So We Can Glow - Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith Page 0,13

our feet if it was warm enough to wear sandals. The boys we liked asked us what it meant, but we wouldn’t tell them. WINONA FOREVER was ours and ours only. We liked boys and we liked each other too. Crystal and I kissed when we slept in the same bed. We kissed until we couldn’t kiss anymore, but that was all we did. Kissed. We kissed and kissed until our sticky-lipgloss mouths tasted exactly the same. Like cherries or strawberries or pink or grape or blueberry or lemon or Dr Pepper and then we rolled over on fire. Burning and burning before we fell asleep. We didn’t tell the boys about this either. Not even when they were being pervs and wanted to get off on asking us if we ever made out. We were coy when we said no, stop it, no.

We started kissing after Amber died. It was summer and Amber and her boyfriend had been out celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday. It was summer when Amber and her boyfriend went missing for two whole days until the cops found the car in the river. It was summer when Crystal’s family had to bury Amber. It was summer when Crystal and I went and bought all the yellow roses we could find at the grocery store and put them on Amber’s grave because yellow roses were Amber’s favorite. And we each kept a yellow rose for ourselves and came back to Crystal’s room and watched Mermaids because Crystal said she wanted to watch something cozy so I went home and got my tape and brought it back. A lot of Crystal’s family was still over at her house, in the kitchen, eating and cooking. Her dad was out on the front porch, drunk with his brothers. Her mom was in the kitchen smoking and crying with Crystal’s grandmother. Crystal and I went to her room and closed the door and turned the movie on. I put my head on her shoulder and I’d already cried so much I didn’t think I could cry anymore, but I sobbed. Again. And Crystal was playing with my hair. I got up and went to the bathroom, blew my nose, washed my face. My eyes were all black and streaked from my makeup afterward. Crystal had taken off her black velvet dress and I took mine off too. We were in tank tops and panties and when the movie was over we got in bed. We could hear her family in the rest of the house, on the front porch, in the backyard. Everyone was being quiet, but the house was somehow loud because it was full and alive, something Amber wasn’t anymore.

Crystal looked at me and put her hand on the side of my face and it was both of us. Both of us leaned forward and kissed and kept kissing. My stomach, our tongues—pink cotton candy, swirling. We touched feet in her cool sheets and I don’t know how long we kissed with the windows open. When we were finished, we cried some more before Crystal got out of bed and went into the kitchen to steal a cigarette from her mom’s pack. Her mom had drank a lot and took some pills and passed out on the couch in her black dress; her dad was out there staring at the TV. Crystal’s uncle was at the sink, sniffing and quietly doing dishes with the wet spoons clinking and catching the zappy kitchen light.

I had a headache from everything, but I smoked with Crystal anyway. She peed in front of me, put the seat down and sat there with her knees under her chin. I let my cigarette hand hang out the window whenever I was holding it. Crystal pulled a half-empty bottle of peach schnapps from underneath the sink. We’d absconded with it that morning from Crystal’s parents’ liquor cabinet. We’d learned the word absconded in English class. It was extra credit on the vocab quiz. Cherry schnapps was my favorite, but I liked the peach too. Crystal’s favorite was peach. I thought it was important for her to have her favorite that sad night. And I wanted to be there for her, for whatever she needed or wanted. After we finished our cigarette, we went to Amber’s abandoned bedroom, touched her stuff, hugged her stuffed animals and cried some more. We didn’t sleep much that night and when we ended up in Crystal’s room again she and I