You confess your deepest darkest secret to Hillary
You don’t really remember how you two became friends again, but you also don’t really remember how you two stopped being friends in the first place. What you do remember is Hillary stealing your glasses when you were trying to listen to Mrs. Sperling’s lecture about x and what x meant in an equation. You remember your hands in the air, blindly fumbling around for your glasses outside in the hallway when you couldn’t find them on your desk. It’s not as if you’re completely blind without your glasses, you’re just completely nearsighted and everything in the hallway just seemed so fuzzy. The lighting was really bad so that probably explains it. But you eventually found them, right next to the fire extinguisher in the middle of a section of lockers. You remember crying right there and then in front of all the 7th graders returning to their lockers in between classes. But you push that thought from your mind because now you’re 13 and you’re no longer that crybaby you were when you were 12. Now you wear contacts and you straighten your hair, and now you and Hillary are friends again. She’s actually your best friend, well, new best friend—you hope at least. Lindsay was your best friend before, even in 7th grade when no one was your friend, but ever since Lindsay’s boobs grew in over the summer, she and every guy in the entire 8th grade have been distracted by them. You’re still not sure if they’re real or not, but you defend her when people say she’s stuffing.
You and Hillary have become such good friends that you feel like you can tell her anything. And you almost do. You almost blurt out the thing that you were scared to tell anyone else, even Lindsay, who you used to tell everything to, but you just know that if you told her this she would totally judge you and think you’re a freak. But now that you’re lying in bed with the lights turned off and you’re still not tired or ready for sleep, you feel that maybe this moment is the perfect time to tell Hillary because if you can’t tell your best friend, who can you tell?
“Hillary?” you ask quietly. Part of you is hoping that she’s actually dozed off and you can simply lie underneath the covers and play Snake on your cell phone until you doze off, too.
“What?”
Your heart pounds in your chest. “Umm, I was just wondering. Do you ever watch Cinemax?”
“Uh, yeah, so do you. We just watched Cruel Intentions on Cinemax tonight.” She sounds annoyed and you almost decide to abandon your confession, but then her voice plays in a higher pitch and you can tell she’s in a better mood. “Don’t you love that movie?”
“Oh my god, so much.”
“Ryan Phillippe is so hot.”
“Oh my god, he’s so fucking hot.”
“I’m tired,” Hillary says and turns over onto her side.
“Oh right, yeah. I’m sorry.” You turn onto your side and force your eyes to close.
“Wait.” She rolls over onto her stomach and looks at your back in the dark.
“What?” You don’t turn around to face her.
“What about watching Cinemax?” You can tell she’s curious by the way she says “watching Cinemax,” like there’s a secret lurking behind the words and if she can only say it in just the right intonation, she’ll find it out.
“Oh, umm, just wondering.” Maybe you shouldn’t tell her.
“Yeah…” she pries.
“It’s silly.”
“What?” she teases. “You can tell me.”
You imagine that smile that’s spread across her lips now. You’re too scared to face her in the darkness. “You promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Oh my god, I would never tell anyone a secret if you told me to keep it secret. You can totally trust me. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, totally. It’s just kind of…embarrassing, you know.”
“Chloe, I would never judge you. You have to believe me.”
You decide that you do believe Hillary, even though you two will eventually stop being friends…again because you’ll realize that she judges everyone and talks behind their backs and betrays all of their secrets, but you won’t realize that until she does it to Lindsay, and that hasn’t happened yet, so you have absolutely no reason not to trust her. And anyway your conscience just feels horribly guilty about sitting in front of the TV night after night, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so that you can see the late night programs full of very naked people in very naked positions, and you have to be able to tell someone.
“I watch Cinemax late at night.” You exhale for what feels like the first time in months.
“Me too.”
“No, I mean, like after midnight.”
“Yeah, me too,” Hillary says quietly.
“Oh, okay.” You lie silently for a moment, trying to think of something clever and witty to say to let Hillary know that it’s really cool that you two have created this amazing bond together over softcore porn, well, mostly softcore. You haven’t yet told her about watching the video you found in your brother’s room or the Showtime program you couldn’t take your eyes off of, which was a bit more hardcore, but you don’t need to get into that just yet because even you don’t really know how to explain your fascination with watching the lesbians in black latex who aren’t really lesbians anyway since there’s a naked guy playing with them, so you figure it’s best to stick to the details of the softcore Cinemax shows, but before you can say anything…
“I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.” Hillary quickly turns over.
“Night.” You smile into the darkness and close your eyes, but your smile fades when you wonder why she didn’t express any relief by your mutual confession.
°°°
Lindsay invites Justin into the girls’ bathroom
Lindsay pokes her head inside and smiles when she realizes they’re alone. She gives Justin the signal to come and she leads him into the girls’ bathroom by the hand. His hands are soft and small and sweaty. Hers are larger than his, though thinner with long fingers, which her music teacher says are great for playing the piano, but she’s too scared to take a lesson. At 13, she’s already reached her final height and weight at 5’6 and 120 lbs. but Justin’s only 5’4 and won’t hit his growth spurt for another year and a half. By then her cheeks will blush ruby red and her dark brown eyes will look towards the ground every time she spots him in the 9th grade hallway. She’ll poke her head into her locker or her geometry book when he passes by and knowingly smirks at the back of her head. She’ll hide in the girls’ bathroom, suffocating on cigarette smoke exhaled from Michelle, the one and only Goth girl in the grade, who’ll be wearing an oversized black trench coat and frizzy purple hair. Michelle won’t comfort her, even though her eyes betray her shame. Two years before, Michelle would have smiled wide and waved giddily as she passed Lindsay in the hallway, but that was when Michelle still wore bright pink tank tops and tight jean shorts from the Limited Too and straightened her hair with her brand new flat iron. Justin’s hand, dripping sweat from unknowing anticipation, slips from hers as she locks the bathroom door. There’s only 15 minutes left in lunch, so she better act quick.
°°°
You wonder where Lindsay went
“God, what took you so long?” you ask Lindsay when she reclaims her seat next to you in the cafeteria.
“Seriously? Can’t I go to the bathroom without being harassed?” Her brown eyes bulge, telling you to give it a rest. But you won’t.
“I’ve been waiting for…ever.” You scooch closer to her and whisper, “It’s been so awkward here. Everyone’s just gossiping about Hannah’s new highlights and Hillary is totally ignoring me.” You give her your best sad-puppy-dog-best-friend eyes and plead, “I need you here. Don’t you get that?”
“It’s okay, it’s just lunch,” she says. But you know and she knows, it’s not just lunch. You know it because last year you and Lindsay were exiled to your own table at the other end of the cafeteria and you worked really hard to get the two of you seats at Hillary’s table this year. You’d never admit it but sometimes you miss it when it was just the two of you sitting across from each other, arguing about whether Backstreet Boys or ‘N Sync was the better boy band. You were a Nick Carter fan and Lindsay was a Justin Timberlake fan, but you showed your dedication to Nick much more than she ever could, even going as far as wearing a multicolored bracelet with his name on it until Nick Coller saw it and told the whole class that you were obsessed with him.
You give Lindsay a judging look and ask, “What were you doing in there anyway? You were gone way longer than it takes to pee and you swore you would never do anything else in there.”
“Nothing,” she says, but you spy a small smile creeping up on her round face.
Before you can respond, the bell rings and Lindsay leaps out of her seat and runs ahead of the rest of the grade making their way towards their next class.
°°°
Lindsay stares at her breasts in the mirror
Lindsay pushes out her lips and gives her best sexy pout to her mahogany-framed mirror. She almost looks like Jennifer Love Hewitt from Can’t Hardly Wait if she squints in just the right way. She cups her hands around her bare breasts, feeling the weight of each double D. Lindsay was just as surprised as everyone else when they grew inch by inch, day by day over the summer. She would’ve thought she was imagining them if it weren’t for the scarlet lines that stretch the length of her soft thin skin.
She remembers sobbing in her mom’s arms and listening to her soothing words, “Don’t worry, honey. I promise they’ll fade away.” But what would her mom know of it? With her tiny petite frame and her small little boobs that have been lifted twice by surgeons so that they stand perfectly in place. Her mom held her in her skin-tight cashmere sweater and smiled down at her daughter’s tears. “If it really bothers you, we’ll get you a reduction when you’re 16.”
She releases her hands and watches them droop down pathetically before her reflection. Closing her eyes, she once again feels Justin’s soggy hands underneath her thin blue shirt. “They’re amazing,” he says and she reaches down to unzip his pants.
°°°
You watch your brother’s videotape again…
You sneak into your brother Ryan’s room when he leaves to visit his friend, Ben, after dinner. Your dad is upstairs listening to the ball game on the radio, while your mom is washing the dishes. Routine and the fact that it’s only the first inning tell you that neither of them will disturb you unless you disturb them first, which is something you don’t plan on doing, so you feel comfortable pushing the tape into the VCR and watching as the blue screen of the TV morphs into people going at it in ways you thought only animals did. You rewind back to the beginning. You always rewind back to the beginning. You like to see the couple coming back from a nice evening at the opera. She’s wearing a green sequin dress, which looks like the dress your mom wore to Ryan’s bar mitzvah, but you try not to think about that except that you are always reminded of it from watching the beginning. Thankfully she looks nothing like your mom. She has long platinum blonde hair and bright blue eyes, which you suspect are fake, and enormous breasts, which you also suspect are fake, that stick up at the top of her dress, which barely covers her nipples. You know because you’ve seen her nipples so many times that you remember exactly where they sit in the dress.
Her dress comes off so easily. It isn’t like when you used to struggle with the zipper behind you and you had to slide it in front so you could unzip yourself. Underneath she’s wearing lingerie but not the type of white and lilac cotton nightgowns you’ve seen in your mom’s closet. Her lingerie is black and slinky and lacy and slides right off, revealing everything and nothing underneath. The man stands in front of her and spreads her legs and pushes her onto the bed behind her and unzips his pants and takes out his penis and it stands on its own in the air. This is something you still can’t comprehend because it doesn’t make sense how it can defy gravity, but it does, and he pushes it hard inside her. He starts breathing hard and you do too, though you’re not really sure why, it just happens, like when your heart beats fast and your face gets all red. The next morning you wake up with three new pimples and you understand that you’re being punished by God or whatever for watching porn.
°°°
Lindsay dreams about Justin and the bathroom
Lindsay doesn’t want to, but she dreams about him anyway. She feels one hand squeezing her breast as the other one leads her hand beneath the elastic of his red and blue-checkered boxers. She lets her hand creep down further, wanting to show that she’s in control, but what she finds isn’t what she expected at all and she feels her eyebrows squishing and her forehead wrinkling and she hopes he doesn’t notice. He doesn’t. He’s too busy closing his eyes and smiling. She accepts that this is just how it is. It’s small and smooth and thin and slippery like his hand earlier. She squeezes it and pulls it how she thinks she’s supposed to—not too hard because she’s worried she’ll hurt it and she feels it grow a little, but it stays small in her hand and she squeezes more, but it doesn’t grow anymore and she worries that she’s done something wrong, but she’s worrying for no reason because Justin is still smiling. She drops down to her knees but not for the reason that he thinks. She just wants to get a better look at it; he doesn’t understand that and she doesn’t try to explain when he pushes her head closer to it, and she does what she thinks she’s supposed to do—she opens her mouth wide and she lets it sit there, wet and small and hard, and now covered in her spit.
°°°
You and Lindsay go to Hillary’s for a party
Lindsay’s mom pulls her Lexus into Hillary’s newly paved black driveway, unlike yours, which creates a lake every time it rains. You only live a block away so you could’ve walked, but why refuse the opportunity to arrive in luxury?
“Have a fun time, girls. Try to save some of the gossip for the tabloids.” She laughs to herself.
“Mom!” Lindsay whines.
“I know I know, I’m being sooo uncool. But thankfully your nice friend, Chloe, is willing to pretend that I just dropped you off silently like a good chauffeur. Isn’t that right, dear?”
“Whatever you say, Mrs. Berry.” You flash her your most innocent smile, of course without teeth. You’d rather pretend that your braces are invisible to the world.
“There you have it,” she says. “Please say hi to Hillary’s mother for me, won’t you?”
Lindsay just stares and scowls.
“I will,” you say.
“Thank you, dear.” She smiles at you before speeding off towards the mall. You like Mrs. Berry. She’s cute in that chic young mom kinda way, though you know she’s already in her 40s. You think of your own mother back at home, watching The Bold and The Beautiful and wearing one of her worn aprons, not because she’s actually going to cook something—she never does—but because she thinks they’re comfortable. Even though it’s a kinda totally lame thing to wish for, you really wouldn’t mind coming home one day and seeing your mom standing by the hot oven, waiting for a tuna casserole to finish baking. It’d be even better if it was ready on the table, which was actually set for a family dinner instead of everyone grabbing whatever leftover delivery food is sitting in the fridge and then eating it alone in front of their respective TVs (or radio if it’s your dad). And while it seems that this really is an important issue for you now, it won’t bother you at all again until you’re sitting on a couch and wondering why it is you hate your mother when you take advantage of the option of free therapy during your second semester of sophomore year (though of course it isn’t really free since your parents and student loans are paying $45,000 a year for tuition) and while that’s in the not too distant future the even closer future won’t have you worry about this at all since you’ll be eating most of your dinners at either Lindsay’s house or at Maya’s, who you’ll meet in less than a year.
You can’t believe it. Jackie, Amy, Staci, Rachel, Molly, Samantha, and Hannah and her highlights are all sitting in a circle on the lavender-carpeted floor of Hillary’s bright-lit basement. And you and Lindsay are in the circle too. With them. “Pinch me,” you whisper to Lindsay and she rolls her eyes. You scratch the carpet and lift your fingers to your nose. God, it even smells like lavender.
Hillary skips down the stairs and plops herself next to Jackie and her smooth black curls. “I’ve got something for you, ladies,” she squeaks. She holds up a bottle of Coors Light and takes a swig before passing it to Jackie.
You’re in awe. “Where’d you get that?”
“What do you think big brothers are for?” Hillary smiles wide, baring her newly bleached teeth. “And there’s plenty more where that came from, ladies.”
You watch each girl take a sip of beer as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. When the bottle comes to you, you hear your mother’s words warning you against the evils of drugs. You see the DARE police officer standing before you at the beginning of the school year, handing you a small piece of purple paper, a pledge stating that you won’t take any drugs, a pledge that you fully intended to keep. But everyone knows that alcohol isn’t a drug and beer barely qualifies as alcohol anyway. So you take the first sip of what will be just one of so many sips later in your life. And it tastes so nasty, like drinking spoiled barley oat water. Your mouth wants to spit it out, right onto the floor, but your brain reminds you of all the eyes—blue and green and even violet-colored contacts are watching you and judging you as you swallow the warm liquid. You wash it down with another disgusting sip.
“God Chloe, don’t be such an alchy.” Hillary grabs the bottle from your lips and brings it to hers. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we play spin the bottle?” she asks, but you know she’s not really asking. And most of the girls just nod and smile as if it’s the best idea in the world.
“But we’re just girls.” Lindsay states the obvious.
“What better way to practice for the real thing?” Hillary says amongst giggles.
“It’s stupid,” Lindsay says. You pinch her and mouth the words “shut up” so only she can see.
“What? Is it too immature for you, Lindsay?” Hillary says sweetly, but you know there’s nothing sweet about her words.
“Whatever.” Lindsay quickly jumps up from the floor and walks over to Hillary, staring straight into her glistening green eyes. “This is stupid.”
Hillary smiles even wider and you wonder how her cheeks have enough strength to hold her skin in place. “You’re right, Lindsay. It’s stupid. Maybe we should all just skip ahead to giving blow jobs in the girls’ bathroom?”
Lindsay gasps as silence takes hold of the room. All eyes turn to Hillary and then Lindsay and then back to Hillary. Like wild wolves, they’re all craving the next meaty phrase that will spew out of Hillary’s mouth. Only you are still looking at Lindsay’s red round face and thinking of the thin plastic blonde woman from your brother’s video, holding an erect penis in her hand and wrapping her full lips around it. You never noticed how thick Lindsay’s lips are until now.
“That’s right,” Hillary continues in a sickeningly sweet tone. “Justin squealed your dirty little secret. And speaking of little…I hear he’s…” she pauses for emphasis, “tiny. But I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen it. Maybe Lindsay…” she eyes the whole group, “can enlighten us?”
You watch as Lindsay sprints up the stairs and pushes through the basement door. You already know where she’s headed. You hear the other girls making declarations of, “Oh my god.” Or, “That’s so disgusting.” But they all sound the same to you and now as you scan the room, you realize that they all look the same to you, too. You scramble to your feet and slowly walk over to Hillary and slap her as hard as you can across the face. “What’s wrong with you?” you say before running up the stairs and heading towards the bathroom.
You smile at Hillary’s mom as you walk past her sitting on the white couch in the living room. She smiles the same wide smile that Hillary had only moments before and you wonder what would happen if you slapped her too. You knock on the bathroom door. No one answers. “It’s me,” you say. No one answers. “I’m alone,” you say. You hear the handle squeak as the door moves inwards and the bright light from the bathroom blinds you for a second before you get used to it. You close the door behind you. You sit down on the cold tiled floor next to her and wrap your arms around her.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.
“Okay.”
She hugs you tight and sinks her head into your shirt, drenching your shoulder with her tears. “I hate her,” she says.
“I know.”
You convince Lindsay to walk back with you to your house to spend the night. Your mom doesn’t even turn from the TV when you give her some excuse for leaving Hillary’s so early.
Later that night, you and Lindsay lie in your extra-large twin bed and look up at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars glued to your peach-painted ceiling. For 10 minutes all you hear is your breathing next to hers and you think that maybe she has fallen asleep.
“I just wish I knew her secrets, too.” She breaks the silence.
“I know one of her secrets,” you whisper to the fake sky above.
“Yeah??” She turns to you. “Well…what is it?” She looks at you with eager eyes, anticipating something deliciously horrific.
Part of you feels like you don’t have the right to tell her, but you decide to ignore that part. “She likes to watch porn.”
“Eww.” Lindsay scrunches her nose. “Oh my god, that’s priceless.” She laughs. “I wonder what her little group would think of her if they knew.”
“You can’t tell them.”
“And why the hell not?”
You suck in air before exhaling. “Because I watch it, too.”
She collapses onto her back again and releases an “oh.”
“Can I…” you begin to ask.
“Yeah…”
“Nevermind.” You lose your nerve.
“Just ask. I know you want to.”
You turn from the sky and look at her. “I was just wondering, for curiosity’s sake and all.”
“Yeah…” She smiles, knowing exactly what you’re going to ask.
“What was it like?” Now you’re the one with your wide eyes waiting for some secret to the meaning of life or just the feeling of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a penis.
“Gross.” She giggles.
“Oh.”
“Gross…but okay.”
“Okay? Like it was actually okay?”
“Well, yeah. But he really was tiny.”
“Maybe his balls haven’t dropped yet,” you tease even though you don’t really know what that means anyway.
“Maybe.” She sighs. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Next time I’ll choose better and I’ll know what to do.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Can’t your porn teach you?” she says playfully, but it’s enough to make you regret having told her. She sees the hurt on your face. “I’m just kidding. Actually, you know what we should do?” she asks, but it’s not a question because she doesn’t wait for your response. “We should watch it together.” She’s smiling as she says it excitedly, as if this is a new project you’ll do together like when you made collages of ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, trying to prove to each other who was a better boy band once and for all, and then agreeing to disagree forever on the topic when you realized it was the most impossible thing for either of you to accept defeat or to insult each other’s loves.
You imagine what it’d be like watching together. You can already see the judgmental look she’ll give you when she senses your excitement as you watch the naked people on TV. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. We can make fun of it together and we can learn something useful with it like…” She motions a blow job with her hand and her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek. She looks ridiculous and you laugh.
“Is that what it looks like?”
“I don’t know—it’s not like I was looking in the mirror. But he did. Isn’t that weird?”
“Totally.”
“And I think he liked it.”
“I’m sure he liked it.” You smile encouragingly, even though you have no way of really knowing. “Seriously though, what guy wouldn’t like getting one?”
“But I didn’t know what I was doing. Like for a second I was actually blowing on it, but it doesn’t do anything.” You scan through your memory of all the shows you’ve seen and Ryan’s video and you can’t remember seeing anyone blowing on it. “They just like when you’re sucking it and licking it, but I didn’t know that. See, that’s why I want to watch some porn.” She says the word porn quietly as if someone’s listening through the walls. The walls are pretty thin, so it’s possible. “Anyway, want to?” She halfway smiles and shrugs, waiting for your answer. You decide to give in since she’s your best friend, your only best friend, and best friends are hard to come by these days.
Originally from Baltimore, Suzanne received her B.A. from Emory University before moving to Tel Aviv. Since moving continents, she picked up her M.A. in Creative Writing, a fiancé, and a writing career. Her fiction has appeared in The Writing Disorder, Maudlin House, Blue Monday Review, and elsewhere. Connect with her on Twitter @SuzanneHyman.
