skins. My mind tries to force the hues into logic but cannot.
“The river is full of them today,” Sophia says.
As soon as she says it, all of my cells light up with horror-shock, a split second before I start gagging.
The river is full of thighs, pushing along like fish, huge as bass, moving downstream. The thighs bump up against each other, create awkward waves, a strange flood of lone limbs in water, a tide of skin tones rushing by.
“What the fuck?” I ask.
“They’re here,” Sophia says, pointing.
Boys stand on the rocks across the water, dozens of boys. They wear boxers, their bare chests reflecting the color of the river. Everything is flesh against rock.
I can make out some of their faces. I recognize some of them from school. I make out Jarred’s face in the crowd.
Sophia strips off her shorts and t-shirt, unhooks her bra then removes more, her nude body puckering in the cold air.
“Cassie,” Sophia whispers through teeth. “Take your clothes off.”
I have never been naked in front of boys before.
“Do not fuck this up, prude,” Sophia hisses.
The boys howl my name. Jarred says nothing, just stares at me dumbly.
I jerk my legs out of my shorts and stretch my elbows through my t-shirt as I slide it off. I’m normal like Sophia, I have a smooth, flat belly, no knot.
In the river air, my naked body shakes. I go blue like her. When she climbs down the rocks and into the water, I do that too.
The water wraps itself around me, cold, sends shiver shocks through me.
I watch Sophia splay out on her back and float with the thighs.
Her breasts surface up above the water.
I lie back on the water like her. I tilt my head up.
The tide of thighs slides against me, moving past. The thighs touch me, caress me heavily, dozens of them. The feeling of the wet skin is new. The slick slithering makes me dizzy.
I close my eyes and forget the sky. I forget the boys.
A thigh glides past my neck, over my arm, away. Another thigh passes over my calves and down to my toes. Thighs skim my stomach and hips, constantly.
More thighs push their way to new places on my back, brushing parts of my skin that I can never reach, sending electricity from my chest down to the place between my legs.
The mouths on the rock make louder sounds, noises bigger than the river tones, shake me out of myself.
I open my eyes. The boys are clustered on the rocks closest to me, now stripped too.
Their hands are moving against themselves.
The river does not stop. The thighs keep brushing all over me. We keep floating. I keep floating. On the rocks, all of the hands keep moving, all of the eyes on me.
THE MOON IS BIGGER THAN ANY NIGHT before. A wildness in the light keeps me awake.
There’s a knock on my window, then it slides open. Sophia’s face slides into view.
“Cassieeeeee,” she calls softly. “You awake?”
“Yes.”
She dangles a silver key in my direction.
“Get up. Come on, come on. Let’s go for a ride.”
I sneak down the stairs and out of the house, into the night air. Then I follow her to my father’s red tractor which looms metallic on the lawn.
Sophia climbs up onto the tractor and gestures for me to follow. Her breath is sour on the night air. She slides a bottle from inside of her jacket and passes it to me.
“You have some catching up to do,” she says.
I want to be wild, forget the knot, forget the earth. I chug, and it goes like knives down my throat, then numbs me good.
“Atta girl,” she says.
She turns my father’s tractor on, the quick roar of the engine, then steers us across the land. The wind runs through our hair.
She hands me the bottle again, and I swig longer and deeper. The numbness builds in my veins, as if the knot has been erased from me. I laugh up at the sky.
“Let’s ring the barn!” she yells.
She accelerates, and the seat bounces beneath us, I put my hands in the air, let out a yell.
We circle the red barn at a high speed, Sophia making the tractor turn tighter and tighter. We lean with the machine, we kick up dust around the wheels when we hit the curve.
“WOOOO HOOOOO,” she shouts.
The scenery is moving rapidly around me now: The moon, the red wood of the barn, the crisp night sky, the dirt on the ground.
“Slow dow—” I start.
“FUCK,” she yells as the tractor takes the next turn too tight, the wheels spinning out beneath us.
We smash through the side of the red barn. The tractor wheels spin out on some hay, then come to a stop. I lift my head, pulse pounding, shaken.
The hole in the barn wall is like a giant mouth. Through its jagged teeth, I can see the moon, the stars, the whole world.
THE SUN HITS OUR FACES THROUGH THE smashed barn wall. My mouth is a mound of sand, tongue dry, stuck to the backs of my furred teeth.
Sophia is beside me, snoring.
I let my elbow find her gut and sink it in.
“Get up, get up, get up,” I say.
The air gets a few degrees colder. A shadow falls over us: My mother.
“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK NOW?” she screams. “What have you done!? LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!”
Sophia starts laughing.
“And you, what are you doing here?” she asks.
“Just having fun for once,” she says.
“FUN?” my mother screams, pulling the bottle from the hay. “You’re
