Before she raped him, the salmon-pink rash on his neck looked innocuous, even attractive—the way it slipped up under his hair like a spider web, silky-smooth and so ready to snare her in and get her all tangled up in him. But after the fact it looked more like an allergy gone wrong, hives that spread itchy-like and ridged up like a penciled-in looped maze that was just begging for an X-Acto knife solution.
He was everything she hated about California and everything she loved about it. The day she met him was an eye without an iris and everyone was swimming in his own blue pit-hole of shit and vomit. Sunglasses swallowed girls’ faces and flip-flops quacked on cement like dying geese. Each time she felt like she wanted to cringe, a pretend dragonfly rubbed down her back and champed against her skin.
She was already in a bad mood before she saw him because the bus on the way to the mall lurched into a Mexican boy selling diced pineapples and left a sticky brown-red stain on the sidewalk. Nobody inside was hurt, but inside their skins and flesh their bodies shivered hopelessly, the way a corpse does in black water as it rushes in. They filed out past what was left of the boy and what was left of the bus driver and the cops who were interrogating him, their voices rising and falling like a swarm of grasshoppers even though there were only four of them there, and assembled on the sidewalk across the street.
Not her, though—she continued walking, thinking of how the dead boy must’ve felt like a mosquito being crushed, and that made her cringe too. She passed another pineapple boy and stopped a few feet after him to glance back and watch his emaciated, burnt arms handle the apples, as if they were silver candlesticks that he was wiping off with a wet Kleenex.
It could’ve made her cry if she hadn’t seen him.
You could say he was bathing in sunlight, but really, the sunlight was bathing in him. Waves of light seemed to flush into his cayenne skin and wade there, leaving shadows of trees to waver on his body like long, black birthmarks. His hair preyed on his forehead, on the back of his neck, against the top of his ears like teeth biting into a lower lip; his eyes shut out the world around them and pulled everything in close at the same time.
Looking back, she sees their first interaction as more of a suicide mission than love at first sight: He was the terrorist and she was the commuter train, the airplane, the busy intersection. He didn’t say “Hello,” but he said something, anything, and she thought it was a mistake so she continued walking (that’s always how it happens—they mistake the guy in a black suit with the guitar case for a street performer and boom, he bursts into a million black splinters propelled by clouds of fire into them, them being the naive masses who made a mistake that could’ve cost them their life, and maybe, most likely, did.)
“Excuse me?”
She marched on, her insides frayed by the dead Mexican boy, the live one, the one she almost fell in love with at first sight.
Buildings that looked like enormous square lemons stretched out ahead of her. Under her the sidewalk seemed to spread out like the skin of a girl’s palm when she paints her nails black.
When she told her sister Lori the story of how she raped the first boy she’s ever fallen in love with, Lori thought the next part would make for a great romantic comedy:
“Excuse me, missus? I was just wondering—what your name is?”
My name? she thought and a smile like a black screw staked itself into her face. She had no name, at least for that one second of bewilderment or cold, sick, blissful calculation, or whatever it was. My name?, she thought...
“I’m not even sure myself.”
“It’s just that—I think I’ve seen you before.”
“You have?” she said. “How bizarre.”
“Yeah. Bizarre.”
“Biz—arrrrr.”
“So,” he said. “You have no name?”
Her smile vanquished, the woman gazed straight at her victim, at his crusty pink scales that lurked from the back of his neck and gave off a hot white glare in the sunlight, at the way his eyes behind the sunglasses seemed to follow her every gesture like a wet, sticky lower lip.
“I might,” she said.
“Because I think I know you,” he said. “You must be an aunt of mine or something.”
“A long-lost sister, perhaps?” she sniffed, hurt.
He took off his glasses. “Ha, perhaps.”
So cunning, she thought.
She turned on her heels and snaked out. In that one moment when she turned away from him she thought she saw his head slowly lift and then sink back into the air, as if saying goodbye, though it could’ve been a hello. She hoped it wasn’t goodbye. But her legs flowed away and so did the rest of her body, into the empty sidewalk as wide as a fallen magnolia tree and as dirty-gray as a 9 a.m. in San Fran. It curved along the edges of the curb, its limbs flirting with the L.A. smog like a whore over spiked punch. Her fingers wilted in the air, her arms flurried like a creek under fisted rocks.
In a way, she saw love, every shade of romantic love, as forbidden. Maybe that made her feel giddy with it, or enamored with the idea of it the way a man can be enamored with the idea of murder or theft. She fucking wanted to wield the thing and stick it into someone’s eyeball deep, deep in like a key into its lock and then turn, turn hard, make it hurt, make love hurt like how she knew it would end up hurting her, because she’s never loved before and the first time always, always hurts.
But it wasn’t really love, or at least she didn’t know it was, yet.
