Arelis tacked the poster up on the wall across from her bed and looked at it. The top left corner was dog-eared but otherwise it was perfect: Beth Ditto with her arms crossed and one shoulder raised, her lips juicy. Her legs were the most delicious things Arelis had ever seen. Next to Beth Arelis had pinned her brother’s old Maxim calender. The dates were wrong but that didn’t matter, not with the December girl spread-legged and almost naked, her breasts in her hands, hard as grapefruits.
Other than the two posters her room could have been anyone’s. It was beige-walled, the once-white carpet stained a dull grey from years of walking over it in her running shoes. A small room, and blank like a cell.
Now Arelis let herself fall backwards onto her bed (twin-sized, Donald Duck bedspread, worn and nubby) and lay there like a starfish. She wore the same thing she always did, jean shorts done up three buttons (there were four), her sports bra, and an old T-shirt of her father’s. And like always she took each piece off quickly, without bothering to invert her shirt back right-side out before tossing it on the floor. The shorts she balled up in a fist and tossed; the bra she kept on. In plain white underwear Arelis lay flat and tried to breathe normally.
Upstairs Lady and Natalia were fighting; at least Lady was attempting it, most likely out of boredom and a sense of duty, though Natalia’s reaction to conflict involved humming to herself, turning away, never replying. Arelis knew that Lady found her sister unsatisfying. And she knew that her mother was angry, because the man she’d been seeing secretly had finally had an attack of conscience; Arelis knew because she was in the habit of knowing everything. Except, of course, what the hell she was supposed to do with herself now that Teresa Joy (a girl as irritating as her name implied) had seen her naked.

Whenever she closed her eyes she saw Theresa arching towards her shuddering, eyes closed and lips parted, and felt vague panic rise in her stomach. Arelis knew she was a lesbian, but she’d only slept with Theresa out of curiosity. Wanting girls didn’t mean she had to want every girl. Wanting girls didn’t mean having to want Theresa. Somehow, though, she’d gotten swept up in the girl’s big, brash, permed-hair wave and let herself be harvested and notched onto Theresa’s polysexual bedpost. She felt dirty, and more than a little confused, because Thersea’s fingers on her skin hadn’t felt good. “I’m supposed to like this,” she had thought last night with a sort of wonder. Part of it was that Theresa slept with everyone and Arelis had long ago made a pact with herself to go against the majority, even if the majority had a sensible idea. It was a matter of principle. Letting herself be touched by Theresa was like defeat. Arelis couldn’t close her eyes without remembering.

What she really wanted was subtle. Something in between the aggressive freckled breasts and drawn-on eyebrows of the girl who’d taken her virginity (viciously, forcefully) and Beth Ditto’s shiny paper smile. What she wanted was quiet and a little obscure. She’d fantasized about Dora, a girl who sat in the last row of the classroom and always chewed her pencils, because Dora had once told her that Arelis smelled exactly like the house where Dora had been born. (Arelis always smelled like deodorant and summer breeze air freshener and, sometimes, weed). Arelis wanted to remind her future lovers of past faces and to bring back memories they’d been trying to suppress. (That, for her, was orgasm: the body discharging, the culmination, a confusion felt way down in pores, someone else’s tongue summoning your secrets to the surface and saying, quietly, ‘release’). And in return she would let herself be shaken by love like a snow globe, all her pieces missing and more vulnerable but setting again with time and clarity into a new vision.

Arelis drummed her fingers on her stomach and remembered despite herself how she’d let her tongue slide slowly down Theresa’s neck until it reached her breasts. There she’d been overwhelmed by the sheer size of them and hadn’t known what to do; she’d tried to conceal her inexperience by touching Theresa’s nipples the way she’d seen in Internet videos. It came out awkward and furtive. Theresa was lying there under her with her eyelids half-closed and fluttering like a dead person’s. She didn’t react to Arelis’s touch. The effect was accentuated by her heavy black mascara, the lashes curling around the lids like a clenched fist. She had lipstick smeared across her front teeth and her orange hair (bleached from its original black) stuck out in a lion’s mane across the pillow, as though she’d been electrocuted.
They were both naked. Downstairs loud electronica was playing, repetitive sounds, and Arelis could hear laughter and the sound of glass breaking and someone’s car tires screeching on the gravel walkway. Her senses felt both dulled and heightened. Suddenly Theresa’s eyes opened; Arelis had stopped the path she was tracing and had sat up, her arm crossed against her own thick breasts.
“What’s wrong?” Theresa asked, a trace of irritation in her voice. “You’re not into this, butch girl? I thought you’d been dying to get your hands on some girl’s pussy for years now- and here you go, here’s your chance.” She cupped her own breasts in both hands, spitefully. Arelis looked at them but didn’t move.
“What?” Theresa repeated. And then she sat up, and her voice changed. “Are you scared?” She purred. Her fingernails in Arelis’s hair were long and filed sharp as claws. “Here, babe,” Theresa cooed, “lie down.”
She leaned forward and kissed Arelis full on the mouth, cupping her cheek with one manicured hand. Arelis felt teeth against her lower lip; their kiss was urgent, and it hurt. She tried to pull away but then Theresa was on top of her, on all fours, her body pressed tight against Arelis’s, lips still blocking her air. Arelis turned her head aside and gasped as Theresa lifted both of her arms and pinned them above her head, at the place where the pillow dropped off into mattress. “Now just close your eyes and feel good,” Theresa said, in that careful catlike voice, pitched low.
Arelis closed her eyes. She felt a mouth working around her nipple, teeth bumping and scraping. She felt the coarse fried ends of Theresa’s hair against her chest. As Theresa moved lower Arelis breathed through her mouth and bit the empty wedge of space between her thumb and index finger to keep from crying. She told herself, “you wanted this.” All the pieces felt good- being touched, cradled, her body sought out- but put together nothing felt right. But what did she know? Gay. A virgin. Thought to herself, “Now there’s no going back,” And though she wasn’t quite sure what that meant, it comforted her.