Virgins by Satori McCormick (17, Colorado)

Alba and I were virgins together

I never understood her Spanish because she spoke it too well

But I loved the way she did,

With rose petals the fabric of her irises and wind rushing through her veins in place of blood

And one night we practiced dirty dancing to 90s hip hop hits and we were fading fast, blurring out of existence, like two blazing comets orbiting each other in the blink of a supreme being, divine paparazzi,

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She wanted God to fall head over heels for her,

So she did her nails by the pool, black polish, Retrograde, the kind her stepdad forbade,

On the wet ledge she absently kicked her feet under the water and I sat beside her coveting

Her red braided anklet and seashell toenails

In the middle of our shitty apartment complex in the heart of the world in a shallow community pool

I fell in love with Alba violently

Think of Icarus as he opens his lips to gently swallow the sun

My heartbeat thudding like the slap and crash of my mother on a cheap IKEA table when her husband hit her

And a window shatters somewhere, gunshots flowering like fireworks in the night, I make out with her

Better than that boy with tattoos up and down his arms in the back of his white pickup truck when they come back from a first date

She’s tilting her head back and he is six years older

And my little half sister is sobbing on the couch because her milk spilled and I push back my hair to clean it up

Dabbing the spreading wetness with a cloth while my sister keeps shrieking in my ear

So I slap her once on a rosy cheek and miraculously she is quiet

But when I look back in the window through the bars Alba is gone and the white truck is empty lit like a bioluminescent lagoon under the phosphorescence of mango-colored street lamps

I think of Alba’s homeland and try to imagine her life there because she is now a planet and I am her moon

Everyone here just listens to old Spanish ballads from their youth so nobody teaches me David Bowie but I listen on my bed I share with my sister waiting for my mother to get home, singing, Ground control to Major Tom

One day I will share this song with Alba

She dropped her bottle of nail polish and a black cloud bloomed inside the core of the pool and we both watched it, a brilliant obsidian flower stretching through chlorine

And I think of that when she’s gone

When the soldiers come get her in the middle of the night and she stands behind her mother asking what is going on in Spanish and her mother is trying to explain in Spanish they lost their papers somewhere,

But in the morning when I wake up she is gone and I find a lone bottle of Retrograde in her room where the window is still open and the scent of Alba’s cheap perfume still lingers

But even now she’s slipping out of existence, dissolving into thin air, memories fanning out in the turquoise of our pool where if I peer hard enough I can see the reflection of Alba unsurely stepping into the boy’s room, laying down in his scratchy black sheets, glancing at the posters on the wall, and then trying to make sure she leaves something behind in America,

I can see us dancing

Kissing sloppily to practice for boys

Telling me about how she’d be a nurse and buy a house with a private pool in the back

And long after she’s gone I see the reflection of our ephemeral childhood, unfinished and distorted, how she laughed in her own separate language, how she left a part of herself with me here in this apartment complex, I paint my nails, thinking about how
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Alba and I were virgins together.