Claire is not like me. Her life smells like a jewelry box. On the bottom of her tennis shoes, in ballpoint pen, a boy has written his name in a heart. When I am with her, I think my chances are better.
One afternoon, surrounded only by fields of cotton and my grandmother’s hedges, Claire takes off all of her clothes and lies naked by the swimming pool. She ties her hair up like a pretty teenage life guard. I try to wean myself from the years of protection—t-shirts over bathing suits, my mother’s umbrellas and zinc paste sunscreen. I take off my bathing suit too, hoping my freckles will fuse to tan.
Two combed and pressed farmers wade through the fields looking for boll weevils. Claire sees them shading their eyes to get a better look. “Look at them watching us,” she says. “Tonight,” she says, “Let’s sneak out in nothing but our night gowns.” I wish for a white cotton nightie to tender the odd new discomfort of burned breasts.
When my mother has gone to sleep, Claire and I sneak her red Honda birthday car down the driveway, drive fast until we hear sirens. Sounding like a cartoon villain, an officer tells me over his loudspeaker to step out of the car. Sunburn has tightened the backs of my legs to vermilion. Under the din of street-lights, I limp to the curb like a faun—half deer, half human. The officer flashlights my license, squints. “What would your daddy say?”
Elizabeth Fennell received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elizabeth’s text compositions were performed in Cook County Theater Dept.’s productions of Home and Tosca. Her writing has appeared in the Chicago zine, Plate of Grits, and in School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s, Collected. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and their three girls.
–Art by Milan Vopálenský & Esmahan Özkan
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