Neon signs cover the buildings like stickers, and the potted bushes look like chia plants. Tommy wants to climb the red steps, so he pulls my hand. We reach the top, underneath a Coca-Cola ad. “Don’t you feel alive?” Tommy shouts. “Like, connected to the whole world and everyone?”
I rub my arm and touch his hand, barely. I want him to know me, so I say, “I feel like I’m trapped in this long room and there’s no way out.”
Below, a dog barks. Tommy laughs. He clasps my shoulder, tugging me close. He smells like a cologne I can’t name. Then, he leans forward like he’s falling, like he’s going to fall on top of me. I peel back.
“But I don’t want to kiss you,” I say. My back arches. My neck cranes.
“Come on,” he laughs and squishes my lips beneath his. The tears start in my throat, and my neck throbs in the back and the front. His tongue forces my lips apart. The saliva is sticky slobber.
When I was a baby, my mother left my older siblings and me in our van outside Walmart. My mother’s voice was hazy and distant, but the door slam was real and loud. In front of me, Samantha poked at the air controls, and Henry pulled his seatbelt, listening to the zip and wind.
Outside, there was a stream of red brake lights, blurry like water. I don’t know what I remembered, but I suddenly felt alone. Henry’s head snapped, and Samantha covered her ears. Shhh, shhhh, shhhhh. Samantha slipped out of her seatbelt, holding her heart-shaped, hello kitty pillow, and she pushed it into my face. “If the baby can’t be heard,” she said, “we won’t get in trouble for making it cry.”
When Tommy pulls back, I’m looking down. People brush against me, but I don’t really feel them. My sobs burst a little, and Tommy cringes. He asks what’s wrong with my face. “It’s all red or blotchy or something,” he says.
“It’s scarring from this thing that happened when I was a baby,” I sniff. “It comes back when I cry.”
Tommy doesn’t understand. He swipes his palm across my cheek like he’s wiping dirt from window glass. Across the street, a woman carries laundry. She hunches over the basket, hovers beneath an overhang. Her eyes linger on the people who shove past.
Tommy drives me home. I sit in the backseat. He’s silent in the traffic, no longer whooping. The glass is cool and hollow against my face. Whenever his eyes flicker back, I think he’s going to look at me, but he never does. The other cars in the streets are all taxis.
Jean Gillingham studies writing at Loyola University Maryland where she is the Fiction & Poetry Editor-in-Chief for Corridors literary journal and president of the writing honor society. She has received the President’s Writing Prize, and the sophomore and junior achievements in writing. Currently, Jean is revising her novel, which recently won third in Ink & Insight’s Critique My Novel contest, excerpted at inkandinsights.
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–Art by Menerva Tau