We sit outside in the lunch area, café umbrellas dotting over the student-made wooden picnic tables, their short shadows polka-dot-ing the dirt, avoiding all the seats where students sit and sweat. We are at our table, front left corner, in our seats. We sit on the proper seat parts of the tables, except for her. She sits on the table’s surface, her slender starry night-encrusted thigh resting on my shoulder as I peer up at her. It’s her birthday, she’s fourteen, and the last of us to turn it. She is on her throne, we all sit in reverence below her, just as she commands. She tells us its time, she’s bored, and we begin to give her our offerings. The others do well, but I take pride when I realize I know her best, I am closest to the mystery that is her. I know the way to her heart– or I hope I do.
My offering time comes last in the circle, and I hand over a jar of caramel sauce. She is sugar, she lives on sweet. Grinning, she opens the jar. I’ve given her no spoon, she has no ice cream to pour it over, but she doesn’t want those distractions. Peering up at her, I can tell her world is now small, full only of her and caramel. She places the lid on the table beside her, I shift it away, worried the lid’s sticky inside will ruin her skirt, which flows short in the wind around my head. She sees none of it, I see only her. She grasps the caramel jar with both hands, raising it above her head so it hits the sunlight, her holy grail shimmering in the midday. We all watch, the table silent as she tilts her head back, eyes fixed on the caramel until they can no longer see it, then she closes them, and opens her mouth.
Jaw unhinging, her braces blinding in the light, she slowly shifts the caramel jar, savoring the taste of the dry, dusty air as we all wait painful seconds, the caramel inching down. It makes contact, and she’s misjudged it, the caramel hits her metal-jeweled teeth, it spills on her bottom lip, pouring down to her chin. I have the instinct to take my fingers and wipe the sweet stick from her face, but that would mean getting on her level, and distracting her from her ritual. The rest of the table grows disinterested, disgusted, they turn away to eat and talk, but I do not hear. She has trapped me. Does she know I’m watching her? She’s corrected the caramel’s course, it pours straight onto her outstretched tongue now, her throat bobbing periodically. She doesn’t pause to breathe, just lets the caramel overflow her mouth whenever she must suck in air. It pours over her chin, down the sides of her neck, before getting soaked up by the collar of her white tee. When the jar is finished we go to class, she wears the yellowed stick like a birthday button.
We don’t like farmwork. Our parents say it’s the best kind of schooling for us, with how rough normal places are. Stuffy classrooms and too many students, they say. The greenhouse suffocates us, the fields bake us in the sun, with an evenness achieved by the convection of the hot-dry winds. Once it’s over 102 degrees we can go inside. It used to be 100 degrees, but we couldn’t keep the farm running. The school needs money, so we wash worms from lettuce, pulling dirt from behind its many ears. Weeding is the worst. We’re meant to be weeding the dirt lawn, pulling every spot of green because someone decided they weren’t worthy, but we don’t want to. So we walk the farm instead, dust collecting on us, crusting us like well baked cookies, too-big gloves hanging off our too-small hands as we move through the air, dry burning at our eyes. We stop at the chicken coop, looking over the patchwork fence. It’s not tall enough, they get out, and we chase them, throw them back over it.
Everyone squints in the sunlight, but Mom made me wear sunglasses because of my headaches. I can see more than they can. While they look out over the fields, laughing at the hunched working students and the way their forms ripple far off with the heat, I watch the chickens. I see one laying just inside the coop, the others peck at it. It’s prone, belly up and wings splayed, and its feathered underside is peeled back to reveal its insides. Someone close by looks over, sees, they scream, they all scream, and run from the dead chicken. It’s not dead. I stay by the too-short fence, I watch it closely. I don’t know anatomy, my recent science final was to tie a rope correctly around a goat and lead it to the far pens. The inside of the chicken is pink and red, and there are many squishy shapes in it, of varying hues. Some are almost purple. But there is one in the center that’s moving, I feel something within me move too, to the same rhythm, and I know it’s the heart. Seconds or minutes go by, then the chicken’s heart stops beating. Mine keeps beating, and I go to my next class.
We sit behind the woodshop, sanding knives. They’re supposed to be for slicing butter, to sell at market, but we like to talk and can’t do that at the band saw or the lathe, so we sand our little knives to dust every class period, and we smuggle them away in our backpacks, imagining someday we could slice skin. Someday the teacher may make us sand spoons. We lounge behind the woodshop, in a patch of shade. We sit on piled cinder blocks and gossip about everyone. Someone across our circle stares at me, he stares lower than my eyes, to the sweaty dark line in the middle of my chest, to where my new boobs in their uncomfortably tight trainer bra sit. I like his staring, I’ve heard it means he likes me. I lean forward and watch him mirror the move while I sand my knife. She sits beside me, above me, crouched over me as I rest on the woodshop’s metal wall. I wonder if she sees him staring. I wonder if she’s staring too. When we’re done I wrap my sandpaper around my knife and put it in my backpack. None of us worry about the dust sanding creates, we can’t see it anyway, against all the red dirt coating every surface, the smog slime-ing our lungs. Why everyone says they love Southern California is beyond us.
We have farmwork again, and we don’t want to again. But the teacher is wiser this time, she watches us like a hawk, we can’t all escape. I resign myself to weeding the long rows of kale in the field, but she grabs my hand, her long silken blonde hair brushing against our exposed arms. She whispers her hot-wet breath into my ear, tells me we’re getting out of this. When the teacher’s looking at another one of us and she and I are at the end of a row, we run. We go to the barn, then cut through its empty darked middle path, full of old student projects; a trebuchet, a race car with no propulsion, a rusty guillotine. We run and jump and dash through it all and I laugh with nerves and she laughs with excitement. We reach the other end of the barn and the outside light blinds me, and I let it, let her grab my hand again and pull me. I see once more when we’re inside, she’s pulled me into one of the new bathrooms; it’s one big room, with a full door, and all-gender. Many of the girls refuse to use it, because it’s all-gender. The boys don’t care. I don’t care. She doesn’t care.
We giggle and sit on the bathroom floor, not seeing the grime covering us or it. She unzips her boots and pours fun size chocolate bars out of them. She stole them from her mom’s office. She spreads them out across the floor between us and tells me how many I can have, slightly less than half, and then she commences the feast. The chocolate is molten, hot and sticky, it melts out of the wrappers and onto our hands, our faces, our shirts. She takes hers off, and I learn she’s wearing a light blue sports bra. She doesn’t play sports. She asks me to take my shirt off and I do. She stares at my chest, at the grayed-white training bra that doesn’t fit right. She tells me my boobs are big, then looks down towards the remaining chocolate. We finish our feast, we wipe the evidence on the insides of our shirts and then we trade, and I wear hers for the rest of the day. It’s tight, the chocolate sticks and seeps into my skin.
I get out of class, entering the farmhouse hallway as the other two classrooms begin to empty into it too, and I immediately get sucked into the mass of students. The throng pushes towards the door, but I press myself against the wall, sticking to it. They begin to find me, and we join together. We link our arms against the wave and wait for the rest, our backpacks brushing, keychains clinking. I am at the end of the line, I wait for her, and she comes to me, she joins and pulls our train towards the door. She doesn’t wait for anyone, she doesn’t have to. She stops at the door and I open it, and as we spill out into the front lawn our chain melts apart in the heat, we become a circle, a blob, moving in a line with all the other blobs back to the lunch area. One by one the blobs break off to their tables, and ours is last. We surround it, take our places. I sit facing the rest of the lunch area and she sits on the tabletop to my right, back to the rest of the students, facing me. She moves closer, rests her thigh on my shoulder, and we chat together in the sweltering sun.
