By: Haylee Chavanne
It was simple. Emily hated Alisha’s boyfriend. Emily knew, young as she was, that Alisha was too beautiful for him. They were sisters, even if they had different mothers, and Emily felt disappointed whenever she saw Alisha’s ugly boyfriend give her a kiss.
Bailee once said to her, “If you have different moms then you aren’t really related. It’s not the same as having different dads because you grow inside of your mom.”
When Emily relayed this to Alisha, Alisha said:
“Your friend is a cunt.”
So Emily knew that they were really sisters, even though they grew in different bellies. Even if Emily looked like her own mother. Dark skinned, black eyed. Hair so thick that no amount of coconut oil could keep it laying flat. Still, she liked tightly spun rows of braids and clips and bows in her hair to keep it off of her face. She liked the way her mother smoothed down the halo around her hairline with white paste.
But Alisha was so white. Her curly hair was honey, almost blonde. The spirals looped upwards on her head and grasped for heaven. Her eyes were shrouded and sometimes blue like the sea before the morning fog lifts. Freckles trekked across her cheeks. Yes, she was far too beautiful for her ugly boyfriend, and so Emily hated him. Yet she hated the sight of Alisha kissing another girl even more.
She’d seen them on the side of the house the other day. It was the side where the garden was neglected because the light barely reached past the house’s shade. Weeds grew and choked out the daisies. A cactus sat miserably in the corner. Emily had been strolling while she licked an ice-pop and thought about photosynthesis–life would be simple, she thought, if people only needed to bathe in sunlight to live–yet as she turned the corner out of the sunlight and into the shade, she saw her sister crammed against the stucco wall with her body fitted to that of a pale redhead. Their hands were fast on each other in tight, sloppy grips. Emily yelped, dropped her ice-pop, and walked swiftly down the pathway towards the back door. Behind her, she heard the white girl’s uneasy laughter, but she heard her sister’s sing out louder and whole-heartedly and Emily knew, Alisha didn’t care that they’d been caught.
It made Emily’s insides shiver and itch as if a beetle were skittering through the spaces between her organs. She closed her eyes, shook her head, went inside.
* * *
“Can Bailee come over?” Emily asked her dad. It was Friday morning, a holiday from school, and a few days after Alisha’s incident with the white girl. The thought of being alone with Alisha all day made Emily uncomfortable, although she was upset with herself for feeling that way. Alisha didn’t like Bailee very much, anyway, so she would keep her distance as long as Bailee was around.
Emily’s dad patted her on the head as he grabbed his car keys off the phone bench and walked towards the front door. “Of course she can, hun. Alisha’s still asleep; wake her up if anything happens. Are you okay making breakfast yourself? ”
“Yes, Daddy. I have been since I was ten.”
He chuckled, kissed her forehead, and said he’d be home from work around seven. He closed and locked the door behind him. After a minute, there was an engine rev, and Emily heard the car pull out of the driveway and down the street. Then there was silence.
She went back to the phone bench and dialed Bailee’s number. “My dad said it’s okay for you to come. Want to bring your homework?”
“Not at all,” Bailee said. “If you do homework while we’re hanging out, I’m disowning you.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I would. That’s why we’re going to do something fun instead. See you soon, Em.” She hung up. Emily stared at the phone for a minute. Her heart was pounding, but she didn’t know why, so she went to the bathroom to wash her face and fix her hair.
Bailee arrived not long after, and Emily asked if she wanted to see her mother’s garden. “It’s really pretty right now. All of the flowers are blooming.”
Bailee agreed, and so Emily took her to the backyard and down the garden walk. The sun was warm, even though it was still early, and it made Bailee’s hair shine like black silk as she strolled a few steps ahead of Emily. All of the flowers were dewy and glimmering in the morning light. Bailee stopped to sniff one of the pink flowers.
“It smells nice,” she said, and before Emily could respond, she licked the dew off one of the petals, then kept walking. Emily, feeling confused, didn’t ask why Bailee had done that. Instead she waited until she thought the other girl wouldn’t turn around, then quickly leaned in and licked a different flower. The petals were soft and damp against her tongue.
* * *
Emily sat on a stone wall in the garden, the same place where Bailee had licked the flowers. Her mother loved to garden and their yard, large and unevenly grounded, was a sea of rose bushes, of daisies, of carnations and baby’s breath. Jasmine vines crawled up the fence and over to the neighbor’s yard. Lemon and pear trees stood proudly towards the back, and there were the vegetables, too – tomatoes green on the vine were plump as a gluttonous tick. Carrot tops groped for the sky with saturated green limbs; their young roots retreated into the soil. Emily wished she could return to the earth in that way.
She examined the plants and tried not to think about Alisha and the white girl, about the bare skin of their bellies. Raw honey and milk, lingering together. Even as she tried, she couldn’t stop imagining it. She saw Bailee, too. Her mind replayed the way the other girl’s mouth had parted to suckle the pink flower.
She shook her head to dispel the image and walked to the dirt where small leaves sprouted. She wondered what vegetables they would be. Beets, maybe. She kneeled beside them in the dirt and pulled her skirt up to her underwear. Her skin was the color of the nourished soil.
I could grow a garden in me, she thought. She imagined bean sprouts budding across her thighs, her freshly-shaven legs. Alisha had taught her how to shave only a few weeks earlier, and Emily missed her soft hairs.
“Why do I have to do this?” she’d asked as they sat on the edge of the bathtub, the warm water falling slowly from the faucet. The steam made the hair on both their heads expand as though it were static.
Alisha handed her a pink razor, showed her how to lather the soap into a white film over her legs. “Because it’s what we’ve been taught to do. Now, run the blade lightly over your skin like this.”
The razor left a streak on Alisha’s fair skin like a cleared road after snowfall. Emily copied her, but pressed too roughly. Blood collected in dewdrops and she chirped in protest: “I don’t want to shave; it made me bleed!”
“Women are supposed to bleed,” Alisha said. “Do your whole leg and knee. Skip your thighs.”
“Why?
“Because you’re too young to have sex.”
Emily had blushed and looked at her dark legs in the water. She finished shaving, and watched the blood bloom out of her body in slow circles into the soapy water.
Now she kneeled in the dirt, surrounded by greens and flowers. The sky was spotted with grey and blue like Alisha’s eyes. She was too beautiful for her boyfriend, too beautiful for another woman. Emily saw Alisha’s honey hands covered in white suds as she showed her how to maneuver a razor blade.
Had Alisha always been a woman? She was barely an adult. When had she crossed that barrier? Emily wished she remembered the moment it had happened. Alisha had, of course, always seemed much older. They were years apart, but she hadn’t always been so beautiful. She hadn’t always been kissing someone.
Emily closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh dirt and plant smells of the garden. The scents made her recall Bailee and her gentle fingers as they reached out to the blooming roses.
* * *
Bailee giggled, and Emily jerked back and wiped the dew from her lips. “I was just wondering why you did that, so I thought I would … try it.”
The sun caught in Bailee’s black eyes as she squinted at Emily. “It was just impulse.”
“Oh, okay,” Emily said. They kept walking, and Emily stayed a little further back than she did before, watching as Bailee leaned in gently to each flower. She liked how delicate her fingers were when they tugged on the petals, and how the sun soaked into and kissed her brown skin.
“Bailee?” Emily said, looking away and glancing towards the ground.
“Hm? What’s up?”
Emily’s face felt hot. She knew she wanted to talk about Alisha, and she thought Bailee would be okay to talk to. They were friends, but not best friends. They went to the same church, but Bailee never thought about things the same as Emily did.
“What is it?” Bailee asked again.
“Do you … uhm, or have you ever kissed someone?”
“No, never have,” Bailee said. “Have you?”
Emily shook her head and sat on the garden’s stone wall. “Do you think it’s wrong to kiss a girl, in God’s eyes?”
Bailee closed her eyes tightly and thought. “No,” she said after a long moment. “Not if it’s practice.”
“Practice?”
“Like for your husband. Just to learn how to do it.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Emily looked up at Bailee, and the girl was looking back at her. Her heart was pounding as before and she didn’t know why. But when Bailee leaned down and pressed her mouth to Emily’s as if she were one of the pink flowers in the garden, Emily understood the feeling, and it terrified her.
Without words, Bailee pulled away and continued walking through the garden. Emily stayed sitting on the stone wall, feeling equal parts ecstatic and horrified, and with no idea how to reconcile those parts of her.
* * *
Alisha was calling for Emily. It had been days since her kiss with Bailee, days since she’d caught Alisha with the white girl, and Emily had avoided Alisha as much as she could. It had been easy, since Alisha was out most of the weekend with her boyfriend and didn’t go to church with Emily and her parents. The weekend was over, though, and Emily came home after school rather than lingering to speak with Bailee as she usually did. She locked her bedroom door and sat on her bed, her homework and binders sprawled about her. She was mindlessly working through pre-algebra when Alisha knocked on the door. Emily ignored it.
“Emily?” The doorknob rattled. “Come on, Em, I know you’ve been feeling weird. You haven’t spoken to me in like a week.”
Emily still didn’t answer. After a few moments, the doorknob rattled again. There was a click and then the door creaked open. Alisha’s head poked through the crack, her hand on the doorknob. A silver key rested in the keyhole.
“Get out!” Emily shouted, throwing a pillow at Alisha. “You’re not allowed to unlock my door except in emergencies, you’re so annoying!”
Alisha caught the pillow, closed the door, and placed the pillow at the foot of the bed. “Can I sit down?”
Emily didn’t answer.
“You seem upset,” Alisha said.
“You kissed a girl.” Emily wouldn’t look at her sister.
“Yeah. I did.” When Emily still said nothing, Alisha sat beside her on the bed, shoving a binder out of the way. Several moments passed as Alisha stared around at Emily’s walls. A bulletin board hung above the desk beside her bed and was covered in pictures of their family. There was a photo Alisha holding Emily at the beach years earlier, when Emily was still a toddler and wandered around topless. Even then, her dark skin looked like an ink stain against Alisha’s lighter color. Beside it was a photo of Alisha looking up and grinning hugely into the disposable camera; the gap between her front teeth pronounced; the strap of her pink tank top slipping off her shoulder. Emily had taken the picture last summer, and Alisha had grown even more beautiful in that time. In the corner of the board was a photo of Bailee and Emily near the tetherball courts at their middle school. Emily wore a long blue skirt with floral print and a white blouse. Bailee was in overalls. Her hair hung in tendrils almost to her waist. They stood a foot apart, and Emily smiled towards the ground.
Emily wanted to go to the bulletin board and rip the photo of her and Bailee off. She wanted to scream at Alisha to leave. Alisha, though, stared at the pictures with her lips puckered as she thought.
“I was kissing a girl,” she said. She looked at Emily, her mouth now upturned. “Women understand women. Women are soft and don’t overwhelm me. That’s all I got.”
“It’s a sin,” Emily said.
“You know I don’t believe in that shit. Besides, it was just for fun. I’m still with Daniel. He doesn’t care if it’s with another girl.”
“You mean if it’s just for practice?” Emily said. As she glared at the photos, her vision muddied with hot tears. The Bailee in the photo looked back at her with a mocking smile. “How do you even know if it’s just practice? Will your mom love you even if God doesn’t anymore?”
“Emily,” Alisha said. Emily still didn’t look at her. She was ashamed of the hot tears. She knew they had given her away. She wanted her chest to stop aching and splitting. She wanted to return to the earth as the flowers could, but knew that she couldn’t.
Alisha reached out and smoothed down Emily’s hair, her touch soft. “It’s okay to want to kiss girls instead of boys. It’s okay. There’s no right or wrong way to be a person, Em.”
Emily sniffled. “Okay.”
They sat in silence for a while, until Emily asked Alisha to let her be alone.
* * *
The next Sunday, Emily sat in her mother’s garden, having told her parents she felt too sick to go to church. She kneeled in the dirt, the color so like her own. Maybe I’ll plant a garden in me, she thought. She pressed her hands into the dirt beside her knees and dug her nails in. The earth was cool and soothing; she scooped it into her hands and rubbed it on her thighs. The soft grains nourished her skin.
The back gate creaked open and Emily stood, looking towards the walkway where she’d found Alisha and the white girl. Bailee emerged from behind the stucco walls. Emily knew she was coming; she had called her to come.
The other girl strode across the walkway, towards Emily. Her legs, long and covered in thin black hairs, were partially hidden by a flowy dress. Her new breasts stretched at the seam lines. Emily realized she was staring as Bailee got closer and flicked her eyes upwards. The slope of the other girl’s forehead curved downwards into her cheekbones as a mountain curves into the ocean. Her eyes were black and cautious as she stood in front of Emily.
“Hi, Em,” she said.
“Hi, Bailee,” Emily said, heart trembling though now she knew why. The two girls looked at one another, hands and body nearly equal. Each girl could see themselves reflected back in the other’s eyes.
