Twice Shy by Mikey Harper (16, Texas)

thirteen. your street is one of the longest in the heights, but my parents take a different route this time and pretend it’s any shorter. we turn the corner your house sits on, smooth-blue and gated, and i see a flash of your loose grey dress caught in the dimness of early evening. the sky is a little lighter than your house, giving me just enough to watch your bare feet play lightly over the street and your tan fingers raise a camera to your eye. in this moment, i don’t want to go on your lake trip or even go into your house. i could sit here and watch the way you move when you think i’m not looking, the way you carry yourself like your camera solidifies your spine, all weekend long. we are a secret, but right now i let myself stare. you really are beautiful.

---

four. the above-ground pool pitched up in our backyard has frozen over for the first time ever. the edges creak a little as coleman reaches over the brink and presses his finger down into the ice, a small spiderweb pricking itself alive beneath his touch. my toes strain, rising so i’m just tall enough to do the same. a little angular outline stabs up underneath my fingertip, a small piece of thin ice clinking out of place. the cold bites at my fingers and nose, and i can see coleman’s taller frame out of the corner of my eye. my little texas body has never been this cold.

sixteen. there is a rush in doing things you’re not supposed to. your fingers are warm, pressed into the back of my hand, and i wonder briefly which freckles you’re covering. you keep saying you’ve got to be so cold, and i’m so close to you, and you smell like the perfume sitting on your dresser, and my mother thinks we’re in the movie theater lobby, and i don’t know how to tell you that the cold is the last thing on my mind when you’re this near. you kick up some salt on the sidewalk, little grains flying underneath the parking lot floodlights. the sun has gone down already, and that makes it all the better. we cut through the smoking area of a small restaurant, the smell of cigarettes and the thrum of here-and-there conversations coming as fast as they went.

twelve. you know i can’t put on eyeliner as well as you do, so you’re doing it for me. the bathroom outside the gym feels underwater, not like we’re drowning but like we’re the only two staring at each other across the bottom of a crowded public pool. look up, you say. blink it out a little. okay, that’s good. you can smudge it yourself, if you want. i let you do it, because you always make it look just messy enough. in this moment i’m wondering to myself if there’s anyone else i’d let get so close to gauging my eyes out. your fingers are slender and gentle. i decide that, no, there isn’t. 

five. my mom is holding a camera in the passenger seat, small and glinting a pleasant shade of red. the vehicle is absolutely stuffed, any hopes of physical space abandoned long ago. ribbons of road stretch on and on, two-laned wrists reaching out to grasp nothing at all for miles and miles. i remember jake teaching me how to do the removable-thumb trick a few hours earlier. i smile, bending my small thumb into my palm.
​