Hickey

by Chip Cheek

She called him a fairy—the boy with the shaggy blond hair and dirty Texas A&M cap, the one with the green eyes and perfect array of freckles across his nose, who probably didn't know she existed. She called him a fairy because she liked him. Unprovoked, alone, invincible, in front of his friends, her notebook in hand, striding past him under the spangled shade of the oak tree near the jungle gym, headed toward the secluded mound behind the dumpsters where she liked to sit and write stories about Bohemians in Paris, she smiled at him, too. The smile said, Do you see me now, mon chéri?

This was his reply: he hocked a loogey and spit it at her, and it smacked her, like a kiss, right on the side of her neck, wet and thick and already cold.

She froze. The thing crept toward the collar of her t-shirt, the new lavender one with the glittery comet on the front, the one her father bought her for making straight A's three months in a row. She was not the most popular girl in school, and her family wasn't rich, but she was pretty, and she wasn't one of the poor kids, and it was inconceivable that this could be happening to her. She felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to kick the boy in the testicles, to slap him, to tear his shaggy bangs out in clumps, but she had to run now, because the thing was still there, eating away at her skin.

She dashed off across the playground, past a hundred or more other kids who were oblivious to her, and as she ran she heard the boy's friends laugh, that idiotic sound they made when they sucked their breaths in. She burst through the school doors. In the ladies' room she grabbed a huge wad of paper towel and did not wipe but sort of picked the loogey off, careful not to spread it. She took another wad of towel, wetted it, and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed at the skin until it was pink, until it stung to put her finger on it.

By afternoon word had gotten around that something had happened between the girl and the boy. In math class her best friend saw her neck and cried, Oh my God, he gave you a hickey— oh my God! and for the rest of the day the girl tilted her head like she had a crick in her neck, so no one could see the mark. She wanted to hurt everyone, even her best friend. She wanted to cut their hair unevenly with her scissors. If he were in her class, she'd have plucked his eyeballs out and pulled on them until the nerves snapped like old rubber bands. Luckily for him, she didn't see him after recess.

At home her father asked what had happened to her neck and she told him a wasp had stung her, then she burst into tears and disappeared into her room. She opened her notebook and imagined a woman in a black coat and red lipstick, holding a bloody dagger, standing on a cobble-stone street before a dumpster into which she'd thrown the body of a young boy, not quite dead. She blew her nose and tapped her pen on the page, thinking, thinking.

The girl's mother came to soothe her. Her mother knew the truth—she was not so old she couldn't tell the difference between a hickey and a wasp sting—but she played along anyway, rubbing calamine lotion over the mark and telling her to stay away from wasps, after all they're mean-spirited by nature, and unlike bees they won't die when they sting you.

The girl cried, Will you please just leave me alone?

Throughout the night, while the neighbor's mastiff howled like a wolf in a German forest, the mark itched. The girl scratched it and scratched it until it began to bleed.

Two days later, at church, the collar of her blouse bothered the mark, which had turned into a waxen-seal-sized patch of hard, knobby ridges. Her mother warned her not to mess with it or it would scar. As the choir sang "Remember the Lilies," the girl thought about new ways to torture the boy. It had become her obsession. She was the woman in the black coat and red lipstick. She would pinch the boy with acid-tipped tweezers until he was covered in bloody welts. She would rub salt into the welts and watch him cry.

After church the girl and her parents went to the grocery store—Stop sulking, her father told her, or you won't get any Pixy Stix—and there, in the Cokes and potato chips aisle, stood the boy and his father.

The girl shuddered, like a car before it stalls. If she could have moved she'd have knocked the boy into the shelves of three-liter Cokes behind him. But she didn't move, she only glared at him, and the boy saw her.

This was what he did: he raised his hand, timidly, in greeting. Then, receiving no reply, he dropped his head and made off toward the dairy section, leaving his father alone with a basketful of frozen dinners.

The girl's bones turned light and porous. Her stomach fluttered unpleasantly and her parents, clueless, begged her along. Come on, baby, her mother said, what ails you now? And she watched herself follow them, floating a step behind herself, a girl-shaped flurry of loose down.

When she made it home she settled into her room and stared out her window at the neighbor's backyard, where the mastiff had trampled the lawn to dust. The sunlight changed and the pine trees swelled with an auburn glow. She hated herself for her weakness, but she wasn't unhappy. She felt ruined and old, she thought to herself in the third person, as she picked up her notebook and pen: ruined and old.

© 2008 Night Train and respective authors/email support AT nighttrainmagazine.com