Love & Other Carnivorous Plants

by Florence Gonsalves

“Don’t worry, it’s second nature. We’ll go slow. But if at any time you want to stop, the code word is ‘stop.’” I love the logic of it enough to actually believe sex could be second nature, though all of my personal evidence points to the contrary. She fidgets with her underwear and I sense she wants to say more. “But just to warn you, vaginas are not like flowers,” she blurts out, pausing with her underwear around her knees.

  I try not to look bewildered, but I have no idea where this is coming from. “Who said vaginas were like flowers?”

  “No one ever said it explicitly, but people are always equating women to lovely things and pushing flower-scented period garb and—”

  “I have a vagina, remember?” I strum the strap of her underwear playfully and it slaps against her skin.

  “I’m just saying it might be different if it’s not yours—you know, like, how people always hate other kids but think theirs is an exception? You might not mind your vagina but yours might be the exception, so when it comes to mine—”

  “What are you even talking about?” I try to make out her face in the dark. “Wait, are you nervous? I think you’re really nervous!” It delights me to think I’m not the only one who’s on the verge of a panic attack.

  “Well, it’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s first for everything,” she says incredulously. “You might be wrong about wanting to do this with a girl, so I’m saying it’s fine if you change your mind. It’ll only feel like we’re going to die of embarrassment for about thirty seconds, but then we’ll—”

  I cut her off. “This is a very sweet pep talk and I appreciate you wanting me to feel comfortable, but I think if we stop talking about it, we’ll be much better off.”

  I take everything off and get under the covers as if they’re a bomb shelter. My heart is the loudest thing in the room and when she touches me my body shudders, not because it’s cold but because whoa. She pushes my legs apart and that’s when all my nervous thinking stops. Nerves become nerves, millions of them responding to her lips, saying yes, this is how I exist. Because sex is where the thinking stops so that the single best thing that’s ever happened to you keeps happening and keeps happening until you think you might explode. And then you do. It’s only after, when your sweat is drying and you’re regaining the feeling in your toes that you realize you’re some sort of miracle. What else do you call going to pieces without falling apart?

  We lie on the bed afterward and all the nervousness I didn’t feel before creeps in.

  There’s no big hunger in my body anymore, but should the moment feel more momentous or something? I lick my lips wishing I could consult Sara, who was arguably more invested in losing my virginity than I was.

  “What are you thinking about?” Bugg faces me by propping herself on her elbow, but it’s too dark to really see each other. I point to her body.

  “Pubic hairs?”

  I shake my head.

  “Fire crotches?”

  I laugh and shake my head. “I was thinking that you’re right about vaginas not being remotely related to flowers. They don’t smell the same or feel the same, and they’re not pretty in any way that would make you want to put them in a vase in your kitchen.”

  “See? That’s everything wrong with the patriarchy and all that scented tampon shit. Vaginas aren’t supposed to look like flowers or smell like flowers or be fucking flowers.”

  “Hold up, I’m not saying they can’t be in the flower family, just that they can’t be a lily or a daffodil. If they had to be a flower, since you’ve planted this idea in my head, then they’d be an anomaly-type flower, the badass ones that eat flies.”

  “Venus fly traps!”

  “Exactly.” I close my eyes, liking how it feels to have our bodies pressed together without anything confusing like clothing in the way.

  “So are you disappointed?” she asks quietly.

  I take the strand of hair that’s fallen across her cheek and kiss it, which is hands down the daintiest thing I’ve ever done. “Not even a little.”

  “Come on, we’re going swimming,” Bugg says the next morning, then throws a red-striped towel at me.

  I don’t think I’m awake yet. “What time is it?” I ask, squinting into the sunlight that’s coming through the window. The room is a lot bigger than I noticed last night, with ocean-blue walls and mahogany furniture.

  “Time to have fun. Come on.” She starts rapid-fire kissing my face.

  “Okay, okay, let me get my bathing suit.”

  “You don’t need a bathing suit. I only told you to pack one so you’d anticipate going swimming, but obviously no one goes swimming unless they’re naked.”

  I’m about to protest, but there’s no arguing with her, particularly not with her naked body, so I try to cover as much of my naked body with the towel as I can. When we run out of the house and down the path to the beach the sand is warm under my feet.

  “See, there’s no one here!” she says when we get down to the water. And I have to admit her observation skills are on point. She takes her towel off and runs squawking into the waves. I try to form the sign of the cross, but I was never baptized so instead I run in squawking too. The thrill of being naked in broad daylight and letting the water carry me makes me feel ecstatic. It’s the sort of thing Sara would love to do if we didn’t hate each other right now.

  Bugg and I lie on our backs so our nipples poke through the water, and somehow I’m trembling with the whole universe, sensitive enough to know the vibration of everything, like a perfectly operating human seismograph. And that’s when I get my most brilliant idea ever.

  “I’ve just had the most brilliant idea ever. I’m not saying I’m Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin or anyone like that, but we should lead a revolution.” I feel the excitement building in my voice, and as I talk a flock of geese flies toward us, the V getting larger when they fly above us. I detail how this revolution will be against all the bullshit in the world, which there happens to be a lot of.

  “You’re right,” Bugg says, floating closer to me, and her wet hair tickles my arm. “And we’ll call ourselves something good, something that tells people we’re not playing their game, something like the Venus Fly Trappers of the Revolution—”

  “Except more pithy and less obvious.”

  “How about just the Trappers, then?” She turns onto her stomach and looks at me excitedly. “I’ll write poems and you’ll do anything you want, ’cause obviously you don’t want to be a surgeon. And the only objective will be to feel like this every day.” Her pale skin is flushed either from excitement or an early onset sunburn.

  “We’ll live by your manifesto and I’ll keep one of those cooking blogs, the ones by very chubby, very happy, rosy-cheeked women,” I say, and my stomach growls. “I’ll give up on veganism once and for all and make meat pies and eat them without a single fuck about it.”

  “And we won’t care about having a lot of money or what people think of us.”

  “Or worry about being skinny,” I add, just for fun.

  She grabs my hand under the water and I let my body move with the current. The best thing about being a Trapper is you can sense exactly what you’re looking for, at the exclusion of everything else. When you finally catch the right thing, well, you just know.

  “I think maybe Sara and I have been holding each other back for a long time,” I whisper, but as soon as it’s out of my mouth I feel guilty. I’m relieved that Bugg was underwater for the entirety of my confession.

  “I’m ravenous,” Bugg says when she comes up for air. “What would you have for breakfast if you could have anything in the world?”

  “Bacon,” I answer immediately. “Eight different types of bacon and maybe a pancake. With real maple syrup.”

  “Perfect. I know just the place. You’re going to eat your little heart out.”

  And I do. Because in nothing short of a religious miracle, for the first time in nearly ten months I sit down at this random diner in this random town and
actually enjoy a meal: no guilt, no inner peanut gallery, just Bugg’s fork and my fork crisscrossing each other’s plates.

  “You might be onto something,” I say, with my cheeks in full-on chipmunk-status. “Bacon may very well be saving my life.”

  That afternoon Bugg has to pick up a mother lode of weed from some guy in town, enough to supply her clients for the rest of the summer. I’m not allowed to come because it’s “too sketchy,” so I wait nervously for her by the window, wondering how the hell I got myself tangled up in this, and noting that she did not mention any criminal activity when she suggested we run away.

  She comes back an hour later with a suitcase full of more illegality than I’ve seen in my life: The bags are still vacuum-sealed, and it makes the trunk of her car smell like a greenhouse. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” she says and invites me to come with her while she makes a few deliveries, but I decline. As much as I’d love to get caught with what looks like several thousand dollars’ worth of weed, I do have some sort of future to uphold.

  After her weed errands are complete she reminds me that there’s a party in town celebrating the full moon. Usually I forget the moon is a thing, but Bugg promises it’s going to be fun so I help her make moon cookies—the circular ones with the black-and-white frosting. She cracks an egg into the batter bowl, and I pass her the vanilla extract from my backpack.

  “So these aren’t vegan, I take it.”

  She scoops some dough from the bowl with her finger and holds it out to me. “Lick it,” she commands, and I do. It’s a very sexual exchange of cookie dough. I end up eating six cookies before we leave the house for what Bugg promises is the greatest night of the summer: dancing in the street, people reading palms, and vendors selling moon juice, which is a purple drink that tastes a lot like gin. Bugg wears some shawl thing with beaded tassels and carries the cookies in a basket marked FREE. I for one would never eat a stranger’s cookies, but I follow her wearing an unceremonious smock, though I at least choose the white one, for attempted solidarity.

  The main street is closed off and there’s a band playing on an open lawn and people are milling about in their summer skin: relaxed, giggly, a little tipsy. Lanterns hang from the trees, illuminating the faces we pass, and Bugg and I hold hands in public for once. At first I feel naked in a bad way—exposed and vulnerable—but then I feel naked in a good way—exposed and free. Just as I’m starting to feel like Bugg and I should relocate so we can reinvent ourselves and stay this way all the time, I see a face I recognize.

  “Hey, isn’t that your… ex-girlfriend?” I subtly turn Bugg in the direction of the girl with short blue hair. Bugg nods, and as she does the girl looks up at us, her face morphing into an angry frown. She starts coming toward us, staring intently at Bugg, and I feel myself shrinking into the peripherals of this interaction.

  “What are you doing here?” the girl demands. She has a laughing moon painted on her left cheek that starkly contrasts with her mood. “You know the moon festival is my territory.”

  Bugg grips my hand and steps closer to me.

  “Veronica, this is Dan—”

  Veronica cuts Bugg off. “I don’t care who it is. We agreed that I got the moon festival and I wouldn’t steal back my pipe.” My mind flashes back to Bugg cradling the dragon pipe in her car, claiming it had been stolen from her.

  “You’d already given me the pipe, then you tried to take it back, which is bullshit. Besides, you can’t hog an entire festival just because we met here.”

  As they start bickering I let go of Bugg’s hand and back into a storefront selling a lot of strong-smelling soaps. I’m sure Bugg didn’t drag me on this getaway for the possibility of running into Veronica and making her jealous, but suddenly my moon juice is too warm to drink and more than anything else I want to call Sara. When I look back warily, Bugg has her arms crossed and Veronica’s voice is rising.

  “You can’t act like I’m what’s wrong with you and if you cut me out of your life you’ll be fine. I’m not the reason you had to go to treatment, Sally Bugg. I’m not the one who made you drink so much you tried to kill yourself, you are. When are you going to take responsibility for the things you do instead of pawning off your mistakes on other people?”

  I don’t wait to hear Bugg’s retort. Instead I throw my cup into the grass, kind of hoping for a littering fine. Everything fun has to have some sort of consequence.

  I walk back to the house and lie in the indoor hammock for so long the rope diamonds leave their mark. Bugg gets home half an hour after I do and apologizes profusely, reassuring me that this was all a bad coincidence. I feel cold toward her until she starts crying (I’m not a sociopath or anything). She makes another batch of cookies to make it up to me, though what “it” is exactly, I’m not sure.

  Before we fall asleep she kisses my shoulder and I notice that despite the cookies and despite Veronica, when our bodies are touching I feel lighter or something, even though I’m the exact same density as before.

  The next morning while Bugg brushes her teeth I look at my phone for the first time since we got here, when I told my parents I was safe.

  “I don’t want to go back and face the real world,” I say, looking reluctantly at the black screen. By “the real world” I mean Sara, my parents, the looming prospect of returning to Harvard, and whatever label something like what Bugg and I are doing requires.

  “I think you should reach out to Sara, though.” Toothpaste foam squishes out of Bugg’s mouth as she speaks. “She’s going through a lot what with being cut from the tennis team and stuff.”

  “What?”

  She spits in the sink more times than necessary. “Shit, I thought you knew.”

  “She got cut? She told me they were going to make her captain next year.”

  Bugg talks into her toothbrush. “I shouldn’t have said anything—I assumed that because you were her best friend… I think, she only told me because she got drunk at my house that night—”

  “Well, now I have to call her.” I hold down the home button and my phone lights up. I have three voicemails from Janet, five from my mom, and two from my dad, but nothing from Sara. I listen to my mom’s first.

  “Danny, please, PLEASE call me. It’s urgent.”

  There’s a bad feeling in my stomach as I dial. “Mom, what is it?” I ask when she picks up. “I’m sorry I missed all your calls this morning. I had my phone off.”

  “Danny,” she says and then she starts crying, and not little whimpers either. Big, stinking sobs. I lean against the bathroom door for support. “How soon can you get to the hospital? Sara’s here and it’s critical.”

  My body turns to stone, but I will my mouth to move.

  “Be there in an hour.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The whole car ride I’m thinking that even though it’s critical, it’s okay. Everything with Sara is perpetually okay. I take out my MCAT study book, which I snuck into my backpack, and try to commit some formulas to memory but nothing will stay in my head.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?” Bugg asks when she drops me off at the emergency entrance. She went at least ninety the whole way, which got us there in fifty-five life-threatening minutes.

  “No, thanks. Not until I know what’s going on.”

  “Okay, call me,” she says, and I run in through the automatic doors.

  Inside, everything is white and smells like old people and doughnuts and hand sanitizer. Hospitals are so depressing, it’s no wonder people die here. I walk so fast my feet squeak on the ground, which would be funny in any other circumstance, and my hands clench in and out of fists with the tempo of my footsteps. I’m afraid to take my eyes off the orange exit sign at the end of the hall, as if without a single unmoving point to focus on, the world will spin entirely out of my control. I follow a sign to the waiting room, and when I turn the corner Janet is there, holding a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin up to her face. There’s mascara all down her cheeks.


  “Janet—”

  She pulls me into a tight hug and I feel her whole body shake. “You missed her.” Her voice is hardly her voice at all.

  “Who did I miss? Where’s Sara?” Seeing other people cry has this domino effect on me, and tears roll down my cheeks too. “Janet, please tell me what’s going on. Where’s my mom? She told me she was here.”

  “She went,” Janet starts, but she’s crying too hard to get anything coherent out.

  I try to flag down the three doctors who are coming toward us. They’re all wearing the same green scrubs, which, I distract myself by thinking, makes them look unnecessarily like aliens. Don’t they make any other-colored scrubs?

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Is there any way you can tell me what’s going on? I don’t know if you know anything about our situation, but we’re here for Sara Collins, who’s in critical condition so I need to see her, but I don’t know where she is and I don’t understand what’s wrong, but if someone told me, I think it’d be much easier, you know, for me.”

  Janet clutches my arm until I feel like I’m going to lose all circulation. “Sara didn’t make it,” she says, but the last word comes out as a screech that echoes through the hallway of my ear like the longest and loneliest tunnel.

  “Didn’t make what?” I ask, but by this point I know. My mouth waters and I feel dizzy. Three-Part Pause-and…

  But I can’t remember how it is that I’m supposed to breathe.

  Two of the doctors put their hands on Janet’s shoulders and tell her to come with them, and the other looks like she’s about to talk to me, but then my mom comes around the corner with a box full of Munchkins.

  “Mom,” I say, and I sound about six years old. “Mom, please, tell me what happened. Why won’t anyone tell me anything?”

  She hugs me so hard she drops the Munchkins.

  “Careful, those are precious cargo.” I pick the box up and stuff one in my mouth quickly, as if to put a stopper in it. I hardly feel myself chew, almost like something has snapped between my brain and my mouth, and they’re not connected anymore.