair.
“I don’t know. Let’s make out.”
I glance up at you and snicker.
“Come on,” you sneer,
“don’t be a prude.
Make out with me.”
You lean over and grab my phone out of my hands.
“I haven’t kissed anyone in a while,” you say,
“I need to make sure I’m still good.”
“Were you ever?” I tease.
You give me a look that
challenges my entire existence,
then pull me by my arm
on top of you
as you lie back on the futon.
I awkwardly half-resist,
then look down to find
that our faces are now
uncomfortably close.
You raise an eyebrow; I roll my eyes.
But before I have another second to protest,
you close the gap between our mouths,
and I mechanically follow your tongue’s lead,
trying not to let my arms wrap
instinctively around you.
It feels like what I would imagine
an actor experiences
during a kissing scene:
not so much skill required
to act out the movements
as to stay in character.
We kiss for no more than thirty seconds
before the door opens, then slams in the foyer.
I jump away from you, and you sit back up,
smirking triumphantly.
Luke appears from around the corner
and starts complaining about his class.
I glance over to you. You’re still
eyeing me deviously.
“Fuck you,” I mouth to you.
We make our purchase and
say goodbye to Luke,
and I start down the steps
still wholly unsure
whether I feel angry and violated,
annoyed and used,
or flattered and withholding.
You lightly but intentionally jostle me
as you go by, two-stepping down the stairs,
and as you hop off the bottom step,
you shout back to me over your shoulder,
“You didn’t exactly stop me!”
. . . And I guess you’re right.
LATER THAT NIGHT
We just finished watching the finale
of The Real World on my laptop, and
we’re lying side by side on my bed.
I follow your gaze to the cluster
of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck
on the ceiling overhead.
The weak hue of mint green struggles
to gleam through the dim.
Your eyes are trained like
you’re waiting for one of them to fall.
When you turn back down to me,
I detect the tortured shadow of pain
in your eyes.
You tilt your head back up to the ceiling,
let out a heavy sigh, and force a brief smile.
You ask me, “Do you think I turned you
into a weed monster?”
I hesitate, unsure how to answer the question.
“Emily.” You look alarmed now,
like there’s something urgent
you need to tell me but you don’t know how.
You take my wrist,
place my hand on your pants.
I let out a nervous laugh,
and we speak with our eyes:
<
br /> What is going on? What is happening?
“I’m not really sure what’s
happening right now, Emily.
But I think . . . I don’t know.
I kind of liked making out earlier.
That might be it.”
I try to allow my brain to process this,
projecting backward and forward
through our friendship as you continue.
“It was just . . . like . . .
really weirdly good.
Can we try it again?”
You ask me this as calmly and casually
as one good friend asks another for a simple favor,
no hints of pleading or pressure in your voice.
I feel oddly at ease.
You move your face closer to mine.
Pause.
This time, you look into my eyes to confirm,
and I meet you partway.
We kiss like we did in Luke’s suite.
But this time, I move my body willingly
on top of yours when you pull for it.
The world around us stops,
or disappears,
or never existed
to begin with
while our bodies
find each other.
Our lips and tongues move
with the same magnetic friction
of our personalities—
both sides working feverishly
to challenge and dominate the other.
You slip your hands under my shirt.
Around my lower back.
You grind my hips down against you
as I bite your lower lip.
The heavy heat bursts like flames
through my mind, burning away any inhibition,
leaving only carnal impulse.
I let out a deep sigh as you rock
my waist back and forth, and you moan
into my ear, moving me harder and faster.
We’re fully clothed,
in sweatpants and T-shirts,
horizontal on my twin bed,
tongues pressing against each other,
when the friction between us
pushes
me
over
the
climactic edge.
I attempt
to muffle
the sounds
and breaths
heaving
out of my
body
as you tighten
your arms around my torso,
hold my head against your chest.
You lie still
and stroke my hair
as I gasp for air on top of you
and settle in the afterglow.
Without moving
or looking up at you,
I inhale deeply, whispering a quiet
“What . . .” on the exhale.
