Window #8

If you crawl along the floor, you can creep close enough to hear Jesse and Jill talking about the sleepover at Jesse’s last Saturday. Jesse mentions how they didn’t really want to invite the astronaut head girl, but they felt they had to because she’s friends with Nancy, and Nancy would certainly tell her, since she’d already been invited. It all gets rather complicated and the details don’t matter much. The point is they didn’t want her at the party. So, once Jesse’s mom said lights out, Jill turned on the lava lamp they have on that orange, plastic end table in their basement, then they pulled out a Coke bottle and got in a circle. If the bottle pointed to you, you’d have to take off an item of clothes. What they didn’t tell astronaut head was that they were all wearing extra layers. They’d heard the rumors, and they wanted to see for themselves. The poor girl was game until she realized that they were all pretty good at spinning the bottle so it would usually land in her vicinity. She tried to stop it. She’d already taken off her shoes and socks, and now had to remove her blouse, regretting the decision to leave her cardigan at home. One by one, she loosened the buttons, sucking in her belly, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Jill tells Jesse that’s when she knew. She says she could see the bulge, the way astronaut head’s belly button stuck out. Jesse doesn’t believe her. She says she was looking for it, she and Nancy, and neither of them could see a thing in the reddish glow of the lava lamp. Then how did you know? Jill asks. And that of course is the reason they’re having this conversation. They haven’t spoken of it until now. The fact is that Jill had chosen that moment to go to the bathroom, so she’d missed what happened next. She knew, of course, that something had changed while she was gone. The other girls were too quiet, each of them lying in their sleeping bags, eyes closed, a blissful smile on their lips. Normally, she would have asked them, told them to come out with it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Soon, she too was asleep in her bag. When she woke she couldn’t remember a thing. Only later did visions flash through her head of her own body in ways she’d never thought about it. Certainly, she’d looked at herself in the mirror, examined her breasts, even rubbed her fingers between her legs, imagining what it might be like to be with a boy. But this was entirely different. Images of her body, her breasts, her legs, her ass, her cunt. Boys’ bodies and girls. Words she’d never speak aloud. Words that excited and scared her. That’s why she’d finally asked Jesse about that night.

So Jesse leans over and whispers in her ear. You can’t catch it until you crawl directly under their seat, put your hand in the sticky apple-juice spill from yesterday. That’s when you hear the tail end of it, how next astronaut head took off her bra, how Jesse saw the darkened areolas. She swears it wasn’t the dim light. The breasts were veined, swollen, almost translucent, Jesse says. She tells how she wanted to lean in, to press her face against them. How it felt as if it was the only thing to do. And because of that, how instead she and Nancy pointed and laughed. How they told astronaut head she had cow tits and worse. They told her that her head was like that not because of the hats she wears but because her mother squeezed her legs together to try to keep her from being born. You’d think she would have backed away, Jesse says, that she would have picked up her clothes and ran. Instead, she took off her thick, black glasses, rubbed her eyes with her forearm. She stared at them the way she sometimes did at the bus stop. Jill asks Jesse what the problem was, but Jesse says it’s impossible to explain. It looked like she wanted to hug them. She opened her arms as if she thought we were the ones who needed to be held. Can you believe it? And that’s when it happened. Milk poured from her right breast, shooting out in streams over our heads, dripping down our hair, over our faces, our bodies. We couldn’t move. Then, just as suddenly as the milk started, it ended, and we began to dance, careening off each other, falling down, getting back up again.

Jill doesn’t say anything. You wait, hoping to hear more. But the girls sit in silence. So you crawl back to your seat, wondering how such a thing could possibly happen, whishing it would happen to you, fearing you might die if it did, that you might roll about the floor, shouting words you don’t understand until you, too, are hollowed out. Your own body would crumble and flake away. And that’s the part that really scares you. That thought of nothing left but your own wild desire.