Catholic Girl Smile

Grant took the things he'd been told he needed and closed the door, staring at the knob for a moment as if he feared it would turn by itself. The lock was broken, but his parents wouldn't be home for several hours. He looked down, prepared, and then began. This was the first time he had tried, having just turned eleven, so each step felt new or forbidden. He opened the lid to the porcelain basin and stared into the water, and then glanced upwards towards the crucifix his mother had hung on the wall above the extra toilet paper holder bin. He pictured Helen's face, smiling at him--as she often did. In his imagining, like at school, she wore the uniform of St. Mary Magdelene's, a white button up blouse and a blue and grey plaid skirt--and though it was the same uniform the other girls wore, there had always been, for him, something different about the way she filled it out. Hourglass.

She was a year older and he liked her. She was taller than him, too. As he stood at the toilet, he didn't try to picture her naked, but instead how she looked jumping rope and singing verses of their chants as she did with her friends during lunchtime, the skinny ones, Molly and Lisa Mae, turning the rope as she jumped her turn, plaid skirt bouncing up to reveal dark, muscular thighs, her arms swinging slightly, the red and teal beads in her weave glinting in the sun.

He applied the lotion, closing his eyes. With each passing moment, it was as though her skirt flew higher, like she jumped so far above the rope that the draft created by impact and the movement of her legs were compelled to float it more and more each time she landed, whether on one foot or two, until it just kept hovering above her white cotton panties like a ballerina's skirt. Too, he could see her looking at him as she jumped, winking, smiling a new, sly smile he had never seen. Mentally, he smiled back at her, too, as he soloed closer to his goal, escalating the movement of his hand until he came so very close to something he had never had before that he was certain it would have been fantastic if his eight year old sister hadn't opened the door, without even knocking, and shouted, "I have to use the bathroom!"

In response, he shouted back, red as a beet, "Get out, Sally! I'm taking a piss! Leave me alone, will ya?" but the damage was done; he could not bring himself back to Helen. He flushed a nothing load and fled the scene bewildered. It would be many months before he would find another chance, for his parents watched him closely and were hardly ever gone.

Still, it was a long lunch period in school the next day, watching Helen jump. He felt he had, in one way or another, been robbed of her. He was angry. His pants felt tighter. And she didn't smile at him then. She frowned. She frowned so much that, later, when he thought about it privately, ashamed and dismayed, he realized the sly smile he had attributed to her was likely a product only of his head--and that she was the innocent whom he, by devising it, had maligned. Too, he would think, for many moons, from all that day's frowning, that she knew what he had done.