It wasn’t that she was beautiful. I was nineteen and bulimic and all that mattered was being beautiful but Cece wasn’t beautiful, something off about her jaw from when they broke it to fix her underbite, dirty blond hair knotted carelessly on top of her head years before top knots were cool. It wasn’t the shock of unnatural color when she’d turn because she kept the underside dyed neon purple, the way she shaved her arms when she rolled and rolled her body when she danced. It made my thighs feel funny, watching her dance, like Twin Pops dropped onto a summer sidewalk, thawing, like I was in middle school again, leaning against the wall of the gymnasium on a Friday night, waiting for my mom to pick me up so I could get home and lock my bedroom door and stand in front of my mirror blasting O-Town from my boombox, willing my body to absorb the fluid rhythm because Emily G. told me that’s how she got her hips to move like that. It was always defying me, back then, my body, swelling and softening in all the wrong places and jerking around like a marionette, and now, at nineteen, it was defying me still; I was still dancing like a dude, still unaware of why that felt right but looked wrong, looked nothing like Emily G. at all, as if I belonged to another species of girl. I wasn’t beautiful, either. I wasn’t beautiful and Cece wasn’t beautiful and still everyone stared, my body not caring what it looked like, for once, with hers moving around it like water. But it wasn’t that: me all hard lines and angles stomping and her some kind of liquid solid matter changing states in real time. Everyone was always staring and we were always throwing our heads back to laugh, strands of hair sweat-plastered to our necks and foreheads because it was so humid and the rain never came, that year, she’d laugh and I’d laugh and it was so easy but it wasn’t that, either—how easily we laughed, together, the ugly way our laughs spilled out around us, the chartless chopped-up crash of it because both of us were cacklers, the home safe feeling I got whenever she laughed and I was the one who made it happen. I’d always been a jealous friend, ever since fourth grade when Mallory G. and Natalie S. had a sleepover without me, I’d always needed more from girls than they were willing or able to give, but Cece was my favorite and I was hers, utterly hers, I thought I’d stumbled into it, the reason I was alive: to make Cece cackle, to pour her wine from a box and watch her sip it from a little plastic mug, to dye her hair purple again when it started to fade, she couldn’t reach the back and she needed my help and I was so grateful to be needed, so grateful she had any need I could fulfill. We were so far from home, that year, a hemisphere away in every direction, but I’d wrap my hands in plastic grocery bags because the dye jar didn’t come with gloves and I’d drag them drenched and crinkling through her long, limp hair feeling so resourceful, capable, so confident—certain, even—that I knew how to protect myself. I was growing up, finally, or something like it. When I turned twenty she wrote my name with her toes in the sand on the beach and bought me a fat cup of gelato which melted to milk before I could finish it and so then she bought me another, I was always on my knees in front of a toilet and she was always trying to feed me, bringing me little treats, leaving them on my pillow, a package of Australian TimTams, a Cadbury chocolate bar from the vending machine, because the cafeteria served fruit for dessert and that made me so angry but I didn’t have any money. She was always lending me money and dressing me up in her expensive clothes and it was bliss, being her little doll, even though her dresses were too tight and too short and they’d slink up over my ass when I danced so that everyone could see I was wearing boys’ briefs underneath, so that someone strawberry-blond and beautiful once wove through the sweaty heaving crowd of the university club where we danced most nights and smiled kindly and yanked the fabric down over my hips and the shame didn’t even have a chance to pool let alone bruise because there was Cece, cackling, tugging her hem right back up to my waist, pulling me up onto one of the stages, kissing me hard on the mouth. She never kissed me unless we were drunk but when we were drunk she kissed me with abandon, sloppily and publicly, tongue and teeth and spit so that everyone stared, whispering, “Are they lesbians,” pronouncing lesbians like I pronounced centipedes, so that everyone assumed we were together even though we were just friends, best friends, even though she had a serious boyfriend back home, a skinny stoner dude with bad teeth and shaggy hair, even though they were monogamous, because “girls don’t count” and back then I thought I was a girl, thought I didn’t count, thought there was something lesser, flimsier, about being a girl and knowing a girl the way we knew each other, loving a girl the way we loved each other. “Not that I’m in love with Cece, but maybe I was, kind of,” I’d write a year later, in a Word document I would disguise under the name “tax information” and hide away in an admin folder on my own laptop because I wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally happen upon it, not even myself, so it wasn’t any of that—how it was too secret and also too loud, how I hated the cafeteria food and she kept trying to feed me and still I was always hungry, that year, thirsty too and the rain never came, never came and never came and never came until the night it did, the night on Magnetic Island after the well-trained trail horses bucked us off their backs, how hers spooked and mine followed, inevitably, how the sand was concrete-hard where I expected it to be soft, how it shredded the skin on my forearms and knees and then burrowed in so deep it stopped the bleeding, it wasn’t how I was ripped open and sunburnt or how the little white tablets dissolved like ice chips on our tongues when we unfurled them for the stranger in the overalls, later that night, how we swallowed and cackled and raced each other up the beach where the stranger’s friends were playing ukulele around a fire, it wasn’t how we slipped off our shoes when the speed kicked in and danced barefoot in the sand and again everyone stared, the strangers and the half-moon and even the ocean, pressing up against the shore as if it was jealous, wetting the sand where the soles of our feet were sinking, sinking. We heard the rain before we felt it but it wasn’t even the rain, how it sounded like pasta boiling and just as harmless and then suddenly it was all around us, invading us, the skinned patches of us shrieking with it, and it wasn’t how the strangers shrieked and splashed back to the boat they were living on or how we shrieked and sprinted back to the cabin where she’d rented us bunk beds for the weekend, it wasn’t any of that because none of it counted: the way our bodies pressed together, the warmth of her mouth on my mouth, her tongue stripping the rain from my skin, her sopping purple hair in my hands and how solid water sounds when it’s drumming on a windowpane. It wasn’t even the storm, or how quietly it slipped away while we were sleeping, how, when the world turned over and the sun rose gentle, like it was afraid to wake us up, she was back in her own bed and my hands were holding themselves. It wasn’t how my head ached and my shoulders ached and the space between my sternum and my spine ached, ached, the dried blood and the sand in the sheets, everything that had come undone in the dark, it wasn’t, and it wasn’t the sky after the storm glowing a soft and fading purple, like the back of her sleeping head turned away from me, like the sheen of all those plastic bags dropped into the garbage, every time I finished dyeing her hair, and the palms of my hands, too, because of course the dye leaked through, and I hadn’t protected myself after all.
Jax Connelly (they/she) is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction explores the intersections of queer identity, unstable bodies, and mental illness. Their essays have received honors including four Notables in the Best American Essays series, Nowhere's Fall 2020 Travel Writing Prize, and first place in the 2019 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, among others. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, [PANK], The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, No Tokens, and more.
