me sit beside her, and I could smell her. She was all clean hair and sweet skin. Our arms brushed on the armrest, and we let them linger, sweat against each other. Our skin forming a thin layer of wet between us, a little of her and a little of me mixing into something made of both of us. I was aching. I could have pole-vaulted right out of the theater.
She turned sixteen that week. At a 3 o’clock showing of The Dark Knight, she slipped her hand over the edge of the armrest and tangled her fingers in mine.
This time, when she left, Pope allowed us one minute alone in his garage room. I kissed her. It was awkward. Delicious. Her hand went to my face and held it. She got in Cuca’s car and cried as they drove away.
“You fucker,” Popo said.
I couldn’t believe she didn’t Facebook. Amapola didn’t even e-mail. She lived across the border, in Nogales, Mexico. So the phone was out of the question, even though her dad could have afforded it. When I asked Pope about his father’s business, he told me they ran a duty-free import/export company based on each side of the border, in the two No-galeses. Whatever. I just wanted to talk to Amapola. So I got stamps and envelopes. I was thinking, what is this, like, 1980 or something? But I wrote to her, and she wrote to me. I never even thought about the fact that instant messages or e-mail couldn’t hold perfume, or have lip prints on the paper. You could Skype naked images to each other all night long, but Amapola had me hooked through the lips with each new scent in the envelope. She put her hair in the envelopes. It was more powerful than anything I’d experienced before. Maybe it was voodoo.
At Easter, Cuca and her Lebanese hubby flew to St. Thomas for a holiday. Somehow, Pope managed to get Ama-pola there at the house for a few days. He was gigging a lot, and he was seeing three or four strippers. I’ll admit, he was hitting the sauce too much—he’d come home wasted and ricochet around the bathroom, banging into the fixtures like a pinball. I thought he’d break his neck on the toilet or the bathtub. The old man had been putting pressure on him—I had no idea how or what he wanted of Pope. He wanted the rock ’n’ roll foolishness to end, that’s for sure.
“You have no idea!” Pope would say, tequila stink on his breath. “If you only knew what they were really like. You can’t begin to guess.” But, you know, all boys who wear eyeliner and pay for full-sleeve tats say the same thing. Don’t nobody understand the troubles they’ve seen. I just thought Pope was caught up in being our Nikki Sixx. We were heading for fame, world tours. I thought.
And there she was, all smiles. Dressed in black. Looking witchy and magical. Pope had a date with a girl named Demitasse. Can you believe that? Because she had small breasts or something. She danced at a high-end club that catered to men who knew words like “demitasse.” She had little silver vials full of “stardust,” that’s all I really knew. It all left Pope staggering and blind, and that was what I needed to find time alone with my beloved.
We watched a couple of DVDs, and we held hands and then kissed. I freed her nipple from the lace—it was pink and swollen, like a little candy. I thought it would be brown. What did I know about Mexican girls? She pushed me away when I got on top of her, and she moved my hand back gently when it slipped up her thigh.
Pope came home walking sideways. I had no idea what time it was. I don’t know how he got home. My pants were wet all down my left leg from hours of writhing with her. When Pope slurred, “My dad’s in town,” I didn’t even pay attention. He went to Cuca’s piano in the living room and tried to play some arrangement he’d cobbled together of Tommy. Then there was a silence that grew long. We looked in there and he was asleep in the floor, under the piano.
“Shh,” Amapola said. And, “Wait here for me.” She kissed my mouth, bit my lip.
When she came back down, she wore a nightgown that drifted around her legs and belly like fog. I knelt at