It's a Miracle!

by H. Claire Taylor

  Was Miranda popular?

  She’d never considered the question before. She’d just assumed that because most people avoided her, they’d avoid her best friend, too. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe Miranda hadn’t been sitting home alone every night she wasn’t with Jess. Maybe while Jessica was spending time with Chris, Miranda was out cultivating a healthy social life.

  And sure, she’d led the softball team to a state championship this year, but Jessica had done that with football, and for the past three years. That alone didn’t make a person popular, clearly.

  At least it’s not Sandra, she told herself, but as Miranda received her crown and scepter and went to stand beside Chris, Jessica struggled to repress the thoughts that were trying to seep out from the darker parts of her mind. Chris and Miranda hugged and the photographer began taking frantic pictures of the court.

  “Wait,” Sandra said suddenly. “We’re not quite done yet.”

  Some of the chaos died down, and Jessica held her breath.

  “The class officers decided that there was one more award that we just had to give away, one that we would decide among ourselves …

  “Our time at Mooremont had its defining moments and its memorable characters, but there was one person who was extra memorable.”

  Oh shitballs.

  Emma nodded and took it from there. “And so we wanted to make sure that she was recognized for her overall contribution to school spirit.”

  Those closest in proximity to Jessica were starting to catch on, and looked over at her for a reaction. She hoped it wasn’t obvious how hard she was clenching her jaw.

  “Her impact on keeping all of this senior class constantly entertained has, let’s just say, been huge.” Emma grinned mischievously into the crowd. “So we thought, well who keeps the spirits of the court high? Duh! The jester! So Mooretown High’s first ever prom jester goes to—you guessed it—Jessica McCloud!”

  Jessica glanced up at the stage, where Chris and Miranda stood in their regalia, both of their mouths lolling open at this new sadistic trick Emma and Sandra had devised and no doubt subsequently spearheaded.

  I don’t have to go up there if I don’t want to.

  Emma pointed directly at her in the crowd. “Come on, Jess!” She said it like this wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment.

  The image of Jimmy beckoning to her with open arms flashed in Jessica’s mind so vividly, he might as well have been standing on stage between Emma and Sandra.

  I don’t have to go up there and I’m not going to go up there.

  But then someone gave her a shove in the back, causing her to stumble forward.

  Oh hell, I’m already moving in this direction, maybe it would be easier to just get it over with and then get out of here and get laid.

  She took one step forward but stopped again when Chris shook his head slowly but firmly and Miranda mouthed, Nooooo.

  “Come on!” Emma insisted again. “We all know you don’t mind being the center of attention.”

  Jess tried to breathe through the hot pressure that was building behind her eyes and sternum.

  She needed to leave. That force gathering in her body was begging to tug free, and the last thing she wanted was to accidentally injure or kill people who didn’t deserve it.

  She turned and tried to head toward the doors, but the crowd wouldn’t move out of her way. She tried to elbow through, but an arm reached out and blocked her path. She looked up at the face associated with the arm and saw Drew Fenster staring at her.

  This fucking guy.

  An inflatable palm tree popped to her left and those in the crowd closet to it screamed. Several students dropped to the floor.

  “Not a gun, just the palm tree!” Sandra hollered over the mic, and attention refocused on Jessica. “Come on, McCloud! Everybody’s waiting for their favorite clown!”

  “Move,” she growled at Drew.

  He scoffed at her.

  A row of the LED tiki torches exploded, one right after the other and Drew had the sense to step aside.

  But another kid—one she didn’t recognize and therefore had to be from another school—stepped in Jessica’s way.

  “Move!” she said, shoving him.

  He stumbled back, but regained his feet and stood his ground again, chuckling in alarm and amusement. If only she had a big, strong date who could knock this guy to the floor …

  She looked up at the stage to see when Chris would get with it, but her attention shifted to Greg almost immediately when he shouted, “Stop throwing a tantrum and just get your damn hat so we can get out of here. Fuck, Jess.”

  “God dammit, Greg!” she shouted.

  The wrath tugged free and the rest of the tiki torches blew. Next went one of the goliath hanging gym lights, and the screams that followed as students fled from the glass raining down from above were temporary drowned out by the deafening screech of feedback from the DJ’s sound system. Emma dropped the mic and covered her ears and the last thing Jessica saw before she smote the rest of the overhead lights into twinkling falling shards was Chris taking three purposeful steps across the stage, rearing back and decking Greg straight in the temple.

  During the span of seconds between when darkness swallowed the gym and when the emergency lights blinked on, blanketing the panicked crowd with a red glow, it was all Jessica could do to avoid being shoved over and trampled.

  However, she did feel slightly less angry, but she wasn’t sure if that was because she’d opened up the smiting pressure valve or because she had just witnessed Greg getting punched in the head. She could sort out the particulars later, she supposed.

  An arm wrapped around her waist and she knew on instinct that it was Chris.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he hollered over his shoulder as he cleared a path through the crowd the way she’d seen his offensive line do for him a hundred times on quarterback sneaks.

  “Wait, where’s Miranda?” She pulled against him until he stopped his progress.

  “Right here,” said a voice from behind her.

  Jessica whipped her head around and spotted her best friend, who appeared remarkably calm. They grabbed hands and Chris led them the rest of the way through the crowd and out an emergency exit, which seemed appropriate, considering.

  The calmness of the night air felt irreverent by contrast. Jess turned to check on Miranda. “You okay?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t smite me.”

  Jessica stole one last glance into the gym, where her classmates were still scrambling for the main exit, all consideration for the safety of others forgotten.

  Good. Let them panic.

  The emergency door shut slowly, and as it did, Jess knew for a fact that she wouldn’t miss Mooremont High. Not even a little.

  Jessica only knew this spot from having been here once with Chris more than two years ago. It was where they’d shared their first real kiss … before being interrupted by a cock-blocking mission from God.

  While Jess had started the night on the fence about sex, Chris was another story entirely. It was clearly no split-second decision to bring her out here—the solar-powered paper lanterns set up around the clearing just off the dusty farm-to-market road was what tipped her off to this being highly pre-meditated—and she wondered if he had a plan B set up in another part of town, in case she’d said she wanted to continue waiting, which would have been entirely understandable given the unfortunate, smite-filled turn prom night had taken less than an hour before. Or maybe he’d have brought her here anyway to sweeten the pot and hopefully convince her that now was the time.

  A freeing sense of Nihilism had settled on Jessica’s mind between when she and Chris parted with Miranda to hurry to his truck for a quick getaway and when they arrived in this special spot, and perhaps the only thing in this world that did matter to her anymore was having sex with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend who had punched Greg in the face.

  Reliving that memory might
never get old.

  Regardless, there was no convincing left to do on Chris’s part.

  And now the past fifteen minutes had been spent making out in the front seat of his F-350. There hadn’t been any conversation on the way over from prom, but both seemed okay with it. For Jessica’s part, she knew from ample experience that the only thing one could do after something like that was to push it to the back of the brain.

  As the cheerleading squad was so fond of saying during the football games, Push it back! Push it back! Waaaay back. Jess adopted that as her mantra for the evening.

  There had been a few moments where Chris’s shift of body language indicated that he was about to say something, but for whatever reason, sound never broke the barrier of his lips.

  The making out had seemed like the best way to transition from an uncomfortable silence to sex, so Jessica had, perhaps too aggressively, lunged at Chris as soon as the engine was off. He hadn’t appeared to mind.

  He presently pulled away and made a T with his hands. “Time out. One second.” He jumped out of the truck, grabbed something from the back seat and then headed toward the back bumper. A moment later Jess heard a strange sound and turned to see that Chris was inflating an air mattress in the truck bed. That was thoughtful, at least. She’d wondered about the comfort level of sex on the hard, uneven metal, what with the thrusting she assumed would be involved.

  He disappeared and then reappeared at her door, which he opened before offering her a hand down. She’d long since kicked off her wedge shoes and didn’t need the assistance, even with her dress making it difficult to spread her knees more than two feet apart, but she accepted the help all the same. It was what Destinee had explained (in depth) was considered foreplay—where a man was really nice and considerate for a short amount of time leading into sex—and had insisted it was important for women to take that where they could get it. At first, Jessica found the idea of foreplay unappealing and embarrassing, until she realized that there were plenty of other animals who practiced it—lions, bats, monkeys, to name a few.

  Surprisingly, that helped her warm up to it rather than intensifying her aversion. She hoped he didn’t try to perform oral sex on her, though, like male bats sometimes did to female bats. That seemed a little intense, or maybe she just wasn’t huge on bats. Plus, she’d never come to a definite conclusion or taken action regarding the pubic hair dilemma. Sure, she’d shaved it all off once, but the days of maddening itching that followed as she tried to do basic things like sit, walk, and pleasure herself made the whole thing not worth it. That didn’t mean she wasn’t still self-conscious about it, though; it just meant she hadn’t decided what to do.

  The battery-powered air pump had done its job to completion by the time they stood next to the rear bumper of the truck, and Chris made quick work of shutting off the pump and plugging up the air flow before he helped Jessica onto their sex pallet. She leaned back on her elbows and stared up into the night sky as she waited for Chris to climb on.

  Her mind wandered back to the last time she’d given the stars any thought. It’d been in the back of Greg’s El Camino, and she’d been high as a kite. She wondered if Chris cared about stars.

  “You want a Lone Star?” he asked.

  That counted. “Yep.”

  He climbed up in the truck bed carrying two ice-cold tall boys. He handed one to Jessica, but not before doing her the favor of opening it.

  More foreplay.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

  “What happened in the gym. You wanna talk about it?”

  “Probably best if we don’t.” She took a long swig.

  “Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Or next week.”

  “Or never,” she offered. “We could talk about it never and that would probably be okay.”

  Chris rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I don’t really know what I’d say about it anyway.”

  “Exactly.”

  He lay on his back next to her and stared up at the sky. “Did you know there’s an infinite number of ways to connect the stars so that they form the shape of a dick?”

  She hadn’t thought of the universe in those terms. “I didn’t.”

  “It’s true.”

  She knew that, too, was merely foreplay, but she took a sip of her Lone Star and tried her hand at tracing the lines between stars to make a dick shape anyway. Out here, away from all the light pollution, with so many stars to choose from, she couldn’t technically disprove Chris’s theory.

  He rolled onto his side, the movement on the air mattress jostling her abruptly, and faced her. She turned toward him, too, with only a little bit of difficulty.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you too.” This time it didn’t feel so foreign. Was saying “I love you” foreplay, too? It sort of felt like it. Saying it had certainly intensified her desire to have sex with him.

  “Sometimes I don’t feel worthy of you.”

  That definitely didn’t feel like foreplay. “That’s dumb. You’re nicer to me than any guy I know.”

  He leaned in and kissed her and it tasted like Lone Star and lust.

  He pulled back just enough to speak. “God, Jess, I’ve wanted this for so long. Are you sure God’s cool with it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you talk with Him about it?”

  “Of course,” she lied.

  He nodded. “And are you ready?”

  She was more than ready. But she didn’t think saying, “Yeah, let’s get this over with already,” was great foreplay, so she simply nodded.

  “You’re not gonna …”

  “No.”

  He set his jaw and nodded then placed his can on the side of the truck, stripped off his tuxedo jacket, and began unbuttoning his shirt. She realized she’d never even seen his shirt off in a sexual context before, and her mind flashed back to the Steps of Intimacy handout they’d been given at the start of sex ed all those year ago. Shirt off was step six or seven. Sex was step eighteen. They were skipping some serious steps, and Jess wondered if maybe they should just ease into it with what her mother called a “good old-fashioned handsy.” Maybe she could mix that in.

  Chris stared at her expectantly. I guess it’s my turn.

  But the only thing she had to take off was her entire dress. Well, it would happen eventually. She set her can on the side of the truck and reached behind her, trying to find the zipper.

  “Here,” Chris said, and rolled her over so her back was to him. Slowly he unzipped the dress, and she felt her lower abs clench in a not entirely unpleasant way. She sat up, and he ran his hands down her back before slipping the dress off her shoulders and inhaling deeply. “You’re so beautiful, Jessica.”

  She could feel her cheeks redden and wished he’d stop talking and start fucking already. She wanted to get this over with, not because she didn’t want it, but because she wanted to work out all the kinks and get onto to the good stuff people talked about.

  Every time anyone she knew mentioned sex, it amounted to the same thing: the first time was a disaster, but after that it started to get awesome. It was time to rip off the Band-Aid.

  She shimmied the dress off the rest of the way so she was in the strapless bra and thong her mother had insisted was necessary for a dress that tight, and turned to face Chris, who sucked in air sharply as he drank in the sight of her body.

  She nodded at him. “Take off your pants.” Eh, not quite the seductive tone she’d wanted, but it seemed to excite him anyway. Maybe foreplay for guys was different from foreplay for girls.

  He hopped to quickly, fumbling briefly over his belt before he mastered it and slid off his dress pants, leaving him in only his boxer briefs, which were jammed packed with that dragon she’d spent the past two years fearing but knew she would someday have to slay.

  Time to unleash the beast.

  He ran his hands down her bare skin, lik
e he couldn’t believe it was real. Then he reached behind him without turning his head, grabbed his Lone Star, and took a long sip of it.

  What was the correct exit point of the briefs? She’d never considered it, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure if etiquette dictated that she pull him free through the opening in the front or over the waistband. Was there a guide for this? They certainly didn’t cover it in sex ed.

  She opted for the opening in the front, and as the rest of Chris collapsed onto the air mattress like a limp rag the moment her hand made contact with him, she assumed he didn’t mind the choice she’d made.

  Shit. What do I even do with this?

  She flopped it around in her hand a little bit. It was completely unwieldy.

  Is this a both-hand kind of thing? She rubbed it in between her palms, then realize she was essentially giving him an Indian rug burn and stopped immediately.

  What would porn do?

  She was spared the effort, though, as he couldn’t wait any longer and pushed himself up so that he was positioned above her as she lay on her back.

  He slid down his boxers and looked into her eyes. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  “Yes.” God, can we get this over with and move on to the good stuff?

  “You can say no at any time, and I’ll stop.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  But he still seemed unsure. “Good. Because, seriously, you have to let me know. I don’t want to be, you know, smote.”

  “You’re good. Can we just get to it?”

  “Yes. Yeah. Of course.” He slid her underwear down, and she gritted her teeth, bracing for judgement at what he saw, but it didn’t come.

  He paused again, hovering just before the point of no return, and looked into her eyes again. “Still good?”

  “Yep.” Then she remembered. “Wait, no!”

  “Huh?”

  “Condom.”

  “Oh right.”

  His briefs reminded her of a circus tent as he pulled them back up, hopped out of the truck, grabbed her clutch from the cab, then climbed back on top. He struggled to open a condom and, when it was clear he didn’t know how to use it, she said, “Here. I learned about this,” and put it on for him.