Pineapple Shakes

There are so many things that haven’t happened, yet. Perverted, restructured, evolved. The world is still so small, positioned between the everbrown hills, the long stretches of green pastures, the single, two-lane road that winds through the orange groves, blossom scent sauntering through every window, every memory.

You’ll never live through mandatory school lockdown drills, never learn how to use your backpack as a shield. Occasionally, you’ll participate in a fire drill, stand out in a line on the football team’s practice field under hot, torrential sunlight as your English teacher’s stilettos sink into the freshly watered lawn like crucifixes thrusted into redeposited cemetery soil. But you’ll never actually memorize the fire exit path, never need to. In a year, the twin towers will crumble thousands of miles away and the adults will barter your future with paranoia, but that’s a far away problem. You’re safe now, beneath the palm trees, your skin aglow under the brilliant hum of desert-valley warmth. The fires haven’t even started to burn year-round.

Only seniors are allowed off-campus for lunch. Only seniors have privileges, and you’re just a sophomore. A sophomore who is a full year younger than everyone else. Still, your breasts erupted from your chest bone over the summer, spilling out of your string bikini on each side of the triangle-shaped fabric, unintentionally neon. A billboard, an advertisement. Finally, a year later than everyone else, as if you woke up one day, and it just happened. Your body caught up. And you wanted to die. Wanted to take your dad’s rusted handsaw from the garage and decapitate your womanhood. Become invisible. Use the blood to drown all the boys, men who suddenly notice you, part ways when you walk past them, heads following an invisible fishing line caught on your hips, slam your locker door shut and lean in, breathe chalky Altoids-mint across your face, accidentally brush your chest as they squeeze by you in a wide-open space, a slow-guzzling engine following you home from school. You hate it. You hate them all. But you love pineapple shakes.

You’re just a sophomore, so the seniors have to sneak you off campus in order to take you out to lunch. They always pay, so you always say yes. You realized the monetary value of your dignity early on in life. You grew up pretty poor, so it isn’t very much. An order of fried zucchini, a Double-Double. People pay to hang out with you—how reframe dignity into power moves, vanity, popularity-by- proxy. You vocally complain about how much you hate them all, but carry the Styrofoam cup marked with red palm trees to every class afterward, sipping the shake slowly, letting it melt in your hands until it turns to icy froth, until you’re sure everyone else saw. Sure, you tell a boy who sits behind you in chemistry when he asks to have a drink of it. He makes a face. Gross, he hands it back. And then, Lemme have another.

Midweek, your 3rd period geometry teacher handles a small piece of thermal paper in front of the class. The messenger aide scurries away from the paused lecture about congruent triangles. He motions his hand as he reads the note, calls your name. Something about an orthodontist appointment, he says between writing theorems with a fat-tipped wet erase marker, the bulb of the overhead projector shining prisms through his thick lenses. He never makes eye contact with you; your male teachers rarely do anymore.

You tongue your braces, feeling the metal dig into the beads of your taste buds, create tiny, bloody fissures as to remind yourself that your braces are still glued to your teeth with fourteen months to go. Your upper lip is sore from trying to talk and smile and eat while hiding the brackets. A friend said braces make a girl’s lips appear sexy, voluptuous. You don’t believe him, cover your mouth with a raised palm as you eat in front of people, break your food into tiny bite-sized pieces with your fingers and monitor each muscle to chew. After his comment, you inspected the size of your lips in your bathroom mirror at home, tested palettes of gloss, practiced training your muscles into a natural pout. Eventually, you seceded, convinced you looked like a birthday clown. She’s got DSL, you read in a handwritten note from a friend once. Dick-sucking-lips, you repeated in the mirror, wiping the opulent gloss off on the back of your hand.

You don’t have an orthodontist appointment today. Still, you collect your three-ring binder and math textbook from your desk, shove the T-9 calculator into the waistband of your white low-rise capris and walk out. At your locker, you discard everything and reapply Chapstick you pocketed from the gas station. Close it, allow the echo to resonate through the empty commons. The space is an enormous, concrete fishbowl. It’s completely empty except for one yard narc making rounds. An empty police cruiser is always parked out front.

You walk right out of campus with your arms routinely crossed around your whole body. You’re not small, the chiropractor at your athletic physical made sure to tell you. But you are—the whole world is a massive, devouring blackhole. Your town is small; your body smaller. Outside, a truck is idling at the pick-up roundabout. It’s white, lifted, twin fender flares hovering over the front tires like flying discs. There’s mud speckled across the side door shaped as flames. The same as all the other trucks in the parking lot. You remember when you moved here a few years prior, how you noticed the streets rumble each afternoon, send tiny gravel shrapnel bouncing off the asphalt when the final school bell rang, and all the boys mounted their lifted trucks and rode through town like a Mad Max army. You never figured out why this ritual exists.

A boy with peroxide-spiked hair waves at you from the driver’s seat. He’s the lead singer of your high school’s resident pop punk band. You don’t know the name, don’t think anyone actually does, but when they play in the auditorium at pep rallies, it’s the closest most anyone will probably get to an actual Blink-182 concert, so he’s cool enough.

You hold up your pass for the safety monitor to inspect. His weapon is a walkie-talkie; he always has the sound cranked high, static revealing his operative position. He’s talking to a senior girl who is straddling the concrete block at the entrance. She giggles, puts her hand on his burly shoulder. He glances at your pass, nods you on without a word.

That was easy, you mouth as you climb into the truck. You remember a friend’s scar emblazoned across her forehead, how it makes her hairline look stapled on. You remember what your mother says about getting into boys’ cars. You tighten the lap belt until it bulges your gut—your spare tire as Cosmo calls it—to appease her. You cover the swell of flesh with your arms, leaving your chest open for consumption. It’s one or the other, always.

It always is, he says. He revs the engine conspicuously. He wants the girl out front to see. To see him, his truck, you in it. A show, a performance, long before a number of likes transformed everyone’s self-worth.

He asks you where you want to go, but he always takes you to the same place, where he orders you the same thing. You’re tired of this game. The pineapple shakes are becoming unsavorily sweet. Your best friend starts writing down caloric intake. You want to spend lunch eating soggy egg rolls from the school cafeteria with her, instead. Want to release your arms from your body and your lips from
your teeth. Your body has become a prison of exhibitionism.

After lunch, you ask him to drop you off out front, so you don’t have to walk from the parking lot with him. You find his hair, his height, everything about him growing more and more repulsive each minute you spend with him. You wonder if you’re leading him on. You wonder if you’re a tease. You toss half the shake into the trash, arriving an hour late. You’re failing fourth period. You always take two lunches.

On Friday, the same office aide scrambles into geometry, hands the teacher the same shape of thermal paper, then tucks his head out the door. You take the pass, wander the hall for ten minutes, and toss it in a bin before returning to class. A pineapple shake arrives in fourth period with no note.

The following weeks, the off-campus passes stop coming into 3rd period, replaced by Styrofoam cups of yellow soft serve in 4th period instead, every three or four days. You’ve added up the dollars spent, the wasted calories. You’d be fat and rich by now. You give them to the boy that sits behind you. Even he’s getting tired of the false taste of pineapple, the inconsistency of milky texture that leaves a cake of residue down the throat long after it’s finished. Neither of you can pinpoint if they’re made of soft serve or ice cream.

Who are these from, anyway? Your mom? He asks.

Yeah, you say, adjusting the thong your best friend insisted you wear with those pants. It’s unbearably uncomfortable. You imagine strangling her with it.

You know what? You turn to face the boy. He’s cute, has long blonde hair that curls right at the ears, sun-kissed. He’s always stoned, but has a much higher grade than you in this class. I’m going to drink that today.

You take the shake from him and suck it down in desperate breaths until your face, your teeth, your head explodes with frostbite. You revel in the pain, the sugar, the way you somehow know it’s never going to get sweeter than this.