Window #15

She paints her eyes. We don’t know what she uses. Kohl powder perhaps. You’d think something so trivial wouldn’t matter. But the subject of her eye paint inspires intense discussion among the girls. Of course they want eyes like hers. Who wouldn’t? If she so much as looks at a boy, he’s struck dumb. You’d think she likes the attention. But she seems more concerned with finding new ways to paint her face. She’ll spend the entire bus ride with a mirror in one hand and her brush in the other. That’s how things go for a while. But then she pulls out what some girls later swear must have been Dusty Rose and applies it to her lips. You can feel the shift in the bus. The way time seems to freeze, and the air thickens. Thinking clearer than the rest of us, Neil tries to open his window but finds he lacks the strength. Then, this boy in the middle rows, one whose name we never learned, this boy who always sat so quietly, somehow avoiding joining any of the groups or siding with one faction or the other in the great spit wad wars, this boy, who wasn’t studious like Allison or shy like the girl in the green dress or octopus head girl, this boy who somehow created a bubble about himself all these months, this boy begins tearing off his clothes. Just after Neil cries out that he can’t possibly budge the window, this boy in the middle rows starts by taking off his too-small baseball hat that must have been a Christmas present from parents who never understood him. He flings his clothes to the floor until he’s naked and leaps from his seat, stepping on the tops of the rows as he bounds down the bus toward the painted eye girl. She has no time to react. He tears her clothes from her, knocking her lipstick and mirror from her hands, then wraps himself about her like a serpent. The two bodies merge: the face, a mixture of the two, as if a cubist artist took pieces of each and rearranged them, the body, neither his nor hers, but with aspects of both. Once they have fused, we pretend we can return to our own worlds. And yet, if we would be honest, the boys among us might admit to the caress of their own soft limbs, the lilted voice inside. The girls might dare speak of the furious world of sinew and muscle that holds them taut as the curve of a bow.