FIRST PRIZE, FICTION
Cherry ISABELLE QIAN
I
n the days and even in the hours leading up to Margot’s first boy-girl pool party, I practiced taking my clothes off in front of the mirror. I studied it like it was something to be mastered, relentlessly, lifting the hem of my shirt and slipping it over my head in one fluid motion, the way I saw actresses do it in the movies. Under my clothes was my new bikini, which I wore like a present. My entire body was hairless and soft. I shaved it every day to maintain its hairlessness. I shaved my armpits and my legs and the pink, wrinkled caps of my knees. My body, when shaved, was beautiful. I liked how easy it was to touch. I liked the thought of someone running his hand along my calf and thinking to himself — how smooth! I bought the bikini a week before Margot’s party. It was the first bikini that I had ever owned, and I bought it specifically for the party, or really for Brandon, who I knew would be there. When I thought about someone’s hands touching my legs, those hands were usually Brandon’s. I liked to imagine him gripping my foot, his thumb rubbing circles on the inside dimple of my left ankle. I thought about him watching as I climbed — shining, newborn-wet — out of the pool and burned my flat soles on the white tile. I thought about him kissing the heart of my foot. His mouth would be cold from swallowing so much chlorine.
Inside the department store, I stripped off my clothes and stood naked in my socks under the fluorescent lights. The bikini that I had chosen was red. Cherry, according to the woman in the store. I loved cherries. In the summer, I would eat so many that they made my stomach hurt. I would eat them all in one sitting, when they were firm but not hard, the flesh swelling with moisture and sweetness, almost bursting from their oily, dark skins — the tautness that held for maybe a day after you took them out of the fridge, before they went soft and old in your mouth. They would leave stains everywhere, all over my lips, my fingers, the front of my shirt. Once, when I was little, I swallowed a cherry pit, and Margot told me that I was going to die. “Those are poisonous,” she said. “If you eat them, you go into shock.” “Right now?” I asked. “I’m going to die right now?” “We need to make you throw up,” said Margot. Following her lead, I shoved my index and middle fingers into my throat and prodded them around. My mouth felt so small on the inside. I coughed until I cried, my gag reflex convulsing against my hand. “Let me do it,” said Margot. “Just hold still.” When she slipped her fingers into my
mouth, I imagined them like pale flashlights, searching through the darkness, past the stalactites and stalagmites of my teeth, towards the strange, red cavern of my pharynx. I coughed and sobbed around her little white hand, and she kept saying, just hold still, I’ve almost got it, until her mom came running out of the house and told me that I would only die if I crushed the pit beneath my teeth and released the poison into my system. “Did you chew it?” she asked. “Or did you just swallow?” “I swallowed,” I said. “You’ll be ok,” she told me. “Be more careful next time.” After that, I started picturing cherries growing in my stomach. Not the trees with their pink blossoms, but the dark, red fruits — two of them tied together by their stems like twin babies connected by the same umbilical cord. “I see a lot of girls coming in to buy this one,” the woman in the store had said, shoving the red, nylon scraps into my hands. “It’s very popular for girls your age.” In the changing room, I put the scraps on and looked at my body in the glass. It did not look like my body, but it was. It was a body in a red bikini, and I realize that it was probably the kind of body that made people turn their heads around and think — wow. As I ran my hand over my stomach and stroked its smoothness, I
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