Page 7 of Stay Buried

I am taller, stronger, but Pearl is all energy and has more weight on her than I do—she teasingly calls me the scarecrow girl.

Pearl tightly clasped my wrists, keeping my arms up above my head.

“I could never forget you,” I vowed. “We were out at the St. James place first thing this morning. It was terrible. There was—”

Pearl leaned down, pressed her lips against mine. She tasted like cherry pie and I let her envelop me. “I don’t want to hear anything terrible, Frankie,” she whispered when she pulled her mouth away from mine. “The only sickness or injury I want to speak of is the trouble with my heart.”

I looked up at her, frowning. “Your heart?”

Pearl took my hand, placed it on her chest over the lace trim of her dress, the shiny buttons that ran down the middle. “Do you feel it? How hard it beats?”

I nodded.

Pearl guided my hand to the left so that it was over her breast, the nipple erect beneath the fabric. I took in a shuddering breath.

“Do you know how it ached when I thought you weren’t coming?” Pearl asked, grinding her hips into mine, moaning softly.

“I’m sorry,” I said, all clear thoughts leaving me, drifting up with the dust. “I couldn’t—”

“Shh…” Pearl said, kissing me again, long and deep. “You’re here now, my love. You’re home.”

I laughed, feeling myself melting into Pearl. “Some home,” I said, looking around at the filthy floor, the furniture chewed through by moths and mice, rotted by time itself.

“That’s how I think of this place, you know,” Pearl said, shifting her weight, but still keeping me pinned. “This is our house. I imagine it sometimes, all fixed up—don’t you?”

The truth was, I did. Sometimes, when we met here, I let myself believe it was our home, a place for us and us alone. A secret house cut off from the rest of the world.

We’d been meeting at the Ayers place for almost a year. It was Pearl’s idea. Before that, we’d sneak off to dark corners of the woods, haylofts, root cellars, the middle of a cornfield—places where only birds, mice, and spiders might catch us.

Pearl and I have known each other since we were children, playing dolls and house together, making forts in the woods. I taught her howto fish and how to make a pipe with a dried-out corncob and a reed from the riverbank. She taught me how to play dolls and to sew and get along with the dull girls our age. But the year we turned twelve, our friendship shifted. I knew I was different, that I didn’t like boys the way other girls did. That when I lay awake in bed at night imagining a future where I was married, it wasn’t a boy I was kissing and coming home to, but a girl. And not just any girl, but Pearl. I kept my thoughts and feelings to myself, did not dare speak them out loud. But like all secrets, it festered and metastasized. It became a bright burning thing that was all I could think about some days. I knew I was in love with her when I was ten years old, but even then I understood how dangerous this was. Not only because of the wrongness of my feelings for her, but because of who she was—the daughter of the wealthiest, most important man in town.

My fate was sealed one afternoon when we were thirteen. We were in Pearl’s bedroom sewing together, working on a quilt.

“Have you kissed a boy yet, Frankie?” she’d asked.

I didn’t answer, just felt my face and ears grow red as I concentrated very hard on the tiny stitches I was making. We’d pieced the top together, then pinned it to the backing with cotton between. We were doing the quilting, neat curved patterns of stitching to hold it all together.

“I have,” she confessed. “I kissed Charlie Dunn up in the bell tower at the factory. He asked to see the bell and I sneaked up there with him and we kissed.”

I still said nothing, just continued working on my stitches, listening to the blood thrum in my ears. I hated Charlie Dunn with my whole heart in that moment. Hated him and longed to be him. What right did he have to be the first to kiss Pearl? He knew nothing about her. He didn’t know what she looked like when she was sparkling with sand and silt drying off on the beach after swimming at the pond, or the way her lips turned red from raspberries we picked in the thicket by the river. He didn’t know her secret fox smile or that the second toeon each foot was longer than the others, which she claimed meant that she came from royalty. He hadn’t counted each freckle on her cheeks or noticed all the shades of gold in her hair when the sun hit it. He was just some dumb boy who saw the breasts growing under her dress, breasts that many of the girls our age didn’t have yet, not the way Pearl did.

“Set down your needle,” Pearl instructed, and I did, glancing at her as I tried to keep my breath steady. She moved closer to me on the bed, the unfinished quilt covering our laps, our legs touching. “Do you want to know,” she asked, “what it was like? I could show you.”

“I-I—” I stammered, my body trembling slightly.

She took my hand, placed it on her shoulder. “He put his hand here like this, and I put mine on him, like this,” she said, clasping my left shoulder firmly. “And Charlie, his sweater was scratchy, but your shirt is soft,” she said, running her hand over my shoulder, caressing my back. “And he smelled of onions and wet wool, but you, you smell like apples.” She smiled, leaned closer. I could feel her breath on my cheek. “He put his lips on mine and moved his hand down here,” she said, pulling my hand down over her left breast. I stopped breathing, my whole body thrumming with a terror and longing I’d never known.

Her lips brushed against mine and I jerked away as though I’d been burned with a hot iron.

I had never been more afraid of anything, or anyone, than I was of her, of my own feelings for her at that moment. I stood up, letting the pinned quilt fall to the floor. “I’m sorry,” I said, taking a reeling step toward the door, dizzy, lightheaded, and trying to catch my breath.

“It was just pretend,” Pearl called after me.

“I have to go,” I told her as I practically ran from the room.

After that, I avoided Pearl for a long time. When she would corner me and ask me to come over, or to go ice-skating, I made excuses, told her I had plans with the boys. It was true that I had always preferred the company of boys and found their games, their talk, much easier to understand. But I still thought about her and oftenwondered if she thought about me too. But surely not in the same way I was thinking of her. At night, under the covers, I’d let myself imagine what might have happened if I’d let her show me what kissing was like that day in her bedroom, our bodies pressed together under the quilt.

Our first real kiss was seventeen months ago. October 17—what Pearl now called our anniversary. We’d been at the fall harvest celebration. The church was decorated with leaves and cornstalks, the bonfire in the churchyard was blazing, the fiddlers were playing, the apple brandy and hard cider flowing. I’d sneaked away for some quiet and Pearl followed me, tucked her arm into mine, and asked me to walk with her. We crossed the yard and made our way toward the woods.