Today we play pretend: sleeping beauties, all of us girls at recess. We have no glass coffins so we each must steal from the overflowing trashcan a lemonade bottle. We must shatter it on the ground, arrange each piece around us, jagged reliquary. No flowers to hold in our death-clawed hands, so we grasp orange peels from lunch, dig our chewed nails in. The orange’s porous skin, makeshift bandage for our glass-sliced fingers.
We practice being hollow: anatomical Venuses, waiting to be filled.
We can only awaken by the lips of another. Yet the boys play on without us across the yard, running after a soccer ball, yelling at each other. They don’t spare us a single glance. All the touch they need, they get from shoves and kicks; all the nourishment, a teammate’s sweat. Perhaps we wish we could join them, though we don’t know exactly what that means.
We lay ourselves on the ground until the grit of the cement flays our shoulder-blades like chicken wings and the end-of-recess bell makes tuning forks out of us. We hold on. We know well by now, how not to vibrate out of our own skins.
I dare suggest to Katia, our leader, that we should try the fainting game next time. Forget the boys, I say. We don’t need them. Don’t need to be them. Katia looks at me strangely, like that last part, us needing to be them, never once crossed her mind. I burn like a church candle, beeswax pliant and ashamed.
We stand all in a row against the wall. Only Katia marches across from us, smirking sentinel. She is always dressed in white, not having gotten her period like we have. I try to remember what it’s like, to not yet know that cramping, lancing pain but it feels now like it’s always walked with me. Katia’s shadow is a storm-bruised contrast to her white dress, sun-drawn large enough to encompass us all.
On my mark, she says, and we all breathe as much as we can—preemptive survival—before we must breathe no more. Each inhalation burns with the promise—the deliverance—of pain. Katia’s perfume is flowers and gunpowder. When I hold my breath on her command, I cradle part of her in my straining lungs.
The girls on either side of me gasp and writhe against the unforgiving wall. They stagger, plead breathless mercy. I stare at Katia even as my vision dances with the powdery specks of moth wings. I want her to see I would never betray her or break her rules. If I could, I would shove all the shed blood back into my body, stand beside her dressed in white, our shadows grafted together, conjoined twins.
If I can’t be one with the boys, at least I can perhaps be one with her.
When I fall, I want her to catch me. If she doesn’t, I will name the cement Katia. I want her breath of life to revive me, reclaim the flowers and gunpowder from my bronchi. If it doesn’t, I will name the smell of dirt and the distant laughter and Katia’s bored whine and her receding footsteps and her voice asking the boys if she can play soccer with them—a kiss.