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One Pink, One Black

 a short story
by Marie Goyette

Holly McGrath was fourteen years old the summer that her half brother Jackson began spending all his time in their parents' car. The car was a salmon-colored '78 Monte Carlo with steel gray leather seats that stuck to their thighs like a giant band-aide. For the most part, it sat roasting in the same spot in the driveway, as perennial as the patches of fringed sagebrush that reached across the yard. Holly and Jackson lived so near their schools, the Lordsburg Library, where their mother worked part time, and Smiths' Food & Drug that they rarely found themselves strapped into the back, jostled left and right until the engine sputtered to a stop. But the summer after Jackson's second grade year, he would shuffle out there every weekday morning, kicking up red dust and pebbles, and stay there until it was time for dinner. He always held a book or two under his arm, although he never read them, and a bottle of water in his hand their mother made him take, from which he rarely drank. Whenever anyone walked by, they would see him just sitting there, his tennis shoes flush against the back of the driver's seat, barely reaching, his fingers interlaced and resting upon his head, his books stacked neatly upon his lap. Droplets of sweat formed and swelled upon his forehead and upper lip; when they became too heavy, they'd stream down the lines of his face and neck, dampening his tee shirt. Sometimes when Holly was trying to get his attention, she would stand there long enough to notice this, but he never looked up at her until she knocked or called his name.

Holly was finding it difficult to tolerate Jackson's aberrant behavior. The heat, her mother said, played a large role in her short-temperedness. In Southwestern New Mexico in mid-July, "tempers'll flare like the high-noon sun," she told her. "Just be patient."

Ellen McGrath wasn't worried about her son's behavior. When she asked him why he was spending so much time in the car, he'd shrugged and mumbled, "Not much else to do."

He wasn't hurting himself or anyone else, she reasoned. But to keep him from becoming dehydrated, she insisted on the water bottle, and that he keep the windows rolled down, although he'd occasionally disobey her, claiming he'd forgotten. Sometimes, when the temperature crept towards a hundred degrees, she'd tell him to come inside and made sure he'd changed clothes and eaten something before he went back out.

"Don't you think it's strange?" Holly asked her mother. "He just sits there. He's not doing anything."

"Neither are you," she said, motioning towards Holly's limp body sprawled upon the couch. "At least Jackson's gotten out of the house."

Holly rolled her eyes so far up that the backs of her eyes stung.

Most of Lordsburg didn't know that Jackson and Holly were only half siblings. Holly's biological father left shortly after she was born; she had adopted Jackson's father as her own. If their mother didn't reference at least every other month "Holly's rat bastard biological father," she might never know that she and Jackson didn't share a father. The two were as close to identical as a girl and a boy five years apart could be. Like their mother's, their skin was as delicate and their pallor as rare in their town as a snowflake. Holly and Jackson were two of several handfuls of white children in their schools; the majority was Hispanic. Their hair and eyes were simple brown, their faces thin. When embarrassed, they both flushed a deep warm pink, the rush of pulsating blood in their faces easily visible through their skin, and their cheeks appeared to swell. They each had a sprinkling of freckles across their shoulders and, they were told by their mother's Avon lady friend, beautiful long eyelashes. Sometimes Holly would tease him a la Little Red Riding Hood: "Oh, Jackson! What long eyelashes you have!" And he'd giggle and say, "The better to bat you with!" while running after her, flapping his arms like a rabid bat.

Jackson's father, Holly's stepfather, was Ron McGrath, who believed both his son and stepdaughter to be normal lovely children. Because his wife thought little of Jackson's eccentric behavior, and because he rarely witnessed it himself, as Jackson subconsciously scheduled his time in the car like a nine to five job, Ron had no reason to doubt his son's utter normalcy. During the school year, he served as part time algebra teacher, part time guidance counselor at Lordsburg High, so he dealt with troubled-vulgar, disrespectful, truant-prone, and often knife-wielding-kids on close to a daily basis. Jackson, he knew, was none of these things; he was, in fact, a paragon of good behavior. During the summer months, for extra money, Ron worked at his father's hardware store. He'd generally arrive home, at about 5:30, to find Holly and Jackson setting the table.

When Holly awoke on the third Monday in July, she could feel in her gut and between her thighs that she had gotten her period during the night. Her first period had arrived just six months ago, when she was thirteen, and she'd been heavily disappointed by how unchanged she felt, how little like a woman she felt. From the tone of pride in her voice when her mother told her about "becoming a woman," and the way, a year or two ago, at least once a week at school, one of the sixth or seventh grade girls would show up, walking a little taller, Holly had expected more. But immediately buying pads and sticking them to the inside of her underwear felt more like a chore than anything to be proud of.

When she couldn't find any maxi pads beneath the sink in the hall bathroom, she told her mother she needed to go to the drug store to buy another pack.

With a ten-dollar bill from her mother's purse in her pocket, Holly trudged out of the house and into the sunlight. As she walked, she could feel the makeshift pad she had constructed out of toilet paper beginning to unravel in her shorts. Drumming her fingers on the car and she walked slowly by it, she looked at Jackson in the backseat. His gray tee shirt was drenched in sweat and he was slumped slightly to the right, away from the door.

Holly hadn't been inside the car since the family drove to Tucumcari in early June for a wedding. They'd broken down on I-40, about a hundred miles west of their destination, and had had to wait for the tow truck in the stifling car, comforted only by the occasional blast of wind blown through the window by a passing semi, for an hour and a half. Since then, Holly had felt especially sensitive to high temperatures. The experience hadn't had the same effect on Jackson, who was now wallowing in the white heat. Slumped there on the seat, his mouth was a straight line, but his eyes were bright.

Annoyance, fueled by the blazing sun overhead, overcame Holly. She gripped the searing metal handle and flung open the door. "Scoot," she ordered, and once he had done so and she had flopped down next to him, "Shit, it's hot as hell in here." Holly had recently begun cursing when her parents weren't around.

Jackson shot her a sour look. "You shouldn't talk like that."

"Why the fuck not?" she asked, grinning.

For the past several months, Jackson and Holly had been attending church with Holly's best friend, Allie, and her family so that Ron and Ellen McGrath could have some alone time on Sunday mornings. Ever since the first sermon at St. Joseph's, Jackson had become hyperaware of his actions and their implications. He'd never even heard of hell before he began attending.

He rolled his eyes, something he learned from her. "You just shouldn't, Holly. It's wrong."

"Whatever," she said dismissively, swinging an arm over the seat and leaning towards him. "Why do you come out here anyway? I mean, it doesn't look like you're doing anything." She paused. "Plus, it is Goddamn hot."

"I like it," he said matter-of-factly.

Jackson in fact did not like it, even hated it, but he couldn't tell Holly the truth.

"I like the heat," he added softly. "And the quiet."

Holly snorted. "No sane person likes this much heat or this much quiet." She peeled her left thigh off the seat and let her leg dangle out of the car. "It's weird, Jack. You just sit here."

Staring straight ahead, Jackson shrugged his narrow shoulders.

Holly had grown tired of their static conversation and said, "Well," and shifted in the seat, feeling the toilet paper bunch between her thighs, "I've gotta go buy some maxi pads." It was a vague attempt to elicit some matronly respect.

"See ya," he muttered, still not making eye contact, glad to finally have the car to himself again. A droplet of sweat fell from his brow, streamed along the indentation of his eye, clinging momentarily to his bottom lip before sliding off his chin, onto his shirt.

Holly wiped her own forehead before forcing herself to smirk, to keep her sisterly composure. "Whatever, dude. Bake if you want to."

What no one but Jackson knew was that by confining himself to the hot car day after day, he was punishing himself for doing something he perceived as evil. The day after he committed the act, he decided on the punishment, which he knew needed to take place during the hottest part of the day, and would last through the hottest summer month.

Jackson's best friend was a petite Mexican girl named Lina. On the last day of school, Jackson had led Lina by her little brown hand from their classroom to a small shed behind the school where extra tables, chairs, desks, and other educational paraphernalia were stored. He'd seen something on TV a week ago, on the one movie channel his parents had recently added to their basic cable package, so that the family could have a movie night without driving forty miles to the nearest theater in Silver City. He'd seen a man stroking the crotch of a naked woman. Sheets and arms were strategically placed to avoid overt lewdness. His parents had told him not to watch the new movie channel when neither one of them was around, so when he heard a rustling down the hall, he flipped off the TV and went to the kitchen to make himself a snack. But he couldn't stop wondering what the man was doing. What Jackson knew about sex was that men and women slept in the same bed to make babies. But this wasn't what he imagined it looked like under the covers. It was too one-sided; she was just lying there. Jackson, being just eight years old, was too young to think to look at the expressions on their faces. Rather he read their actions as manifestations of desire. If sex really was what his parents had explained it to be, what he saw hadn't been sex. But if not, he wondered, why was the man doing that? What was he trying to accomplish?

Like a gentleman, Jackson moved two folding chairs out of the way, bent down and, using his hand, swept away the dirt and pencil shavings from the floor's wooden planks, then motioned for Lina to sit down. After he glanced over his shoulder to make sure he'd shut the shed door, he sat down across from her.

"You want to try something with me?" he leaned into her and whispered, sensing, despite nearly complete sexual ignorance, that what he was doing was wrong. "It's something I saw on TV. You'd like it," he said, but then remembered the woman's limp bare body on the bed. The woman wasn't in any pain, as far as Jackson could tell. In fact she seemed very relaxed. But he regretted telling Lina that she'd like it because he didn't know if she would. They were best friends and he had never deceived her in any way. Jackson likened lying to having sex before marriage. Instantly he felt shame, heavy and sour, seep into his gut.

Attempting to recover from the bowels of his hedonism, he stuttered, "Well, I don't know if it will be fun. But, I just want to see something."

Lina was sitting like an Indian in prayer, legs crossed and feet tucked under her, hands folded and resting on her ankles. "Okay," she whispered back. "What is it?"

"Okay, now it's not sex," he said, nearly confident. "But you have to take off your pants."

She looked down at her faded pink pants, at their elastic waistband. Very shyly, she first removed her Velcro tennis shoes, then stood to shimmy out of her pants.

"Underpants too," Jackson whispered, a twinge of an apology in his voice, as she was about to sit back down.

Lina did as he said because she trusted Jackson. She trusted him because he stuck up for her when the clique of white girls in their class would tease her, and because, when no one was around, he'd play dolls with her in her back yard, and because he'd always stop by her house if she missed a day of school. She loved Jackson like a brother. 

"Do you want me to stand?" she said. "Or sit?"

"Sit and lean against the wall."

She sat and they looked at each other for a moment. Lina wanted to please Jackson; there was part of her that believed she owed him something for being so nice to her when he didn't have to.

"I just want to know how something feels," Jackson whispered.

Lina understood what he wanted to do, so she began to inch her legs apart.

If Jackson had looked at her face, he would have pulled her to her feet and given her a shoulder to lean on while she stepped back into her pants. If he had looked at her face, at her eyebrows drooping like teardrops and her front teeth-all still baby teeth-clamped over her bottom lip, he would have known she was terrified. But he didn't look at Lina's face; he only looked at her little legs opening themselves to him.

In her head, Lina counted to thirty while Jackson touched her. It didn't hurt like she thought it might; it was more like he was searching for something. He poked and gently pinched her skin between his thumb and forefinger, sometimes rolling it around like a ball of chewed gum. Once he placed his entire hand over her and held it there for several seconds, as if he was feeling her forehead for a temperature.

When Jackson stopped, he realized he wouldn't yet understand what he'd seen on TV. It was just skin. Touching Lina the way the man had touched the woman didn't make him happy or excited. He could achieve the same sensation from running his fingers over his own lips. Just skin.

At one point as he was touching her, Jackson had looked up at Lina's face. She'd been looking straight ahead, her eyes as dark and glassy as a piece of obsidian rock. Jackson quickly looked away, already ashamed of himself, but having come too far to stop.

Lina began to cry as soon as she snapped the elastic of her pants around her waist. She crumpled back onto the floor and let her face rest on her knee, her tears darkening the corduroy, her little body trembling. Jackson soon began to cry as well, silently, but with genuine remorse for betraying his friend.  

If Holly had known what Jackson did to Lina, she would have hated him instantly. She would have hated him for his perverseness and for attempting to satisfy his sexual curiosities through not only someone weaker and more naïve, but someone he seemed to care about. And for making her imagine what disgust, fear, and shame Lina must have been feeling. She would have hated him for making her recall the time she was ten years old and at a birthday party when her friend's great uncle demoralized the little girl by slapping her rear end and calling her a silly cunt. And for the time just a year ago that their father kissed her goodbye before she left for school and the corners of their lips touched, how his were as hot and dry as the air, and how he pulled back and coldly told her to get going.

If Holly had known what Jackson did, she would have experienced a creeping, shameful jealousy; Jackson was five years younger and of the opposite sex, but already knew more about the vagina than she did. She had never even looked at her own in a hand mirror; it seemed too intimate, too much like looking inside herself, as if she might be confronted with everything about herself that she didn't like, the knowledge of how to fix it, but also a fear too great to utilize that knowledge. Leaving her in an emotional purgatory.

But Holly knew nothing of Jackson's sexual espial and continued to feel simple annoyance towards his refusal to act normally.

Holly climbed out of the car, shut the door firmly behind her, thumping her fist once against the red-hot metal of the door to punctuate her unspoken frustration, and turned to walk away. It didn't occur to her that Jackson's reticence spoke volumes. Being fourteen years old, she assumed his behavior was a direct attempt to irritate her. Once she had walked about two hundred feet, she glanced back, but couldn't see the car through the shrubs in the yard and the thick desert air.

At Smiths' Food & Drug, beach towels and water noodles hung like meat in the window. As soon as Holly walked inside, the frigid air struck her, causing goose bumps to emerge on her arms and legs. A bell dinged above her, announcing her arrival, and the cashier, a boy two grades above Holly in school, looked up from the magazine he was reading, said, "Hey," and smiled.

"Hey," she repeated shyly.

His name was Ciro and his mother taught biology at the high school. Holly knew little more about him than his name and that he was a good dancer. She'd watched him twirl his laughing mother around the gym floor at the Lordsburg High Faculty Christmas Party a year and a half ago. Half mesmerized by his grace and physical confidence, Holly held her father's hands loosely and shifted her weight stiffly from her left foot to her right until the end of the song.

Holly had never seen him working at Smiths' before. "New job?" she said lightly, tossing her chin in the air.

Still smiling, "Yeah," he said, and then added, "Very challenging work," while holding up his magazine. His voice was soft and his tone had a cadence that made it sound musical, a certain curvature around the letters.

"Yeah," she said and giggled and looked away, looked to the floor as she made her way past him.

Maxi pads, tampons, and diapers were located along the back wall, in the right corner of the store. As she made her way back there, she didn't see Ciro look away from her and wondered if he had yet. People had told her that you can know when someone's looking at you without seeing them; you can feel their eyes on you. But Holly had never experienced this. The possibility had once flittered through her mind that no one ever watched her, that her appearance or interactions with the world weren't worthy of anyone's voyeurism.

As soon as Holly emerged from the snack aisle, she looked to her left to make sure Mr. Morgan, the pharmacist, was manning his counter. She hoped he was because buying feminine products still embarrassed her somewhat and she could much more easily look Mr. Morgan in the face during the transaction than Ciro. Mr. Morgan wasn't there, but another man, a large Hispanic man whom she'd never seen before, was, which, happily, would relieve Holly almost entirely of any embarrassment.

The store's selection of maxi pads wasn't great: with wings or without. As Holly was about to pick up With, for that extra bit of security, she saw a box of tampons and picked those up instead. She had never used a tampon and wasn't entirely sure how they worked; all she knew was that it was something you stuck inside you. The thought made her cringe, but she knew her mother used them, women on TV used them, and at least one girl in her grade used them. She figured, how bad could it be? "Womanhood doesn't come easy," her mother told her when she experienced her first menstrual cramps.

Holly slipped the box under her arm, but before she turned around, something else on the wall caught her eye. Between the feminine products and the diapers was a row of small black boxes. Printed across each box in bold red letters was the word "Condoms." Because she was fourteen, and just out of eighth grade, Holly knew what condoms were and what they were for. Sex jokes, which occasionally mentioned condoms, had begun making the rounds when she was in seventh grade and, like learning a language, such knowledge often sinks in without a person's awareness. So she knew what they were and what they looked like. But before today, she had never seen one up close. She scanned the row of boxes. Like with the tampons, there wasn't much of a selection; there was one brand, one style.

Holly noticed, and then felt proud that she had, that the pads, tampons, condoms, and diapers were arranged on the back wall in that order, as if according to sequential need. The diapers, depending on whether they were for a woman in her own infancy or for her child, could come at the beginning or the end, creating a never-ending circle of feminine life.

Feeling somehow confident, somehow inspired, Holly picked up one of the black boxes, reasoning that she was fourteen, half way to fifteen, aware of sex and not entirely unattractive, holding a certain mystique in this town being of the rarer race, surely soon to be sexually active, and stuffed it under her arm above the box of tampons. Then she marched, fists tight, towards the pharmacist's counter.

Before setting her items down, she said, "I can pay for these here, right?"

"Oh, sorry," the man said softly, and then motioned towards the cash register in front of him. "This one is broke." He then pointed towards Ciro at the front of the store and said, "You can pay up there."

If Ciro hadn't seen the man pointing at him, and he hadn't waved Holly over, she would have put the items back and walked the three and a half blocks to the Chevron station, bought a Coke, and used the change to empty the pads out of the machine in the women's bathroom. Instead she only hesitated before walking to the front of the store. As she approached Ciro, the confidence she had been feeling a minute ago, the belief that what she was doing was normal, nothing to raise an eyebrow at, began to fade. She knew that if she saw someone from school buying condoms, she would excitedly whisper it to every friend she had and they would all do the same until the entire town knew. And what would he think about her other purchase? she wondered. Would he even know what the tampons were? If he did, would he be repulsed or captivated by the feminine processes? What would she say if he asked her what they were? Would she waver at the last second and tell him they were for her mother? And would she say that the condoms were for a friend, revealing not only her childishness, but also her acquiescence?

But she couldn't turn back around because Ciro was watching her approach; she believed he might have even seen what she planned to purchase already. When she arrived at the cash register, she dropped her two boxes, one pink, one black, onto the counter as casually as she could, and looked down as she dug into the pocket of her shorts for the money her mother had given her. A moment after she did this, she felt Ciro's eyes on her. It was a feeling so distinct and precise, she felt she could pinpoint the exact area his gaze was concentrated. She felt it first in her eyelids, as if he were trying to catch her eye. Then she felt it in her lips, and smiled nervously. Then each cheek, one then the other, until they flushed a deep pink, just like Jackson's did. It wasn't hard for Holly to find the ten-dollar bill in her shallow pocket, but she let it fumble between her fingers until she collected enough courage to look up.

At Ciro's last job, he worked as a bagger at the Piggly Wiggly in the southwest corner of town. He was fired for drinking a Coke he hadn't yet paid for, but had intended to, the day his boss, Frank, caught his wife cheating on him.

Roughly grabbing his shoulder from behind, Frank had said, "Alright, Rico Suave," a term he used behind the back of every Hispanic male, regardless of age or demeanor, "You're outta here."

For the five months that Ciro had worked there, he'd seen a lot of young Hispanic women come through with condoms, many he knew from school, but not a single white one. Seeing Holly at Smiths' with a box of condoms under her arm caught him off guard, not only because of her skin color, but also because she looked so young. He'd seen her around town, and at various family-friendly functions held by the high school faculty, so he knew who she was.

"Nine sixty-three," Ciro said, his face long, dark, and still.

Holly handed him the bill and said, "Your name's Ciro, right?"

"Yes. And you are Holly." He pronounced it Holy.

"Holly, yeah," she said and smiled, encouraged because he knew her name.

"You're a sophomore?" She knew this because after the Christmas party, she'd looked him up in her friend's older sister's yearbook.

"Well, I'll be a junior when school starts up again," he said and handed Holly her change and receipt.

She remembered she would be a freshman, officially a high-schooler, and said, "Oh, then we'll be at the same school next year." She paused and smiled. "I'll be in ninth." She paused again. "A freshman."

Ciro had thought she was younger and instantly felt less dirty for finding her attractive. "You need a bag?" he asked.

Holly told him that she did, so he put both boxes into a white plastic bag. "You know," he said, almost whispering. "If you have one of these," he paused to rattle the bag, "you don't need the other."

Holly had no idea what he meant. Rather than admitting this, she remained silent and hoped he'd continue.

"You know? The condoms, you don't need them if you're," he paused, "bleeding. You can't get pregnant then."

Holly stepped outside of herself for just a moment, postponed the dropping of her jaw, and uttered, "Yeah. I know," even though she had no idea. Even though she felt this revelation on Ciro's part was significant, was key, in her quest for maturity.

"You got big plans for these?" he asked as he handed her the bag, stunning her further.

Holly no longer believed herself a worthy participant in this conversation and was tempted to reveal the truth, to tell him that she wasn't even sure how a tampon worked, that she would rely solely on the instruction booklet when she got home and attempted to put the cotton cylinder inside herself, that she planned on telling her mother that she had in fact picked up pads, not tampons, because deep down she didn't feel ready to alter the physicality of the inside of herself and she wanted her mother to believe that she was right on track. She was tempted to tell Ciro that she had achieved any knowledge she had about sex through verbal osmosis rather than experience and that she wouldn't even learn how to put a condom on a banana until second semester of her freshman year, or so she'd heard. But she couldn't bring herself to say any of this, so she just shrugged, and then mumbled, "Not yet," which was very much the truth.

"What are you up to later?" he asked.

Holly chose not to read into this and so she just said, "Nothing" because she was becoming mentally exhausted and wanted to go home, to just do nothing.

"You know Alberto's? The pool hall downtown?"

She said she did.

"My buddies and I are going to be hanging out down there, shooting some pool. You should stop by, play a few rounds. You know pool?"

She knew it, she said, but had never played. She couldn't bring herself to delicately brush a strand of hair from her eye, bat her beautiful long eyelashes, and ask him to teach her; all she could do was agree to meet him there. Before she did so, she considered the possibility of this scenario never again occurring and then, partially as a distant result, experienced a quick ripping pain in her gut.

"Five o'clock then?" Ciro called after her, as she pushed open the door and the bell clanged again over her head. "You'll be there, Holly?"

Colliding with the intensely hot and dry air as she walked outside, she called, "I'll be there."

The heat in New Mexico rarely made Holly sweat, but it had a way of instantly and thoroughly weighing her down, making her feel fifty pounds heavier as soon as she crossed the threshold from air conditioning. As she walked away from the store, back towards her house, fear began to snake through her veins, pushing all her blood to the tips of her fingers and toes, diluting it and making her dizzy.

I'm going to have sex, she told herself with mustered authority, more imitation than conviction. Despite her undulating fear, a twinge of pride glimmered through her chest and stomach, coinciding with a rush of blood into her underwear. She stopped and looked down at her thighs, making sure no blood had dribbled out of her shorts. When she saw that it hadn't, she gripped the plastic bag tighter by its handles in her right hand, her left hand a hard ball of knuckles, and marched solidly on.

Holly stopped at the first trash can she saw, right in front of a sewing shop her mother often dragged her into, and looked around before tearing open the box of condoms, jamming the twelve condoms into the pockets of her shorts, and the box into the bottom of the trash can. She couldn't risk her mother seeing the black box through the white bag and asking her what it was.

It was two forty-eight when Holly walked by the Monte Carlo and saw Jackson still slumped to the right, only more severely now. He looked like he did the last time they went swimming at the public pool, when he had been so hot, he jumped in with all his clothes on as soon as they got there, shoes and all.

His eyes were slits now and Holly couldn't help but be a bit worried. She didn't know if he was asleep, unconscious, dead, or merely sitting there with his eyes closed. As she had done earlier, she thumped the side of the car with her fist. "Jackson!"

His eyes snapped open and his entire body flinched in response. He was fine.

"Go inside and get some water!" she ordered through the glass of the window.

He shook his head. "I'm fine," he seemed to say quietly, but he actually just mouthed the words.

The inside of Jackson's mouth, throat, and chest felt to him like the hot rusted metal of the car's exterior. He wanted water, even believed he might very soon die without it, but also believed he would not be redeemed of his sin without valid suffering, and needed that more than anything. Lina and her family were members of the same church that Jackson attended, but they went to the 9:00 Spanish mass, so he saw her nearly every Sunday as she was leaving, usually in the parking lot. And every time he saw her, he looked away, reminded of the last time they'd spoken, and brimming with a type of shame he believed unique to what he'd done. 

Looking away from her brother, Holly mumbled "Whatever" and went inside. As she walked in, her mother was standing in the living room, arm extended, palm open to receive her change. Holly explained to her that, in addition to getting pads at Smiths', she'd also gone to Joan's Cones and ordered a large waffle cone with vanilla ice cream, strawberry syrup, and sprinkles, and that's why she only had had thirty-seven cents to return to her.

Holly's mother didn't notice that Holly kept the bag containing her purchase gripped in her right fist, tucked behind her back, and she couldn't have known that Holly's middle and index finger on her left hand, which was jammed deep into her pocket, pressing against the cool black plastic of the condom wrappers, were crossed in the hopes that she didn't ask her daughter whether she could look inside the bag.

After deciding to take a nap and before collapsing onto her wicker daybed, Holly took one tampon out of the pink box and locked herself in the bathroom. With her shorts around her ankles and the instruction booklet on the floor in front of her, she touched the cool plastic applicator to the only part of herself she'd never seen up close. Even the mole on her left butt cheek she'd gotten a good look at using her mother's compact. Keeping her eyes on the ceiling, she wiggled her hips around until there was no resistance when she applied pressure to the applicator. Then, as illustrated in the booklet, she used the inner cylinder of the applicator to push the tampon into its place. Once it was in, or at least partially in, she felt somehow fuller, and a little like she needed to pee. Not fully understanding female mechanics, she decided to hold it in until she needed a new one, or until there was another reason to take it out.

Holly went back to her room and set her alarm clock for four-thirty. She fell asleep hoping that shortly after she arrived at Alberto's, she and Ciro could easily slip away from his friends and that they wouldn't make catcalls as they left, or worse, shoot him looks of astonishment when she arrived and clung to his side. Once she was asleep, she dreamed that their encounter took place somewhere cool, dark, and quiet, that it began with a kiss and ended with one too.

At four-thirty, Holly's alarm clock drew her out of a thick, bland sleep. Her head felt as heavy on her pillow as the watermelons her mother would sometimes buy at the Lordsburg farmer's market. She climbed out of bed, shimmied into her only jean skirt, a size too small now, put on a pink tank top and white sandals, ran a brush through her hair, smeared some lip gloss on her lips, and went downstairs.

"I'm going to Allie's for dinner!" she called to her mother. Allie lived three houses down and Holly often went to her house for dinner. From the entranceway, she waited to hear her mother's "uh-huh" of approval from the hallway beyond the living room, then she went outside.

The air felt different as she walked into it; it was still hot, but the threat of wetness seemed to be hanging overhead, and the sky was an unfamiliar shade of slate gray, the same color as the seats in the Monte Carlo. There didn't appear to be any clouds; the color of the air had just changed. As Holly began walking, she felt tiny beads of sweat forming at her hairline and on the base of her neck. It hadn't rained in a month and hadn't really stormed for about six. But Holly had never seen the sky this color before and couldn't imagine what it meant was coming. It was after she had walked past the Monte Carlo, and saw Jackson lying flat on his back, his eyes slightly open, his skinny legs dangling over the floor, that she realized she had forgotten to bring a condom; she had scattered them like ashes into her underwear and sock drawer, but told herself she'd remember to bring just one with her to Alberto's. But she didn't want to go back. She was afraid if she did, she wouldn't come out again. And it felt, for whatever reason, necessary, obligatory, to meet Ciro, to have sex with Ciro. But, she figured, if what he said was true, she didn't need to go back. She had her period, and, therefore, couldn't get pregnant. Not that Holly was worried, not that she believed her body to be capable of producing life. It seemed to her that her body was having a hard enough time maintaining her own. The condom would have been for Ciro's peace of mind. She swung her head over her shoulder and looked back at the house. Through the living room window, Holly saw her mother, who was standing, sort of hovering, over the middle of the room, slowly reaching one arm out and bringing it back to her body. It looked to Holly like she was vacuuming, but she didn't hear anything. The absence of the normal roar of white noise was odd, almost disconcerting, until she noticed that the living room windows were closed.

Ellen McGrath normally kept all the first floor windows open, even on the hottest days. She and Holly's biological father had moved to New Mexico from Kansas shortly before Holly was born because Ellen thrived on the heat. She'd heard about the coming storm on TV that morning and had closed all the windows in anticipation.

Holly figured her mother had known about the coming storm and wondered why she hadn't warned her. "Mom!" she yelled, not really knowing why. "Mom!" she yelled again, waving her arms in the air, trying to get her attention. Holly was about twenty feet from the house, yelling and waving her arms, not moving any closer but expecting to be noticed.

Somehow she was and her mother opened up the window.

"Bye, Mom," she said. "I'll be back in a bit."

"I know, Sweetie," her mother said, smiling. "I heard you the first time." And then, as she was closing the window, "Watch out for the rain."

"Thanks, Mom," Holly said, even though her mother had shut and moved away from the window.

Holly did not want to go to Alberto's; the feeling was as corporeal as a pinprick. But she also felt that she should, and she felt that the way she felt Ciro's eyes on her in the drugstore. Or the way she felt the tampon rubbing against her insides. She was afraid she hadn't inserted it correctly, that it was about to slide out of her and fall to the ground. For a moment, she considered going back inside and attempting, through a series of strategic fibs, to find out when her mother lost her virginity, but she knew that would result in a talk that would keep her from being on time to meet Ciro. She considered stopping by the library and looking up the statistics, when girls usually have sex for the first time, to find out if what she was doing was okay, was normal. But she'd never looked anything up on her own before and wouldn't know where to start. If she asked for help, the librarians would wonder and most likely mention Holly's subject of interest to her mother when she came in to work tomorrow.

Normal or not, she knew what she was going to do. Again her mother's voice said, "Womanhood doesn't come easy." Holly looked away from the car, back into the street. Alberto's was about a twenty-minute walk from here. She knew to be on time to meet Ciro, she needed to get going.

When Holly pulled open the door to Alberto's twenty minutes later, the rain still hadn't started; the sky even seemed a bit lighter. Holly wondered if the storm was passing over Lordsburg.  The inside of the pool hall was dark, but the air was light and cool; Holly didn't notice the shift in temperature because she was scanning the shadows for Ciro. She had tried to get a glimpse of him as she passed by the window seconds before, but couldn't see through the sheen of dust that coated it. By now she was confident. She'd spent the last twenty minutes saying aloud, when there was no one within earshot, that she was ready to have sex, and saying it in her head when someone was.

Ciro and his friends were at the table in the farthest corner of the room; the light hanging over the table swung slightly, illuminating the faces of the three Hispanic boys. Besides Ciro, Holly recognized the face of just one of the other two.

Ciro saw her and waved. "Holly!" he called. "We're over here," even though Holly had clearly seem them.

"Hey," she said, smiling, walking towards him and his friends.

"Hey," he replied, still smiling. Then, "Guys," turning around, "this is Holly. Holly, this is Al and Jojo." Jojo was the one Holly had seen before, but she couldn't remember where.

Al reached out to shake her hand, and Jojo smiled, said, "Hey."

After she shook Al's hand, she stuck her own hands in her pockets and said, "Hey," bobbing her head loosely, attempting to appear casual, as if she met groups of older guys with skin much darker than her own all the time.

Ciro picked up his pool stick and sunk the eight ball. Smirking at his buddies, he said, "Well, eses. Looks like the man has won again."

"This guy," Jojo said to Holly, "this guy es.un pajero."

Al shoved Jojo lightly on the back, laughed, and then looked at Holly. "Jojo means he is a loudmouth cheating jackoff.un pajero."

"Oh," Holly said, leaning against the pool table now, gripping the rim. "Gotcha," although she knew the word well, having heard it at school at least once every day since she entered junior high.

"Assholes," said Ciro with his perennial smile. "A round of beers, boys and girls?"

"Are you twenty-one?" Holly asked Ciro reflexively. And then, slightly embarrassed, "I just didn't think you were."

All three boys chuckled. "Nah, this is my papa's place," said Al. "I am Alberto, Jr."

"Oh," said Holly, her cheeks throbbing heatedly. She was grateful for the dark.

"He is okay with us drinking. As long as we stay here," Al explained.

"Do you want a beer, Holly?" called Ciro, already behind the vacant bar.

"Uh, yeah," Holly answered, without giving it much thought, without stopping to consider what her father had told her about alcohol and its role in teenage deviance and subsequent unhappiness: the "vicious circle," he often referred to.

"Cool. Four cold ones coming up," he said, clanking bottles together.

Holly, seeing Ciro behind the bar, took advantage of the chance to speak to him alone. "Be right back," she said to Al and Jojo, both sitting on the pool table, and rushed to the bar to catch him.

Forced to disregard her nerves for lack of time, Holly leaned across the bar, smiled, and said, "Hey."

"Hey there, here you go," Ciro replied, handing her a cold beer bottle, smiling back. "Ready for some pool?"

"Well, I actually don't have a lot of time," said Holly, not wanting to reveal that her weekday curfew was only 7:30, that she had no idea how long sex would take, and that she'd really just like to get it over with. "Maybe we could just take off now."

Ciro's face was further darkened by the shadows. A light hung over the center of the bar, but he stood just out of its reach. Behind the shadows, he was confused. "Take off where?" And then, "You and me?"

Holly panicked and could think of nothing to say. After about ten seconds, she stuttered, "I just thought, I don't know. I guess I thought you and I were going to go somewhere." 

"Where?"

Holly could see that Ciro was no longer smiling.

Tears of embarrassment were welling up in Holly's eyes. She cleared her throat, tried to will them away. "I don't know. I was confused, I guess. It doesn't matter." Her eyes darted from Ciro's face to his chest to the beer bottles in his hands.

"Okay," he said, dismissing the conversation, the smile returning to his face. "Whatever you say, Miss Holly."

Holly couldn't stop a tear from rolling down her cheek. She was so grateful to Ciro for not pushing her, forcing her to reveal her presumptuousness and immaturity. "Thanks." Then she glanced at her watch. It was only 5:20, but she couldn't stay any longer.

"You ready for some pool?" Ciro asked.

"I just can't. I'd really just like to go home," she said, speaking honestly. "But thanks for inviting me."

Ciro was disappointed because, while he'd had no intentions of having sex with Holly, he'd wanted to kiss her. "Maybe you'll come into Smiths' again," he said, his voice inflected with hope.

"Okay. Maybe," she said. "Bye, then. Tell your friends bye too."

"Bye, Holly."

The downpour began when Holly was about halfway home. Fat drops of rain darkened quarter-sized spots on her shirt and skirt until she was completely drenched and the material saturated. She walked slowly through town, wanting to be home quickly, but feeling too heavy from the weight of her clothes to rush. When she got to her driveway, the strong medicinal smell of camphor that drifted from the fringed sagebrush whenever it rained filled the air. Through the falling rain and the rain in her eyes, Holly could barely see the house, but she saw the Monte Carlo clearly. Between each raindrop, the air felt cool and she found herself feeling relieved for Jackson. Perhaps the rain wouldn't last much longer, but even a short break from the heat could give him a chance to rejuvenate.

Inside the car, Jackson stretched his legs and sat up in the seat. The temperature in the car had dropped several degrees just seconds after the downpour began and had grown steadily cooler in the past fifteen minutes. Looking out the window, he couldn't see anything through the torrents of rainwater gushing over the windows. He thought of Lina's face and wondered what she was doing. He hoped that she was curled up on her father's lap in the big armchair in their living room, and that he was reading Rafael Pombo-their favorite-to her, while the rain pelted the window behind them; and that she had not been outside when the storm started.

As Holly walked by the car on her way inside, she saw Jackson's profile through the window and stopped. As his sister, she felt she should check on him. She grabbed the handle and pulled open the door. "Hey, scoot over." After he did so, she plopped onto the seat and shut the door. "Wow," she said. "It sure has cooled off in here."

"Uh huh." Then looking her over, he said, "You're soaked."

"Yeah, I was in town when it started."

Jackson and Holly sat in silence together in the Monte Carlo, listening to the rain pound the roof of the car, until they saw the shadow of their father rush past the window, and they followed him inside.