Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online Page B

throughout childhood and into adolescence. Our skin, pale from days indoors, had quickly blistered and her shoulders had begun to peel. After pulling the stinger I rubbed her back with lotion, then sat in the shade beside her, braiding a length of pine straw.
    “No fair,” she said. “You’re wearing your top.”
    “So?”
    “So take it off.” “Dare me?”
    “I double dog dare you.”
    I untied the bow behind my neck, then the other between my shoulder blades, and tossed the bikini top onto the grass. I lay on top of her, feeling the cool stickiness of her skin, the curve of her back beneath my stomach.
    I hadn’t touched another girl since that day we’d been caught, both of us reduced to frightened tears and shame. The boys at school liked me and were insistent; on many occasions I had found myself stripped bare in the bedrooms of those whose parents were out of town. More often than not I enjoyed it, although it seemed that only my body was involved, while my emotions and intellect remained detached. The boys all seemed so young, either too confident or too shy. Hair grew in unusual patterns on their bodies. Too often there was the smell of sweat on them, or worse, the overbearing scent of cologne. They talked about things that did not interest me: soccer and beer and TV, loud high school bands with meaningless names like Fruit and Not the Senate whose music did not move me.
    As I lay on top of Amanda Ruth, I felt a nervousness rattling in my stomach, and along with it a feeling of being in exactly the right place and with the right person, a wholeness I had not felt since we’d last been together. Her body felt as familiar as my own, although she had changed since that day in the boathouse, gained a softness and a stillness that wasn’t there before.
    After a while she moved, repositioning herself so that she was lying on her side on the towel, facing me, her head propped on her hand. We lay there for a minute or more, looking at one another, and I did not know what to do. I sensed that she was different now, experienced.
    “Have there been other girls for you?” she asked, picking up the pine straw I had begun to braid and dragging the tip of it along my skin, slowly, from navel to sternum.
    “No. For you?”
    “There was a girl at camp. We write letters. Her name is Celine.”
    “What about boys?”
    “None,” she said. “You?”
    “A few.”
    “I could have guessed.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “For me it’s only girls.” She had her hand on my hip and was looking in my eyes, so serious. I felt strange lying there topless, having a serious conversation. Her bathing suit bottom had green leaves on a black background. There was an imprint of grass on her thigh. “You, on the other hand, aren’t sure what to make of anything,” she said.
    “Do I have to be sure?”
    “It would just be easier if you knew.”
    “Easier for whom?”
    She didn’t answer. She was kissing me. And I was thinking that this was easy. This was how it was supposed to be. She kissed me so softly, her hand lightly touching my breast, and when she came closer I could feel her hair brushing against my shoulders. Her hair was long and soft and it got in my eyes when she kissed me, strands of it fell into my mouth. She was warm all over. She laid me back, put her mouth to my neck and then she was kissing me there, then my collarbone, my belly. I could feel her fingers so close, the pressure of her hand against me, an opening up, a gentleness I’d not known before. She took her hand away and lay on top of me, pressing her thigh gently between my legs. The rhythm came easily, I felt myself rocking against her. She was speaking softly into my ear, not a whisper but a sound so low it was almost not sound at all, things no boy had ever said to me. There was no fear in this, no shame, not the ugliness her father made us feel that other time, years ago. I felt the warmth pressing out of me, the deep, final push,