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Flirting.
by Claudia Smith
The night Maria turned nineteen she walked out to Marian island with
Geoffrey Butler. They had a bottle of champagne from catering job she'd just worked at Hogg Hall. She was still wearing her black skirt and white blouse. Under the blouse was the teal necklace he'd won for her last week at the Laramy County Fair. She wore her blouse buttoned over it, just the way she'd worn her scapular when she was in high school.
The fair had been last week, but it seemed like years ago. They'd gone with a guy named Reese and this girl named Blythe who seemed to be attached to Geoffrey, because they did things like punch each other on the back and loop arms. When they stopped at the ring toss, Maria pushed her hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out his lip balm. She smeared some on her chapped lips. Then she blushed when he looked at her and jammed it back in. She should have asked first. She was no good at flirting.
But he smiled. He grabbed her elbow and dragged her to see the pig races. He said his father was from a farm. She said when she came to this college she'd thought it would be glamorous, that everyone else would be rich and clever, like the people in this Fitzgerald book she'd read, This Side of Paradise. He said his Dad was a lawyer not a tycoon.
It was a spring day. The fair smelled like fried bread and flowers. When her pig won, Geoffrey bought her a stick of blue cotton candy. They watched two squirrels mating in an oak tree. He said that was good luck.
Blythe and Reese found them. "There you are," Blythe said, "watching
squirrels fuck." She and Reese had their arms looped together. She kissed Geoffrey on the cheek, made a smacking noise like it was a joke between them. Maria had never kissed anyone.
But she spent the next week kissing Geoffrey. He had a single in Fog Annex. When she came over he lit candles and opened the windows so they could smell the honeysuckle growing outside. After, she thought about all that kissing and didn't know the words. They sounded hollow and silly. She thought about some poems she knew, the one about hands smaller than the rain, and that seemed wrong, but it sort of captured the feeling. Geoffrey's skin was warm and gold in the candlelight. Sometimes his face felt rough and scratchy when she kissed him.
Tonight she had a condom and little book of matches in her breast pocket. Every night, the water rose around Marian Island and turned it from a peninsula to an island. It was late, the water would rise soon, and they'd walk back in the morning.
They sat on rock. She lit a match and held it up to his face. She liked his warm gold-brown hair, tiger gold eyes, his skin lit up like a candle. She hadn't told him she was a virgin, but he probably knew. They watched the match burn until the flame reached her thumb, and then he blew it out.
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