Infandous by Elana K. Arnold Read Free Book Online Page B

coming back here again and again. My mother says it’s all connected—the tide, the cycle of the moon, of a woman.
    I think about my mother, the way she smiled at Jordan tonight, and I wonder about men and boys and the gray space in between. It used to be that I enjoyed eyes on me the way Jordan’s eyes roamed my mother.
    Marissa and I have always made fun of the girls who fuck tourists. It’s just too easy to be part of the summer escape, to be the local color that guys go home to tell their friends about—a picture on a cell phone, a text or two, virtual memorabilia that adds up to proof of conquered lands.
    No one wants to be the conquered land.
    So my first time—not last winter but when I was fourteen—wasn’t with a tourist. It was with a boy named Eugene. A terrible name. He wasn’t really a local, either. He and his friends used to caravan up to Venice from Orange County every few weekends to skate our park, down near the art walls.
    I watched him skate and he watched me watch him skate and Marissa watched us both. “That boy wants you,” she whispered into my ear, her breath warm.
    Boys want girls. It’s just one of those things, not worth questioning. I grew up soaking in it, that desire. Everywhere I’d ever been, men wanted my mother. I knew they wanted what was mine—her touch, her hand, her smile. As I got older, I began to recognize they wanted other things from her, things she didn’t even give me, and every now and then, when she gave it to them—never when I was around, but I could always tell from the little scrap of condom wrapper in the bathroom or the salty heavy ocean smell in the bedroom or just the look on her face, later—I hated them. Hate is not too strong a word.
    That summer, with Eugene, I’d had my period for six months. I knew what it meant—that I could get pregnant. My mother said it meant more than that. She said it meant a fresh start every month, that my blood was a memory of our connection to the ocean, each swell of it moon-born and tidal. I thought it mostly meant a bloody hassle.
    Some mothers don’t want their daughters to use tampons, afraid that they’ll deflower themselves. My mother didn’t even keep pads in the house—she had these menstrual sponges, which she rinsed and reused. And she bought me tampons—the smallest size, organic unbleached cotton.
    “Your body is yours first,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to explore it.”
    Flowers. Deflowering. The tampon box—“Teen” size, it boasted—featured a light pink, open-petaled flower on a baby blue background.
    Eugene’s penis was way bigger than a teen-sized tampon.
    ***
    I perch on a bench not far from where Marissa and I sat on the swings earlier today. I stare out at the ocean, a booming inky shadow in the night, the crash of the waves louder now than before, now that it’s too dark to see them break.
    I met Felix out in the water. I was surfing—poorly, since that is the only way I know how. I like it out there, but I’m not a mermaid like my mother. It’s just that I like straddling the board; I like sitting under the sun, the rocking ocean beneath me, my legs dangling into the water.
    He’s the kind of guy who probably doesn’t know how to do anything poorly. That was my first impression. I watched him wait his turn in the lineup. I saw how patient he was; even when a kid took off in front of the line, he didn’t freak out like some of the other guys did. The kid obviously didn’t know the rules; he could barely get up on his board. Probably he was a tourist from somewhere like Tennessee and had no clue there even was such a thing as etiquette. When it was Felix’s turn, I thought for a minute that he would miss his wave. He seemed to paddle slowly, languidly even, but he must have been really strong, because he caught the wave no problem even though there was none of the frenetic rush that I always felt when I was going for a wave. And he popped right up, clean all the way