The Book of X

by Sarah Rose Etter

  “It hurts!”

  “Too bad,” she says. “We can’t have you walking around like this. People talk, you know.”

  She keeps going, keeps pulling the hairs from my brows, one by one. Each yank is a small torture. Water streams down my face, which becomes red and blotchy in the mirror.

  “Now let’s do the rest,” she says.

  Her fingers run over my face, then a brush, then another brush, I am a painting.

  “There now,” she says. “Open your eyes.”

  I don’t recognize myself. I am another girl from another planet, a warped version of myself.

  SOPHIA STARTS TO DO BAD THINGS.

  First, she steals lip gloss from the store in town.

  “You just put it in your bra,” she says, then she puts it in her bra.

  When I try, the lip gloss slides over my braless chest and catches on my knot before it falls to the ground.

  SOPHIA IS ALSO SMOKING.

  She smokes the butt of a found cigarette on the walk home from school each day, coughing.

  “You just purse your lips and inhale,” she says, smoking.

  I take a drag and cough like her.

  “Nice,” I say, smoking.

  SOPHIA HAS ALSO BEEN KISSING THE BOYS. Everyone knows about it.

  “Sophia’s a slut,” the girls whisper to me in the hall. “Sophia’s a total hoe.”

  She kisses the boys with the plain brown hair by the dumpsters after lunch.

  “It’s no big deal,” Sophia says, smoking. “It’s just mouths.”

  I think about the smell of rotting lunches in the dumpsters. Then I think about Jarred’s mouth on mine.

  ◆Two-thirds of people tilt their head toward the right when they kiss

  ◆The muscle used to pucker the lips is called orbicularis oris

  ◆The word kiss is derived in part from the Old English cyssan, “to touch with the lips” in respect or reverence

  ◆No two lip prints are the same

  ◆In medieval times, it was common to sign the name with an X, then kiss the mark as a display of sincerity

  I BEGIN TO TRICK JARRED INTO TOUCHing me. I stand in the middle of the hallway each morning when his bus arrives.

  He enters the building in the stream of other bodies, bookbag slung over his shoulder. Morning still crusts his eyes.

  I hold my breath until he gets close, closer, closest, then brushes against my arm and I am lit by a million watts.

  “Why are you always in my way?” he hisses.

  But I still radiate from it, the contact of our skins. The light of it makes me want.

  MY BODY IS A LAND UNDISCOVERED, MY heart beneath the skin wanting to be found and touched.

  Between my legs, nothing has happened since rocking horse. Some nights, I slide a pillow there and rock again, thinking of Jarred.

  TODAY, MY MOTHER IS FOCUSED ON SELF-improvement.

  “Take off your clothes,” she says.

  We stand in her bedroom.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “It’s time to look at ourselves with honesty,” she says.

  My mother has been going into town. She’s been spending more money. Her fingernails are made of plastic now. Her teeth gleam whiter than snow.

  “Your teeth are so white,” I say.

  “It’s a new technique from the dentist in town,” she says. “He is a hunk.”

  She yanks my dress over my head, then runs her hands over my body, fake plastic nails brushing my shoulders, my arms, my hips, then thighs.

  “We need to slim you down,” she says.

  VISION

  I am the queen of the cake room.

  There are dozens of round cakes on silver steel tables. Pastel frosting flowers dot their edges and tops. I am starving, My hand sweats around a fork.

  I step toward them, mouth full of drool.

  The first cake is round, white with pink flowers. I sink the fork into it and pull out a big hunk. In my mouth, the sugar dissolves against my tongue. I’m fast to fork another piece between my lips, the sugar smearing across my cheeks.

  I eat and I eat and I eat, the cake filling my stomach. There are cakes everywhere and no one can stop me, not my mother, not my father. I eat, and I eat, and I eat, the sugar rushes through my veins. There are cakes everywhere, and when I’m done with this cake, I can eat another and another and another and no one can stop me.

  MY MOTHER HANDS ME A BROWN PAPER bag with a single rock inside.

  “This is the latest diet,” she says. “Suck on this at lunch. The dirt and meat particles have calories that burn fat in them. I read about it in a magazine.”

  IN THE CROWDED LUNCHROOM, PLASTIC chairs scrape the floor. The mouths of my classmates open and sandwiches slide in. Jarred eats a peach, the long strings hang from his lips, the deep color of the pit in the blood of the fruit.

  I hunger for a peach, a cake, a meat.

  I feed myself the future instead: Slender, cheekbones sharp, mouth pursed, thin thighs, thin arms.

  I slide the rock into my mouth.

  “I WON’T GO OUT INTO THE QUARRY today,” my father says at the breakfast table.

  His face is strange and gray. A sour smell fevers off of his body.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother asks, exhaling smoke. “Too much again last night?”

  A silence comes down on the table. We wait for a fight like this most days. Some days a fight comes, some days it doesn’t. Today, it passes by.

  “You’re on your own today,” he says to my brother. “Go to the side lands and look for a new harvest.”

  My brother nods. My mother exhales smoke, eyes sharp on my father, dissecting.

  “I’m going to see Sophia today,” I say.

  “Fine,” she says. “Get out of our hair.”

  AFTER BREAKFAST, I SLIP INTO MY father’s office. I slide the gate key from his desk drawer. The metal is hot in my hand, my secret lights a fire in my veins, it thrums in my body, my knot humming.

  “Goodbye,” I shout on my way out the door.

  I cross the fields, heart racing. All of the sky big and blue as ever, and I am free in the world. The meat is on the air already, the red wounds of the quarry in the distance. Rings of sweat begin beneath my arms.

  A latticed black gate rises up before me, the entrance to the quarry. Through the slits in the gate, I can see glimpses of the meat. I slip the key from my pocket and into the mouth of the lock.

  The gate swings open with a long, low creak. The path is shallow at the start, with low red rocky walls on either side.

  A small set of tracks lines the ground. Metal carts sit silent and empty. I follow the tracks deeper into the quarry. The earth around me gets redder with each step, the scent of meat filling my nose and mouth.

  The red rocks gradually morph, the stench growing stronger, almost choking. Slick wet spirals of meat surround me, rising above my head in high walls, thin veins of white fat running through the redness.

  The meat glistens like a rare gem, a beautiful hypnosis. Chunks have been removed from the walls here, places where my brother and father tore the meat from the earth to eat and sell.

  I run my fingers over the slickness, get red up to the wrists, lick the blood from my fingers.

  I move closer, press my body against the meat, press my mouth against the wall, let the blood soak into my face.

  THEY’VE TAKEN ALL THE BOYS AWAY. IT IS time for sexual education.

  I sit next to Sophia. We dart eyes at each other until the teacher walks in.

  A diagram is on the wall, and it shows the female body, the muscles drawn in beautiful gray lines.

  “Today,” the teacher says, “we’re going to learn about sex.”

  Nervous laughter pecks up out of our throats. Sophia makes a gagging face at me.

  “Now, this is what the inside of your body looks like,” the teacher says. “These organs here? They are how you become pregnant after intercourse.”

  Another burst of laughte
r comes forward.

  “Calm down, now calm down,” the teacher says. “We have to get through a lot today. Be mature here.”

  The teacher glances over at me.

  “Oh, oh, I should say,” the teacher says. “You’re something else altogether. I’m not sure how your body works. Maybe just ignore this.”

  My throat closes up. I stare down at my desk. Sophia reaches over and pinches me. I look up.

  “Fucking shithead,” she mouths at me.

  “Now, when you have sex with a man, his sperm will travel up the vagina to the uterus then to the cervix,” the teacher continues. “If the ovary has created an egg and it is nearby, the sperm can swim to it and enter it. This is called fertilization, and we do not want it to happen. I simply cannot stress this enough.”

  ◆The uterus is roughly the shape and size of a small pear

  ◆In Ancient Greece, the uterus was believed to be an organ which wandered around the body, causing all emotional and physical female problems

  ◆Uterus didelphys is a rare condition which causes women to be born with two uteruses

  ◆One in 4,500 women are born without a uterus

  ◆The uterus is the only organ that can create an entire other organ; during pregnancy, the placenta is grown inside the uterus

  WE ARE ALL PILED INTO THE TRUCK. MY mother sits up front next to my father, smoking. My brother stares out the window from the seat beside me as we cross the land.

  “River day,” she hums. “Are you excited for river day?”

  Dread takes root in my gut and grows.

  “I don’t feel good,” I say. “I think I’m getting sick.”

  The tar of my anxiety spreads through my veins.

  “Can we just have a nice day?” my mother snaps.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  The river is crowded with the faces of people from town. I see Jarred across the water.

  We strip to our swimsuits. Then my mother and I stand next to the river. I can feel the eyes of everyone around us on our knots, on my knot. I flush with shame.

  “We came here to swim,” my mother says, voice like metal.

  My mother pulls my hands from my stomach. We move to the water.

  “Isn’t this nice?” my mother says, but there’s no joy to it.

  I dive beneath the water. I go deep, then even deeper. I try to go deep enough to drown the knot.

  VISION

  The sign at the entrance says: THIGH RIVER PARK. NO TRESPASSING, but Sophia tugs my hand and pulls me in.

  We walk down a long path until we reach giant dark rocks.

  “We’re going to have to climb a little,” she says.

  She starts to make her way up the rock. I watch her maneuver, then follow her motions. I can hear water in the distance.

  “There it is,” Sophia says when we reach the top of the rock.

  I stare out over the landscape: Rocks and trees surround a river. But the river is the color of many skins. My mind tries to force the hues into logic but cannot.

  “The river is full of them today,” Sophia says.

  As soon as she says it, all of my cells light up with horror-shock, a split second before I start gagging.

  The river is full of thighs, pushing along like fish, huge as bass, moving downstream. The thighs bump up against each other, create awkward waves, a strange flood of lone limbs in water, a tide of skin tones rushing by.

  “What the fuck?” I ask.

  “They’re here,” Sophia says, pointing.

  Boys stand on the rocks across the water, dozens of boys. They wear boxers, their bare chests reflecting the color of the river. Everything is flesh against rock.

  I can make out some of their faces. I recognize some of them from school. I make out Jarred’s face in the crowd.

  Sophia strips off her shorts and t-shirt, unhooks her bra then removes more, her nude body puckering in the cold air.

  “Cassie,” Sophia whispers through teeth. “Take your clothes off.”

  I have never been naked in front of boys before.

  “Do not fuck this up, prude,” Sophia hisses.

  The boys howl my name. Jarred says nothing, just stares at me dumbly.

  I jerk my legs out of my shorts and stretch my elbows through my t-shirt as I slide it off. I’m normal like Sophia, I have a smooth, flat belly, no knot.

  In the river air, my naked body shakes. I go blue like her. When she climbs down the rocks and into the water, I do that too.

  The water wraps itself around me, cold, sends shiver shocks through me.

  I watch Sophia splay out on her back and float with the thighs.

  Her breasts surface up above the water.

  I lie back on the water like her. I tilt my head up.

  The tide of thighs slides against me, moving past. The thighs touch me, caress me heavily, dozens of them. The feeling of the wet skin is new. The slick slithering makes me dizzy.

  I close my eyes and forget the sky. I forget the boys.

  A thigh glides past my neck, over my arm, away. Another thigh passes over my calves and down to my toes. Thighs skim my stomach and hips, constantly.

  More thighs push their way to new places on my back, brushing parts of my skin that I can never reach, sending electricity from my chest down to the place between my legs.

  The mouths on the rock make louder sounds, noises bigger than the river tones, shake me out of myself.

  I open my eyes. The boys are clustered on the rocks closest to me, now stripped too.

  Their hands are moving against themselves.

  The river does not stop. The thighs keep brushing all over me. We keep floating. I keep floating. On the rocks, all of the hands keep moving, all of the eyes on me.

  THE MOON IS BIGGER THAN ANY NIGHT before. A wildness in the light keeps me awake.

  There’s a knock on my window, then it slides open. Sophia’s face slides into view.

  “Cassieeeeee,” she calls softly. “You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  She dangles a silver key in my direction.

  “Get up. Come on, come on. Let’s go for a ride.”

  I sneak down the stairs and out of the house, into the night air. Then I follow her to my father’s red tractor which looms metallic on the lawn.

  Sophia climbs up onto the tractor and gestures for me to follow. Her breath is sour on the night air. She slides a bottle from inside of her jacket and passes it to me.

  “You have some catching up to do,” she says.

  I want to be wild, forget the knot, forget the earth. I chug, and it goes like knives down my throat, then numbs me good.

  “Atta girl,” she says.

  She turns my father’s tractor on, the quick roar of the engine, then steers us across the land. The wind runs through our hair.

  She hands me the bottle again, and I swig longer and deeper. The numbness builds in my veins, as if the knot has been erased from me. I laugh up at the sky.

  “Let’s ring the barn!” she yells.

  She accelerates, and the seat bounces beneath us, I put my hands in the air, let out a yell.

  We circle the red barn at a high speed, Sophia making the tractor turn tighter and tighter. We lean with the machine, we kick up dust around the wheels when we hit the curve.

  “WOOOO HOOOOO,” she shouts.

  The scenery is moving rapidly around me now: The moon, the red wood of the barn, the crisp night sky, the dirt on the ground.

  “Slow dow—” I start.

  “FUCK,” she yells as the tractor takes the next turn too tight, the wheels spinning out beneath us.

  We smash through the side of the red barn. The tractor wheels spin out on some hay, then come to a stop. I lift my head, pulse pounding, shaken.

  The hole in the barn wall is like a giant mouth. Through its jagged teeth, I can see the moon, the stars, the whole world.

  THE SUN HITS OUR FACES THROUGH THE smashed barn wall. My mouth is a mound of sand, tongue dry, stuck to the bac
ks of my furred teeth.

  Sophia is beside me, snoring.

  I let my elbow find her gut and sink it in.

  “Get up, get up, get up,” I say.

  The air gets a few degrees colder. A shadow falls over us: My mother.

  “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK NOW?” she screams. “What have you done!? LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!”

  Sophia starts laughing.

  “And you, what are you doing here?” she asks.

  “Just having fun for once,” she says.

  “FUN?” my mother screams, pulling the bottle from the hay. “You’re going home right fucking now, Sophia. And you?”

  She turns to me.

  “Get to your fucking room.”

  I bound across the field and up the stairs, into my room, where I lock the door. I climb into my bed, head pounding, dizzy.

  ◆Late Stone Age jugs suggest that intentionally fermented drinks existed during the Neolithic period

  ◆Alcohol is a depressant which in low doses causes euphoria

  ◆In higher doses, alcohol causes stupor, unconsciousness, or death

  I SPEND DAYS WITH THE LEMONS, RUBbing the walls. I am not allowed on the phone. The hours ache by.

  A WEEK LATER, MY MOTHER IS STRANGELY happy. The fight has worn off of her. We are going shopping.

  “Are you ready?” my mother calls, singsong.

  I am rotten today, nastiness in my body. My knot feels thicker, more prominent. My mother does not notice. We drive to town.

  “What a beautiful day!” she hums.

  Mania is a trap. Trees whip past. I count the dead deer on the side of the road.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asks.

  The bloody ribs of the deer reach up out of their bodies to the sun.

  “The ribs of the deer look like fingers,” I say.

  “Could we try for just a minute not to be disgusting? We’re trying to have a nice day and get you a dress.”

  “Yes,” I murmur. “Nice day.”

  The store is rich and glowing. The lights are thin ribs electric above us. We walk over pristine linoleum floors, the racks of clothing around us pushing in.

  “This would be nice!” she says. “How about this one? Oh, let’s try this.”

  She fills her hands with lilac satin, yellow taffeta, a sickening green velvet.