Twenty-One Oviedo

The Fuck Prom party is at the end of an unpaved road on the outer edges of Oviedo, at this girl Vanessa Manrique’s house.

I kick Stella a text when we roll up.

You’re not gonna believe what’s out front.

Stella shrieks when she sees us.

“Dudes!”She catches me in a hug like a half nelson. “What the fuck is this?” she shouts. “You really did it—you escaped! Be Weird... you drove her up here?”

He starts to answer but she jumps on him next and hugs him within an inch of his life.

“You know what you are? You’re James-freaking-Bond, that’s what!”

She turns to Beckett.

“Church Girl!”

“It’s just Beckett,” Beckett says.

“Pfft, I know your name. I’m just so stoked you’re all here!”

As we turn toward the house, B’Rad goes, “Okay, so... I’ll come get you guys in the morning.”

“What are you talking about?” Stella calls back to him. “Get your ass over here!”

“I... okay... I thought this was a girls-only party?”

“We’ll just tell everyone you’re team mascot,” she says. He still doesn’t move. “Look, as long as you understand you’ve got pretty close to zero percent chance of getting laid tonight, you’re gold.”

He jogs to catch up with us. “If I knew I was gonna stay, I woulda changed when these two did.”

Stella goes, “Don’t sweat it, man. You know you look fly as hell.”

As we walk toward the house, Stella tips her head in Beckett’s direction and whispers, “How’d you pull this off?”

“We can share those stories later,” I whisper back. “Right now, I just need to chill out for a while, cuz it’s been intense.”

“Okay, but just so you know? This reads like ‘recruitment’ to the people down the hill.”

“You’re high,” I laugh.

“Whatevs.” She takes the short flight of steps out front two at a time. “Right this way, bitches. First stop: beer and grub.”

“I thought it was wine and women,” I joke as we follow Stella into a room low-lit with all kinds of cool lights, past the open French doors of a side room where one group is watching Carrie around a giant-screen TV. The living room is full of girls dancing and more colorful lights pulsing from a pair of tower speakers. There’s a game of what looks like full contact foosball going on at the back end of the room, but Stella keeps us moving—past the couches and reclining chairs where a few girls are making out, through the kitchen littered with chip bags, and warehouse store–sized tubs of candy, and drink cans, and bottles of alcohol. She opens the back door, and we pop out onto a wooden deck, then down a few steps to a fire pit behind the house.

The air out here is full of starlight and music. Someone strums a guitar and others sing along, and bubbles of laughter pop here and there in a breeze that’s so warm and sweet I could drink it. For the first time all night, I feel like I can exhale. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like an apology.

“Who’s the dude?” some girl asks from across the fire pit as we squeeze in where we can. She’s wearing a soccer jersey with the number 15 on the front.

Stella goes, “That’s B’Rad. Say hi, B’Rad.”

B’Rad lifts his hand as someone jokingly asks, “Is he the MC?” and someone else goes, “Nice suit.” The words instantly evaporate inside the crackling flames of the fire.

“What’s your poison, MC?” number 15 asks B’Rad, but it’s maybe-Naomi who answers from right behind me.

“I’ve got it covered,” she says, stretching forward, passing a can of hard cider so close to my face I can feel the cold pulsing off it.

She rests her hand on my shoulder after B’Rad takes the cider can from her.

“Thanks,” he says.

I inch away from her to give myself a safety bumper, not that maybe-Naomi understands boundaries.

“You’re here,” she says, kneeling beside me. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

I look directly into the fire to avoid making eye contact.

“Unexpected change of plans,” I tell her.

Beckett leans across me. “Natasha, right?”

The heat coming off her could blister a person’s skin if they weren’t careful. It catches me a little off guard.

Meanwhile, maybe-Naomi acts like she’s trying to remember how she knows her.

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “From the other day. Hey.”

“Yeah, hey.”

But maybe-Naomi turns her back on Beckett like she’s a side note.

“So, Daya. This is great, right? We can finally have a do-over on that dance from last time. I feel like we stopped before things got interesting.”

“I think I’m just going to hang out here,” I tell her.

She looks from me to Beckett, carving a visual path down the length of her.

“Your call,” she says. “But in case you’re wondering, I operate on the three-strikes plan.”

She pulls herself to her feet.

“One to go,” she adds with a wink.

It isn’t hard to watch maybe-Naomi walk away—it’s definitely a relief when she disappears inside the house. Across the fire pit, Stella and Valentina are kissing on a swing bench. Around the circle from them, the girl with the guitar is showing the girl next to her how to shape her fingers into chords, and number 15 is now deep into a theoretical conversation with B’Rad about the nature of the universe as interpreted by various animated characters.

I look around the circle of faces, and I’m so fucking happy, I can hardly contain it. I finally feel like I’m somewhere I don’t have to hide. Like I can stand still instead of being a moving target. Like my feet can hit the ground without eggshells underneath them. No one here makes me feel broken, or like I need to be fixed, or like I can’t show up and just be who I am. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel ease. That’s all I need tonight.

Just one perfect moment.

Beckett tilts forward.

“Hey, is that a pool back there?” she asks.

I lean around her to see what she’s looking at.

“I think so,” I say.

She stands up, holds her hand out to me.

I take it.

I follow her.

For a split second, I look back at Stella. She’s all eyes. She gestures between me and Beckett, like, How the hell did this happen? but all I can do right now is throw her a peace sign as we kick down a handful of steps and around a row of hedges to the pool area.

Beckett and I stretch out side by side on a lounge chair, letting the shifting blue light from the water lap over us. Starlight pours through the sky like sugar crystals, vanishing as it hits the arc of city lights in the distance. The guitar notes floating over from the fire pit are like summer’s version of a snowdrift.

Beckett shivers, and I feel her relax into me. I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe she’s here. With me. Staring into a flawless sky, searching the stars for constellations, attuned to every subatomic shift around us—the soft breeze that picks up a few loose strands of her hair and brushes them against my face. Her foot, tipped to the side so the toes of our shoes are touching. Her fingers reaching for mine.

“I like your hands,” she says. “I feel like they know things.”

My head spins the way it did on the pontoon boat that night, when I had a little bit of weed in my system.

“My hands know things?” I say.

Her laugh comes out in this soft puff of almost-embarrassment. “Yeah. I think they do.”

“Like what?”

She lets her fingers weave between mine. In. And out. And around.

“Like the shape of things. The way lines can move. When to keep them still. The saturation of colors.” She laughs again. “I don’t know. It sounds weird, but... I think artists know how to find the stories in everything.”

“You’re an artist,” I say. “What’s telling you a story right now?”

She takes a deep breath, and goes, “The air.”

I wait to see if she says any more about it, but that’s all she gives me.

In a whiff of laughter, I go, “Were you going to elaborate, or...”

She rolls toward me, tucks her head into the curve of my neck. Our fingers are living a life of their own and I’m barely breathing through it.

“It’s like... every time the water ripples, or a cricket chirps, or... your heart beats?”

“You can hear that?”

“Yeah. With every beat, waves of energy lift into the sky. And they keep rippling that way forever, because sound is infinite. Y’know?”

Everything is infinite right now.

Our fingers wind together, touch fingertip to fingertip, stroke soft, then not so soft, but I keep bumping against her promise ring. She slides it off, slips it onto my pinkie this time. I don’t know how to feel about the fact that it fits.

Nothing about her purity promise fits what I’m thinking.

“Your heart is beating so hard,” she says. “I can feel it all the way into my body.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She shifts again. “Can I put my hand on your chest?”

I guide her to the space just above my rib cage.

“Wow,” she whispers. “What are you thinking about that’s got your heart beating so fast?”

“Truth?” I ask.

“Definitely.”

“I’m thinking about kissing you,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about kissing you all day.”

She rolls so she’s half on top of me.

“What’s stopping you?” she says.

I can’t hold her close enough, kiss her deep enough, touch her soft enough or hard enough to feel like anything I’m doing is good enough. I don’t know where to go, what to do. I don’t want to suck at this.

I ask her, “Is this okay?” and she says yes again, and again, and I can’t keep up with the infinity of her yes. I kiss her like kissing her makes absolute sense. I kiss her like kissing her puts the planets into alignment. I kiss her like I will lose my soul if we don’t kiss, if I don’t take the clips out of her hair, if my hands don’t get lost in the curls that hang loose around both our faces, if her hands don’t explore my throat and my chest, if our fingers don’t discover each other’s breasts, if our breath doesn’t fill the sky, if our lungs don’t swallow the stars whole so they can go supernova inside us. I kiss her like I’m not terrified, like I’m not confused as hell about being both terrified and electrified by kissing her.

We surface with her face still in my hands, and I search her eyes—back and forth, over and over. Is this real? Is this okay? Does it matter what happens tomorrow as long as this can happen tonight?

I lift my hand to stroke Beckett’s face, and the lights all around us glint off her ring on my finger. I want to throw that ring at the moon like I did with the matches. I want to set fire to the idea of purity that says it’s better to get groped at a church dance by a drunk boy than for two girls to lie under the stars in a perfect moment, asking if it’s okay to kiss and touch.

Beckett says, “You look really intense right now.”

“This feels really intense,” I tell her. “Doesn’t it feel that way to you?”

“Well, sure...”

“No, but I mean... doesn’t it freak you out at all? Being here? Like this?”

She presses into me, as if her lips, her tongue, her breath are the only answers to the questions I can barely hold inside me. I’m desperate to know how this can make sense, how it can be real, how I can trust that it won’t evaporate into dreams and mist by sunrise.

She swings one leg over me, straddles me as she bends forward to kiss me again and again. She moves against me, and as I lift up off the lounge chair, she leans back and pulls her blouse over her head, and my mind can’t process how perfect she is.

“It’s okay to touch me,” she whispers, sliding my hand inside her bra. I’m shook by how soft she is, how connected and lit up I am. How being with her like this is so good, it’s almost painful.

I press into her soft and easy, the way I’d catch snowflakes on my tongue. I ask her, “Does this feel good? Is this okay?” She moans and whispers her answers to me.

A couple of girls stumble tipsy and laughing down the stairs leading to the pool. I panic for a moment, hold my breath, hoping it’s dark enough that they can’t seeus-see us.

“Oops,” one of them says. “I guess this spot’s ocupado.”

She giggles again, but the other girl goes, “This whole house is ocupado—damn.”

They leave, but they never really feel gone after that.

This isn’t the first-time vibe I’ve fantasized about all these years. I always pictured a candlelit room, and bubbles spilling gently from a fancy tub, and rose petals, and something sparkly to drink that isn’t champagne. I wanted that with Beckett. I wanted her first time to be perfect, too.

“You’re so beautiful, Daya,” she whispers against my mouth.

I kiss her, because I don’t know how to respond. Beautiful is a word reserved for girls who look like her. But I feel beautiful, being with her like this.

She takes my hand, guides it to her pants, helps me unzip them. When I slip my fingers inside, she makes sure they go where she wants them to.

Her smile melts into my kiss as her body melts into my hands. She tells me what feels good, whispers where to touch her, where to kiss her. Every sound she makes detonates inside me.

“I want you to feel good,” she says.

I want that too. Wanted it for so long... thought about it... fantasized...

But in the privacy of my room, things feel different. There isn’t a crowded fire pit a short distance away, no drunk never-prommers stumbling into our space. And having someone touch me is a lot different from touching myself—that’s something I wasn’t expecting. I’ve never had to tell myself what feels good, what I like, what I want.

“Are you okay?” she keeps asking.

“Definitely,” I say. And it is, all of it. It feels amazing. She feels amazing.

But also, I think I’ve psyched myself out a little.

We touch and kiss deep into the night. By the time she falls asleep, I’m pretty sure she came at least twice.

She’s apologized at least that many times because I couldn’t quite get there, even though I don’t think that’s something anyone needs to apologize for.

For a long time after she falls asleep, I lie still, watching the Milky Way swirl around us. I lost my virginity tonight. With Beckett Wild. And she lost hers to me. In what universe does that get to happen?

I hope she’s right, though. I hope that sound waves do ripple into the universe forever. Because that would mean that every breath and heartbeat of this night is already eternal.