Close to Me

Fiction by Alison L. Fraser

Choco Taco must be attracted to the scent of my period because when I get up at 6am to pee, the bathroom wastebasket is strewn down the carpeted hall, a trail of blood-spotted toilet paper leads to the doggy door. I rush to pick the tissue up, hoping no one saw it. On my way back upstairs, I see out the window a dark brown labradoodle digging a hole. I never find the tampon.

“Don’t worry, no one was up,” Arlo  says in my ear at breakfast.

She has dirt under her fingernails, and she nods ever so slightly towards her dog, now panting placidly in the corner.

*****

“Gimme your gorgeous hair. I’m so jelly,” she says, hunched across her desk to pet the back of my head. I never let people touch my hair, but I let her. Arlo is one of those classic curly redheads with freckles, striking against the kind of pale skin that flushes at any amount of shame or attention, pinking to reveal her feelings. She hates being an easy read.

Arlo is new this year. She grills me if my friends are mean, ever bully anyone, or me, if I am their victim, the outsider of the group. We’re all huge nerds, I assure her, but she continues to take my hand to draw me away to her locker to put on eyeliner in her magnetic mirror together and speak to me and me alone.

“Do you really think they like me, or are they pretending to be nice?”

“They don’t know you well enough yet,” is what I tell her, which probably doesn’t make her feel any better.

I can tell how annoyed they are by the way they block her out of huddles, the exasperated murmurs when we trade lunches, when she doodles her name on my arm in metallic gel pen.

The first time she invites me over her house to sleepover, before the Choco Taco incident, we watch all the Lord of the Rings movies in one night. Arlo looks like her mother, same red hair, pouty mouth. Arlo’s mother tells me she is grateful I am introducing Arlo to the right people at school. I don’t mention that Arlo sits with us at lunch, but if I’m talking to anyone besides her, Arlo won’t touch her food, waiting and sighing.

*****

The hair lightening cream tingles the skin above my lip. I lie face up on my bed so as not to let the puffed-up bleach fall onto my sheets. There’s a ding of a message. It’s Arlo: wut up. I try to gather my thoughts from before I heard the ding, but can’t remember where my mind had wandered, or what I was up to.

When I was ten my mother showed me how to hide my dark upper lip hair. I remember enjoying the burning immediately. It would be worth it, I told myself. This is better than the teasing. I wonder if the friends I have now would say the same, mustache girl, but with a kind of bent affection that teenagers can be so good at, poking each other, but lovingly, because we’ve since learned how to deflect in public. I wonder what Arlo would say. Maybe I’ll tell her someday, maybe I’ll tell her next time she asks what I am up to.

*****

Arlo and I like the same things. I carry a sketchbook everywhere and get her into the habit of drawing too. Her sketches have a cohesion to them, where mine change style, as though there is more than one person filling the pages. Hers are so decisively her. She outlines her drawings in archival ink pens; she doesn’t like smudges. She admires mine, smeared and scraggly graphite, with envy.

“I wish I had the guts to make it messy like you.”

I wish I could figure out a style and stick to it.

*****

We’re messaging and doing a homework assignment together in between debriefing the day at school when she types, I wanna kill myself. I don’t type back that I have the same urge, because I don’t want to seem like I’m copying her, but every night I lie in bed holding my breath, or pinching the skin thin around my wrists, or stretching the neck of my sweatshirt up and back, tucking the sleeves in between the bars of my bed and pulling forward. Less so when I sleep over Arlo’s house, but the thoughts remain there, a viscous itch at the back of my brain. I don’t know what to say back to her, so I tell her she can talk to me anytime about it. She tells me I’m a good friend and signs off.

I have an Altoid tin full of pills under my bed, a mix of stuff. I take them out when those thoughts push to the front of my brain, and I caress them in the palm of my hand, telling myself at least I don’t feel it as bad as her. The pills are pretty, blue, white, pink, a deep red. I’m not sure they’d do anything anyway. I forget what they’re for.

“I’ve been collecting pills for myself,” she tells me during class. I must look shocked because she smirks, wrinkles her forehead, as if she’s messing with me, mimicking me.

I tap a nearby friend on the shoulder, pretending I can’t hear Arlo because we are sitting in a group in the middle of a biology lab, and it’s unnerving to be talking about pills at such a high volume, revealing my secret—I mean hers. The friend turns around and waits for me to speak. I shake my head, never mind.

A moment later I whisper to Arlo, “Me too.”

“Yeah, but I bet you haven’t ever done anything, like, close to me.”

*****

We’re in English class. I have to recite a poem in front of everyone, some sonnet. I’m nervous as all public speaking makes me nervous, especially poems. I lose my place about halfway through, paranoid I’ve skipped entire lines. My mouth continues moving but my brain replays the beginning, retracing my words for what I’ve missed. I speak too fast, trying to spit the words out before I forget them. This time my knees buckle, and I slump to the floor.

My teacher hovers over me smiling his stupid smile.

“Are you okay?”

He’s nervous that if I’m not okay he’ll have to get help, and it would be a thing. I don’t want it to be a thing, so I say what would make the most sense without causing further questions.

“I have my period.”

“Oh, okay, well, do you want some water?”

*****

“Take an iron pill when you’re menstruating.”

“I—I don’t actually have my period, Arlo.”

“I know. But when you do,” she leans over to grab a fruit cup from the serving line.

“Okay. I’ll think about it.”

“I have some in my bag if you want. So you don’t have to buy them.”

“Um, sure. Thanks.”

She smiles her braces smile, which she usually keeps hidden behind pursed lips.

“Happy to help a friend,” she says, reaching into her bag for a small, black pill box flecked with painted pink camellias, and a delicate clasp.

“It was my Nonna’s,” she catches me eyeing the box and palms me a few iron supplements.

*****

Choco Taco trots up to me lying on Arlo’s couch. He prods my knee, then he presses his nose to my crotch. I push him away. He pops up relentlessly, nose back in my crotch.

“Choco Taco, no!” Arlo shouts, holding a plate of pop tarts.

“My mom said we could eat in here, so don’t make a mess, don’t let the dang dog into the food. Yeah, you, you gross pup, stop sniffing her vag. I swear, he only does this when you’re around.”

I’m unsure if she realizes what she’s said and is pretending I don’t hear it that way. After all, it is both our post-sleepover morning sweatiness stinking up the room. She puts the plate down on the ottoman, her hand hovering over the pop tarts, strawberry and wild berry. I wait to take one until she chooses which to eat first, watching Arlo’s focused face. The short peach fuzz under her nose sticks upright, glowing in the sunlight behind her. She has some zits near her ear and jawline. I reach for the spot under my ear, feel around for the familiar bumps, a slight raw pain when I touch them. Arlo bites the corner of a wild berry.

I tell her, “You know, I used to make fun of this kid who said he only liked the unfrosted ones. Back in like, sixth grade.”

Arlo scoops crumbs from beneath her chin. Her face is blotchy, lips pressed together. She watches me for a minute, no chuckle, or nod in agreement, stuck in thought.

“But it turned out his mom wouldn’t buy him the frosted ones,” I continue to fill the silence.

“What kind do you like?” She turns on the TV.

“Brown sugar cinnamon.”

“My apologies your highness,” she says.

I don’t know what I expect her to say, but it’s not that. I used to tell Arlo stories from before we met, but she’s been tuning me out recently. Maybe because they’re untoasted, but the pop tart is bland, beige mush. I work saliva around my mouth so I can swallow it.

“Aren’t they good?”

“So good.”

*****

Arlo is flipping through her sketchbook showing me her drawings after school. I’m staying to do work on my portfolio.

“Isn’t it so weird, what I’m doing?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

I unroll a piece of thick paper, the kind that’s so soft it’s close to cloth, from the fancy paper drawer I have my art teacher’s permission to use. Arlo looks on hungrily as I slide the metal drawer shut with my hip.

“There’s this one. See my weird art. Do you think I’m getting better? I won’t be as good as you, but look how weird it is,” she says.

“Arlo, I’m trying to focus.”

She flicks her wet paint brush at me, spraying dark blue water across my paper as I’m aligning it with my etching.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” she stares at the spots not sounding sorry at all. I brush the water away as best I can, but the paper is ruined.

*****

“You’re not meant to keep the friends you make in high school,” Arlo says to me over our school breakfast. “They’re all temporary. I’ll probably make better friends when I leave.”

“They don’t have to be temporary,” I say, a little offended.

“Do you think you’d be friends with them if you weren’t forced to be with each other every day?”

“I barely talk to them these days anyway,” I say, “What about us, you’re my friend, aren’t you?” I push one last speck of tasteless cereal around with my spork.

My mother finds sporks annoying. When I was in elementary school, I’d come home every day with a school spork, and she’d dramatically throw her hands up. She banned sporks from the house. I think now it was more about the excessive garbage, the endless emptying of trash from my bag that she found aggravating.

“What’s up with you?” Arlo asks.

“What? Nothing,” I say, distracted by my mom’s tantrum over sporks.

“Tell me. What’s so funny?” Her face, urgent.

“Just realized something about my mom.”

Arlo grunts, she wants to move on.

“I wanna bang someone,” she says, tossing her drowned bowl in the trash. She combs her hair to the side with one hand, letting her fingers rest around her neck like a vice.

“Who?”

“You don’t have to love the first person you have sex with.” She glares past me. Lost.

That’s not an answer to who do you wanna bang?

“You got your braces off!” I yell, my legs slam to the floor from my tilted-back chair in a clatter.

“I was wondering when you’d notice. You’re a good friend,” she says.

*****

I thought I’d be spending most of April vacation with Arlo, as we had in February, but she tells me she's going on vacation to someplace hot with her family over the break. On Monday, she’s different. I’m not sure the sun could do what it’s done to her body; her hair has lost its red luster, her skin is way dull now, sallow, her freckles replaced by scarred pimples. I assumed freckles became more visible in the sun, not vanish entirely.

“Not mine,” she sings, “and for once you can’t tell I’m blushing neither,” she pinches her cheeks. Nothing happens, but her skin behaves unlike skin, and more like a balloon deflating. She seems pleased with herself.

“Don’t worry, it won’t be like this forever. You have to let it settle.”

“Let what settle?”

“Oh, never mind,” she says.

I don’t tell her how I spent all of break alone. How I didn’t hang out with anyone, how no one else asked to hang out with me. I exist through double paned glass, a blur from everyone’s view. That’s so emo, ew. She would say something scolding like, Those people don’t love you like I do. I get you.

*****

“You smell that?” Arlo mouthes to me during class.

It smells gross, whatever it is. The windows are open, since our English teacher enjoys the spring breeze and scent of budding trees, but the smell is overpowering and everyone is covering their mouths or holding their noses. I don’t know how to tell Arlo it is coming from her, old sweat, the mold that forms in a wet bathroom, your towel from drying your hair and the hair products you wipe from your hands. She reeks of it. I shake my head, no, trying to be nice.

The stench is emanating from inside Arlo’s locker as we pass it on our way to lunch. I glance towards it, and she notices me.

“You smell it?” she asks again.

I can’t deny it this time, she wants me to say yes, with her pleading eyes.

She scans the hall to make sure no one is watching and opens her locker, beckoning me forwards. Inside on the top shelf of her locker is a mason jar, a wooden spoon protruding from the rim. The odor is a full wave of swamp wafting towards us, as though a fan is blowing from behind the jar, a vibration. Arlo picks up the jar, the crook of her arm shielding me from what is inside.

“You have to swear you won’t tell,” she says severely.

“Okay.”

I lean in as she brings the jar to my face. Inside is a mess of dark brown goo, shiny like chocolate ganache. She stirs it, and as she stirs it, it glazes against the glass, a jelly. It is red, not brown. It is blood.

“It doesn’t have to be period blood, if they don't get a period you obviously have to use something else. I’ve tried it with tears or sweat before. And scabs. Scabs are good.”

“For what?”

She puts the jar back.

“For me to be close to you.”

My thoughts and hers, as though we have been in on it together.

“That’s my blood.”

“I needed it to be more like you. I had to feel it.”

“But I really hate who I am.”

“A side effect,” she says.

*****

Head bent down over my knees, my legs prickle from sitting on the toilet. I should be back in Bio, or my next class. I’ll have to go collect my bag from the classroom in front of other students I don’t know, who don’t know me. My thighs feel cold. I reach down between my legs and pull the tampon string, roll it in some toilet paper and shove it into the trash can on the stall wall.

I know Arlo’s shoes as soon as she enters. They are covered in handwritten lyrics, one foot crossed over the other as she waits by the sinks. I can no longer read the lyrics I have sharpied on my own sneakers, the ink is smudged into the rubber, a blur. She watches me leave the stall, rinse my hands. I watch her enter my stall. I hear the wax paper liner rustle from inside the trash can.

*****

There’s a new girl in our grade. She draws on her jeans in blue ballpoint, so it looks as though words and doodles have been stitched into the fabric. She wears cut-off sleeve tees, smells of almond and marshmallow. When she gets called on in class, she lifts up her chin ever so slightly, baby hair sideburns, knows exactly what to say. She listens to people, like really listens, and then gives these whispery, thoughtful responses.

I approach Arlo at her locker, twisting her spoon inside a mason jar. The stink lingers. I search to meet her eyes in the mirror to let her know I’m there. A familiar face gazes back.

“Do you want me to show you how?”

*Originally published in Surely Magazine.

BIO: Alison is a mixed and messy writer existing in Massachusetts. They have some other stories in Black Lily Zine, Roi Fainéant, and HAD. Read more by visiting alisonfraser.space.