IRIS PREAKER
Holy Spaces
1.
There’s a preacher at school that everyone wants to fuck. Hot godliness aside, he’s truly unremarkable. Grease bright hair & acne spots crusting his jawline like stars, plus he walks with an exaggerated swagger — all Michael Jackson, electric eel — that makes me want to wince, as if he might bite me upon contact. But I have perfected normalcy like a clean incision, so at Tuesday Mass I exchange longings with the rest of the girls, pretend to blush when he flashes his dirty teeth.
“Why haven’t you talked to him yet?” Maria asks me, smacking her lips together with a shiny gloss, cherry maraschino. “You’re the prettiest girl in school. If he’s into any one of us, it’s you. Unless he’s blind.” She mimes fellatio with the flick of her tongue, saliva embryo, & I want to gag on my own spit. “Or what? Too much of a sin?”
“Older guys are boring,” I say, instead of throwing up, squeezing my hands between my knees so nobody can sense the discomfort emanating from me like radium poisoning. “And I’m seeing someone. I guess. I don’t really know.”
In the pews, thighs touch thighs, the thin white hairs on Maria’s legs sticking out like weeds. Her elbow is against mine, a planned osmosis, and I remember the way we used to make cathedrals with our fingertips, the sun melding our hands together with sweat, singing to ourselves in a bad warble: this is the church / and this is the steeple.
Eventually, Maria turns to me: “Is Mass over already?” I tell her I’m not sure. A glitzy statue of St. Catherine of Siena watches us flock back to school like a cellular cluster: identical bodies, we are a unified creature. Bleached perms & long, shiny legs. Modified plaid skirts & too much Aquaphor. It would be funny if it wasn’t so fucking sad, the singularity of it all. I consider all the ways I’ve wanted to be an original — a 10-inch chop, an abundance of eyeliner, a piercing to the neck — before giving up and styling myself as the Straight Girl Barbie, my blonde strangling the wind.
2.
My Boyfriend grins as I tug on the collar of his shirt. Then his jawline. His shoulder. Thigh. Some nights, I imagine unhinging my jaw to swallow him, the white flesh of his body filling up my mouth like salt. Call that communion. Call that fucking, only this time I might actually get something out of it, instead of lying down bodiless on some boy’s piss-soaked mattress, my eyes reflecting TV static.
He is glazing over, his naked flooding with sweat. “Does this feel good?” he asks, breathing down my neck.
“So good,” I say. I keep myself from screaming, an unwanted gravity.
More noise. I clench my eyes shut so there’s a painful quiet between us. “Are you gonna come?” he says, then. I bite my lip like infection. Soon, I tell him, just give me a second.
I think about Maria, what she said of the pastor as our knees knocked together, how if he’s into any one of us, it’s me. Maria once told me she fucked a teacher’s husband, her panties made bloodstains on their cheap tinsel floor. I bat my lashes at Boyfriend, grind my hips hard into the swell of his crotch. Mimic all the sounds from a porn video, where it’s always gauzy and something’s being pushed into the girl as she wiggles and squirms, a back-up dancer in his holy camera light. Oh, yeah. Mm. Yes. Fuck me like that. Harder. Faster. Make me your bitch. Come in me. Come inside me. That’s it. God. God. God. God.
3.
I wash the sweat shining off my face, the cum from my clothes. I dab concealer for each purple suck-bruise, a strange confession.
4.
In church again, the marble-saints are glistening, dehydrated summer. Maria walks up to me wearing a ruthless braid. I think she might say, I know you had sex this morning or, I know you’re not straight, but instead she just sits down and doesn’t look at me, her face blank, unreachable.
“Is that preacher coming in today?” I mouth, in want of better words. Maria says no but nothing else. Her nails are too sharp, making angry moons against her palms. I wince, as if my nerves are touching hers.
I watch Maria lick the flesh of her lip, shaky. I bite my cheek for something to do, feel the blood rushing in like a current. She is so pretty it hurts me to look at her. Then, I try again: “do you want to go to class?”
Maria nods, emptily, reaches for my hand but doesn’t touch it. I think about the curve of her neck, how it bends swan-like into her shoulder. I want to consume her jaw. I want to hold her in fistfuls, write psalms against her mouth and thrash. Wrapped in each other’s curls. I flutter into her. Tongue, take me now. A flesh of drowning. Maria smiles, lips tight, and the space between us quivers like a wounded animal.
Iris Preaker is a sad girl writer and a junior in high school. Her work has been recognized by FEED Lit Mag and the Adroit Journal. You can find her on Twitter at @bechdelss.