by Laura Goode
23. SiN later, furiously: How do you keep your hair out of your face while you’re kissing? Why is it hard to unfasten a bra when it’s on someone else? Has Rowie ever come?
“All right, all right, don’t go all psycho on me,” she says, laughing and clutching a stitch in her side. She calms, watching me, and begins to work the axis of buttons down her orange shirt. My hands, my skin, on hers are a negative relief of her color.
“God, Rowie,” I say, startled by her radiance. “You’re beautiful.”
“Shut up.” She twists against me. “Beautiful doesn’t do shit.”
“You’re right. But you’re also beautiful.” I gaze at her from across the pillow, wishing I could never look at anyone else. A beat goes by. I take a deep breath and pull off my hoodie. My hair lies beside me, a pet on the pillow, merging with hers.
“Um,” she whispers, one jack-of-hearts eye obscured by the black stream of her hair. “Do you know what to do?” I shake my head, sealing her mouth with one finger.
“Um.” I inch closer. She still has her PJ pants on, a worn pair of blue scrubs I’m assuming she inherited from her mother. I ask her Can I? with my eyes and she nods. I pull the drawstring loose and slide them down her thighs. I notice for the first time that Rowie shaves her legs above her knees— I never have. A thrill radiates from my core when I see her black underwear. My hand hovers above it like a helicopter for a moment, unsure how to land. She lifts her chin and I sink my face into the brown arc of her jaw.
“I think I know where to start.”
“Rowie,” I say, pulling away for a necessary breath, “you don’t kiss like you’ve never kissed anybody else before.”
“Well, shucks,” she mumbles. “Actually — I did something once, but I don’t think it really counts.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t really count?”
“I mean, it’s such a cliché.”
I crack a smile. “What kind of cliché?” I grab her yellow bra strap and kiss her mouth.
Her chin tilts down as she grimaces. “It may have been . . . a summer camp cliché.”
“Oohhh!” I say. “I’m intrigued. Who was she?”
“Um.” She clears her throat. “Samir Mirza.”
“Oh.” I feel like a dumbass. “The plot thickens. Continue.”
“It happened so fast — that’s why I figured it didn’t count. I was asleep.”
“You were asleep?”
“It was on a dare, I guess. He was supposed to sneak into my cabin and kiss me on the lips without waking me up.” She looks away.
I make a face. “That’s skeezy.”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “I woke up.”
“What’d you do?”
“Punched him,” she says simply. “He got kicked out of camp.” She grins a little.
“You!” I grab her around the middle. “You, girl.”
It gets easier once we’ve done it a few times, once it starts getting dark earlier. I can’t even tell you how much it isn’t like with Charlie Knutsen. I’ve never felt big before. When I’m with Rowie, I feel enormous — God, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not like feeling fat or anything. I’m just, I don’t know, aware of my magnitude in a way I wasn’t before Rowie happened, or aware of hers. I bend over to kiss her and she feels so small beneath me, fine-boned, pebble-smooth, a feline thing, a fuse. I lack the ability to deny her anything; the way I feel when we’re in the same room is like she’s electricity and I’m water.
“I feel like —” I peel off an orange section and feed it to her. We’ve built a stockpile of snacks out here ever since Dr. Raj caught Rowie prowling the kitchen at three a.m. and she almost died of shock. She takes a bite and juice dribbles down her chin. She starts laughing and almost spits it out. I laugh and push it back into her mouth. “Anyway, I feel like there should be, like, a NO BOYS ALLOWED sign on the door of this treehouse. Like it’s our clubhouse.”
“Thhppp Unndweep Cwshubbb,” she mumbles incoherently around the orange piece, losing herself in laughter again.
“What?” I dissolve into giggles, never wanting to be anywhere but here.
She swallows. “The Undies Club.”
I lean in and kiss off the orange pulp. “I like it.”
“Rhyming with you girls feels like that too. A clubhouse, I mean. Or a club,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean. We got an A-team.”
“Our songs are sick. Being onstage with you, Ez — it makes me feel — I don’t know. Alive. It’s like working muscles I didn’t know I had.”
“Me too.” I smile. “You said it just right.”
“What day is today?” she asks. “I can’t even remember anymore.”
“Thursday,” I reply. She hooks a finger in the elastic of my underpants and laughs.
“It says Lazy Tuesday on your hoo-ha.” She laughs harder.
The treehouse is private, but small in a way that makes me wonder if it’s really big enough to contain us. We meet at school, and with Marcy and Tess, but in different skins. At first it feels delicious, our secret, though it swells, conspicuously, every day giving us more not to tell.
“Am I slutty for not making you take me out on a date before I showed you my boobs?” I ask. “Do you think I’m easy?”
She giggles. “I don’t even remember the first time I saw your boobs. So yeah, you’re easy. Ho.”
“Maybe we should, like, go out on a date sometime,” I say cautiously.
“Where the hell would we go?” She snorts.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Anywhere you want. Or, I guess, anywhere we could bike to.”
“But I like being here.”
“Why?”
“Because here I can do this,” she says, kissing my ear. “And this.” She slips my bra strap off my shoulder. “And this.”
Sometimes we pass out for a few hours out of sheer exhaustion, wrapped in each other’s arms under the pile of blankets. I wake up into another blue night and watch her sleep, studying her face. I don’t know how to explain it: I recognize her, I see her sameness with me. Rowie and me, we rhyme.24
24. SiN: When the black-eyed girl blushes / It twists me in thrushes / All flustered and hushing / The lushness of lusting / What a rush, wanna touch / Her luscious erupting / Her flush gets me gushing / we’re hushing, she’s blushing, I’m busting on crushing.
I brush my fingertips across the smooth convexity of her forehead; in her sleep she winces, swats my hand away, a refusal.
“What day is today?” she whispers, pulling awake.
“I don’t know,” I murmur into her hair. I roll closer to her. I extend my leg, bending it over hers. Her hand rests on my thigh. She extends her other leg across mine; our legs twin boomerangs, interhooked, splayed like two clocks’ hands. I wrap my extended leg around her back, pulling her in, belly to belly, where we remain for a minute, finally seeing the whites of each other’s eyes. It’s like, I’ve always known this world was mine, but then Rowie came along and found the door, and stood there until I heard her breathing on the other side,25 until I opened it and let her all in, let myself all spilling out on a sleepless black-haired girl. She rises to her knees and lifts herself over me, forcing me onto my back as the hand behind me acquiesces. Both of her hands are spanning my waist, holding her up as she regards me sleepily from above.
25. SiN: I hear you. / I hear you. / I hear you.
“Do you ever get that feeling like you’ll never have enough time?” I ask.
“Every day,” she answers.
I nod. “That’s how I feel when I’m with you.”
“You too. I mean, me too,” she says, leaning down to kiss me. My heart begins to thunder as I cross my ankles behind her back.
“Tessie! Hustle!” Marcy yells with her head out the Jimmy window, leaning on the horn. We see Darlene’s vexed face poke between the living-room curtains. She puts a bony finger to her lips; Marcy relents on the horn.
“Where is she? We s
till have to get Rowie and be at the LocoMotive by nine,” I say.
“Do you think the stick up Darlene’s ass is actually from a tree, or do you think she had it specially hand-carved?” Marcy says.
“You’re a little harsh on Darlene,” I say. “So she’s a Botox queen. She’s not, like, evil.”
“Yo, my first memory of that woman is her refusing to take us to the grocery store before Tess had makeup on after we slept over that one time. We were, like, twelve.”
“I know,” I say. “That was when we found the TrimSpa in her bathroom and tried it. We were up all night. No wonder we looked like shit in the morning.”
“She’s just ugly to me. I mean, you definitely freak her out, but you’re still parent-friendlier than me. Try showing up to dinner at Darlene’s in a men’s undershirt and a Twins hat,” Marcy says. “Watch the feathers fly.”
“God, how’d you get to be such a little butch?” I say. “Has anyone else noticed I’m surrounded by pseudo-queers? My dad builds fairy houses. My best friend dresses like Fiddy Cent.”
“Maybe we’re all queer, you know?” Marcy asks.
“What does that mean?” I ask, cracking up.
“Just means that ain’t none of us ever gonna fit in, so I do what the fuck I want. Sexuality spectrum!” Marcy gives a fist pump.
Just then, Tess finally bursts out of her house, tripping like a vixen in vicious heely boots. Ignoring Darlene in the doorway, we hang out the windows and catcall like heathens.
“Daaaaammmnnn, girl.” I reach over and slap Tess’s legginged ass as she climbs in the back. “This is, like, some Debbie Harry shizz.” Tess’s wearing a red minidress with gold polka dots, shiny black leggings, and the skank heels. Tess is the kind of beautiful that makes you wonder if that much beautiful ever gets in her way.
“Naw, dude.” She grins. “This is, like, some Con-Tessa shizz.”
We’re on our way to play at the LocoMotive, a grungy little Minneapolis club with an open-mike night. And come to think of it, we’re all kinda pimped out to the teeth for our first real thing: Marcy’s added chains and brass knuckles to her standard beater-and-jeans ensemble, and I could swear she’s actually put a product in her hair, and I’m combining my hand-painted Timbs and leggings with a big leopard print Value Village T-shirt.
“Check out this mix I made,” Tess says as Marcy pulls out of the Grinnells’ cul-de-sac of a driveway. She plugs her iPod into Marcy’s tape deck converter, and Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick, Push” begins to blare from the speakers.
“Dude, I know you, like, love him, but Lupe Fiasco is pretty much just Kanye’s douchebag bromance of the moment,” Marcy whines.
“Yeah, well, Kanye was just Jay-Z’s douchebag bromance of the moment once. At least he isn’t hating on the ladies all the time,” Tess says.
“Eff Lupe Fiasco. Get an earful of this and tell me he still dampens your panties.” Marcy pulls a Parliament out of her man purse and switches in her iPod, putting on K’naan’s “Kicked Pushed.”
“I’m throwing your iPod out the window if you light that in front of me,” Tess shoots back. “It’s bad enough I’m still trying to get my sister to quit.”
Marcy lets go an irritated sigh. “Fine. Change the song and I’ll lose the stoge.”
Tess switches the iPods back and bites her lip, grinning, in the moment before the song changes. We hear the opening saxophone riff to Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” and let loose a collective holler; it’s an old favorite. Marcy cranks the volume as we roll down Iroquois Lane.
“Bitch is so fierce,” I breathe reverently.
“I’ve never been sure how I feel about bitch,” Tess says. “Don’t you ever feel weird using the language that hip-hop uses to describe women?”
“Oh, here we go,” Marcy says. “Teenage Feminism 101. Next are you gonna tell me I shouldn’t watch porn because it’s sexist?”
“You watch porn?” Tess asks, visibly taken aback. “Where do you get it?”
“Please,” Marcy says dismissively as she pulls into Rowie’s driveway. “You can’t grow up in a house with four men and a computer and not know how to find porn.”
“I wish I could say I didn’t know anything about porn chez Crowther,” I say. “But Tessie, I think the language hip-hop uses to describe women is really messed up, but don’t you think that if enough women rappers break through, it’s something we can reclaim? I just think hip-hop is a medium that, like, encourages conflict over language. I mean, don’t you think our whole Council of Mischief bidness of sex-positivity is about being a part of that kind of debate?”
“Yes,” Tess says, nodding. “And I agree with most of what you’re saying. I’m just wondering if taking part in the debate by using words that are sexually violent toward women is the right way to do it.”
“Huh,” I say. “I hadn’t thought about words like bitch as being violent, but they are when you think about it. They’re meant to wound.”
“Well,” Marcy says with a shrug, “the thing about words is you can’t really question what they mean without saying them out loud.”
“I mean, if you really have a problem with bitch, which I can totally get with, there are so many other words to use,” I add. “Girlfriends, GFs, homegirls, homeslices, ladyfriends, sisters, soul sisters, mamas, your posse, coven, fam bam, band of rabble-rousers, hooligans, troublemakers, bluestockings, alpha femmes. No reason to stay limited to bitches and hos.”
“Yo, where the eff is Ro?” Marcy says, and we all realize we’ve been sitting in her driveway spewing nerd talk for ten minutes and she hasn’t come out of her house. “Should I honk?”
“I wouldn’t,” Tess says. “You know how her parents are old-school. Maybe hit her cell?”
“I’m on it,” I say.26
26. Text to Rowie: babygirl, we’re outside. everything cool?
Just then, Rowie bursts out of her house at full clip, rocking a purple pleather jacket and thick gold heart hoops, looking distractingly hot in skinny black jeans. She throws herself into the car and I notice her favorite green feather in her hair.27
27. SiN: Is she an eggplant today? A plum?
“Drive,” she commands Marcy, bouncing jaggedly in her seat.
“Is — is everything okay?” I ask.
She shakes her head maniacally back and forth for a moment, bouncing in her seat, then slaps the window hard, palm open.
“I’m just so over it with them,” she explodes. “My dad is such a fucking FOB sometimes.”
“What happened?” Tess places a tentative hand on Rowie’s shoulder as Marcy rolls out.
“Nothing. It’s nothing. He just thinks I’m an American hussy whenever I wear something that doesn’t scream virgin. But he never just comes out and says it. He barely ever says anything, and when he does, it’s always just lame euphemisms, always not having my priorities straight.”
“I think you’re a hot hot mess,” I offer, trying for a smile.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Marcy says, “I got an earful from Coach Bob after Nordling asked him if he knew about 4H. Bob was pretty pissed I didn’t tell him.”
“Did you get in trouble?” I ask.
“Naw.” Marcy grins. “He hates Nordling. Once I told him what we were about, he just sort of grunted and lumbered off to watch Cops.”
“Look, can you guys just fight about Kanye for a minute or something?” Rowie says. “I need to get my head somewhere else.” She doesn’t look at me.
“Kanye’s a tool,” Marcy says.
“Kanye’s awesome,” Tess says. “But Marcy, Jay-Z is, like, the artist at which we meet in the middle.”
“Doesn’t get much more mainstream than Hov,” Marcy says with a smirk.
“Jesus, Rowie, why do you encourage them?” I say, making the universal choking sign.
“This is the part where Tess avoids the Kanye discussion by talking about Jay-Z’s relationship to moral authority,” Marcy says, yawning.
“Jay-Z is t
he Martin Luther of latter-day hip-hop,” Tess says. “Do you hear that anti-Catholic sentiment in ‘Lucifer’? It’s like his ninety-five theses.”
“Why you gotta hate on my people?” Marcy asks. “Goddamn Protestants.”
Rowie smiles weakly. “I don’t know why I find this so reassuring, but I do.”
A note on style: Marcy’s into mostly coastal nineties hip-hop, the classics, the foundation-layers for our generation and our collaboration: Public Enemy and dead prez, Tupac, Snoop, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Biggie, the Wu-Tang, and Arrested Development. There are others — De La Soul, Les Nubians, A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, KRS-One, and Boogie Down Productions — and all these are the early cornerstones; from them, her taste progresses outward and/or underground, into the Dilated Peoples, the Soulquarians, Gang Starr, Main Flow, Classified, the Last Emperor, Immortal Technique, the Individuals, CunninLynguists, Common Market, K’naan, more. We’re also fervent upholders of the local — Slug and Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Har Mar Superstar, not to mention, you know, Prince — tradition of Minneapolitan reppers, which includes white rappers.28
28. SiN: We had to start by understanding where we came from.
Tess comes at the genre via us, church, and the radio, so she’s less of an archivist than Marcy, more of a vocalist, and the only one of us who openly likes indie rock as well as hard soul: Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, Jenny Lewis, Sheila E., Aretha Franklin, Patti Smith, Imogen Heap, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, Res, Feist, Janis Joplin, Karen Dalton, Laura Nyro, Lady Gaga, Dionne Warwick, Etta James, and Diana Ross. Rowie and I both fall somewhere in the middle. For me, any kind of music has always been about the lyrics — the Saul Williams and Bob Dylans and Mos Defs and Talib Kwelis and Rakims and Leonard Cohens of the world — but lately I’ve been, like, a mixtape sleuth on the Internet. J. Period and K’naan actually did a mash-up of K’naan and Bob Dylan that almost made me crap my pants; someone else smashed Jay-Z and Radiohead into Jaydiohead, and I dug that too. Rowie brings the global beats, the less local, border-crossing and harder-to-classify: Panjabi MC, M.I.A., Nneka, Yelle, MC Solaar, DJ A.P.S., K-OS, Jamez, SA-RA. We’re both also way into oldies — old country like you slow-dance to in lonesome bars, Motown soul — and, paramount of all, badass chick MCs: Queen Latifah, Invincible, Lady Sovereign, Princess Superstar, Peaches, Missy, Lauryn Hill, Lil’ Kim, MC Lyte, Roxanne Shanté, Salt-n-Pepa, Bahamadia.
