a girl into a city. When they leave, their residue remains, the discoloration on the wood where the sun came through every day for many days, until one day it didn’t.
Why are you smiling? Maggie asks.
Because, he says, I want to kiss you.
Mateo comes for Maggie one shining Hawaiian morning on his motorcycle. He brings her to a motorcycle club meet-up that begins with a potluck breakfast in the verdant hills. Maggie is the only girl of her age. The other women are biker chicks in dusty black leather with stringy hair. She feels out of place, but gloriously so.
She wears the turquoise top as a dress. Her tan legs vibrate against his with the hum of the engine. The first couple of curves are frightening but eventually she stops thinking about danger. Each curve becomes an opportunity to lean her body in the opposite direction and grow up.
Mateo has muscles and little slash marks fanning out from the sides of his eyes. She likes holding on to his back. Back in Fargo her parents are probably drinking. When she’s home it feels necessary to account for all their movements. But here in Hawaii she’s free. She’s on a vacation from the fear and unfairness.
They ride around all day. At a certain point, she feels a sharp pain and believes she has been stung by a bee. But then she realizes it was a rock that sailed up from the road and sliced her arm. She doesn’t complain about it. She doesn’t want to do or say anything unpleasant.
The engine sputters to sleep as Mateo rides them into his driveway, at the end of a canopied cul-de-sac. All the residences are on stilts, like fairy-tale tree houses for hippie surfers.
Mateo has a roommate who isn’t home. Maggie can tell he hasn’t lived in the place for long. His room is bare, dark-sheeted. Overturned wastebaskets double as nightstands. It seems he hasn’t kept anything from his old life, with the exception of a lighter and some nice pairs of pants. Maggie has just been in her sister’s wedding. It’s wild to her that this man had a wedding with a woman and now he has a single room with a bed against a wall. Only packets of duck sauce in the fridge, beer, sandy Brita.
The way Maggie sees it, she wants it more than he does. He doesn’t know she’s a virgin. He doesn’t know that just a few months ago she’d been giving her sister a hard time for being pregnant and unwed.
Maggie lies down on the bed first. They fuck for twenty minutes. It’s more and less than what she expected. For one thing, the actual physical stuff has become knowable, broken down into identifiable parts. The slick, copulative aspects are more obscene than she imagined they would be. But she’s in the club now. She’s one of the people who get thumped down into beds and lie atop wet spots.
It’s the intangibles that impress her the most. Sex, for Maggie, is in the way he noticed the cut on her arm from the rock. That he was upset because she hadn’t cried out, because she had kept the pain to herself. The way he peeled off his boxer briefs. The foreign softness of certain patches of skin. It would be these things that she would remember for years to come.
After it’s over he doesn’t take her home right away. They lie in his bed and talk for a long time. He asks her questions about Fargo, and he tells her about Cuba. She listens to him, with her hand on his chest, which is rising and falling like an animal’s. She concentrates on her hand, she hopes it’s lying there with the right amount of pressure, that it isn’t annoying, that she isn’t too much of a child. She doesn’t want to seem like a virgin.
Anyway, she isn’t one, anymore.
Byers objects about Hawaii. The whole state is a sex act.
The question, Hoy says, was did you confide in him about it?
Yes, you say.
And how did you go about confiding in him about that?
I wrote him a letter.
Okay. Why Mr. Knodel?
Because I was extremely embarrassed, and he had up until that point proved to me that he wasn’t one to judge.
Okay. And so what were you hoping to get from Mr. Knodel by writing him the letter?
You think about this. Some of these questions you are embarrassed to be answering in front of your brother, even though he knows