the sugar war (ii)

so this is what i wrote for the love scene assignment for our fiction class. it's part of the sugar war, but it's not the part that comes after the part i already posted. (obviously. because that wouldn't make sense.) i think my class liked it when i read it out loud, and that makes me happy. :)

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Resa had this thing called alopecia universalis, which is some kind of rare disorder that makes you lose all your hair. Under those bright colored wigs she wore every day, Resa's head was as smooth as an egg shell, and that's including her eyebrows and lashes. I remember watching her draw on eyebrows with a purple eyeliner pencil one time, her bald scalp shining, the lavender wig still sitting in perfect order on its Styrofoam head beside the sink. She caught me looking at her in the mirror and she grinned, blew me a kiss, and then stuck a tiny gold star at the corner of her eye like one of those cute little anime characters. I never did tell her how beautiful I thought she was, how I was always thinking about her pale hairless skin, wanting to put my charcoal-smudged hands all over it. I figure she must've known anyway. There's no way she couldn't know I wanted her all the time. She probably knew before I did.

For all the wanting, though, I only had Resa -- really had her -- once. It was four days before the end of the Sugar War, and we'd just found out about Gurley's dimes, so we were feeling pretty lousy when we got home from work. I think we both knew Harvey's had lost the War that day, but neither one of us wanted to say it, so we walked into the place not saying anything at all. I tossed my keys on the table by the door while Resa swiped the neon green wig off her round head and plopped it down on one of the empty heads facing the doorway.

Listen, I wanted to say. There's nothing we could have done. Who knew Gurley's could afford to sink that low? Not us. We couldn't have known. It's not our fault! But I didn't say that out loud either, because when Resa turned toward me again, she didn't seem too interested in words. She just came over and put her cool hand up to my cheek, ran the pad of her thumb across my bottom lip. I didn't really know what she was doing, so I just stood there noticing the pencil strokes of her dark green eyebrows and didn't move.

"Okay, straight girl," Resa said. "This is what's going to happen. I'm about to kiss you, and I don't want you making any noise about not being gay." She was looking at my mouth when she said that, but then she looked up at my eyes. "I'm tired of feeling so shitty," she said, "so we're just going to make each other feel good for a little while. Understand?"

I think I nodded, or at least I didn't push her away. She was the kind of person you didn't really say no to, even if you wanted to, which I didn't. I'd never kissed another girl before, but I think I'd been thinking about kissing Resa for a long time. When I didn’t protest, she smiled a little, and then she leaned forward and pressed her lips against mine.

It wasn’t like kissing a boy. Her mouth was so soft and small, and I could taste her green apple lip gloss on my lips after she pulled away and opened her eyes. Our kiss had only lasted a couple of seconds, and I hadn’t closed my eyes at all; I was probably worried that if I did, she wouldn’t really be there when I opened them again. She was smiling at me. She said, “Not bad, straight girl,” and then she slid her hand into my hair and pulled me toward her again, and this time she used her tongue. I closed my eyes.

I’d always been a little fascinated with Resa’s bald head. It was so smooth. There wasn’t even any peach fuzz, as if she’d gone over the whole thing very carefully with a razor. And I never would have asked her, but I wondered sometimes exactly how much of her body was affected, if she maybe had any hair further down. That day, the day Gurley’s won the Sugar War, I found out.

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