Peach Juice Is Dripping from the Ceiling

Peeling boiled peaches next to you makes my cheeks pink. The fruit in my hands is hot, like girl flesh. The stained sink catches the empty skins when I drop them: they clump in limp piles to be gathered later. 

You don’t tease when, my hands slippery and ashamed, I lose my grip on a naked peach and it falls in with the skins. I pick it up again and think of James and his invertebrate family living in their peach, rolling into the ocean, landing in New York. They ate their home and made a new one from its core. If I said that out loud to you now, would you understand what I mean?

The pie we’re making for your birthday feels something like a home. We’re going to eat it until there’s nothing left. 

*

I asked you last week what you wanted for your birthday.

You looked up from your book and said, “I don’t need anything.”

But I wanted to give you something.

“Okay. Let me think about it.” 

Later that day, you wrapped around me from behind while I washed my face. You didn’t mind that I splashed you. I didn’t mind that you held me. 

“For my birthday, I want you to tell me a secret,” you said into my ear. I could feel your voice in your chest where it was pressed to my back. I stared at myself in the mirror and wondered if my bare face counted as a secret. It felt like one.

*

You kept the tradition of peach pie from me, but your mother shared it with me when I asked her for gift ideas, determined to give you something to hold along with your secret. You’ve had a peach pie for your birthday every year since you could walk. Why didn’t you tell me? I worried until last night when I walked in holding groceries and you were there, freshly showered after your evening class. You looked at the bags in my hands and saw the outlines of ingredients. “You don’t have to do that.” 

But I wanted to. I looked in your eyes and tried to convince you with my thoughts: I want to I want to I want you. 

You said, “Okay” and helped me put everything away in the kitchen. You knew where everything went even though you only moved in a month ago. I watched you put the bags of sugar and flour into the cabinet above the dishwasher and thought about how well you fit in my apartment. Our apartment. 

It was my turn to shower while you heated up our leftovers from the night before. We watched another episode of Younger and ate microwaved pad thai over the coffee table. I took the bean sprouts that you meticulously picked out with your fork, and you stood from the floor to put your dish in the sink. Maybe I was just tired, but I worried when you didn’t return right away. 

Were you coming back? You rummaged around the bedroom. 

“Of course, I’m coming back,” you said, walking back in with a hairbrush. You sat behind me on the couch and began gently combing through the tangles I’d accumulated at work.

My eyes slid shut and I became small, my favorite way to feel at the end of the day. 

You don’t have to take care of me.

“I want to,” you said. “Let me.”

I felt how hard you tried to not let the brush tug at my scalp. In your hands let me and your quiet breath behind me let me, I heard your heartbeat pounding: let me, let me, let me. 

*

I woke you this morning even though I tried to stay quiet when I got out of bed. I had to get ready for work. You mumbled dazed nonsense at me while I powdered my face. I told you that you didn’t have to be awake with me, that you should sleep in for your birthday, but you insisted that you wanted to spend time together before I left. As a compromise, I brought my makeup bag into bed where you fell back asleep in my lap, your cheek pressed to my thigh. You exhaled between my legs, and my breath fogged the mirror in my hand.

Your alarm woke you for class just as I was leaving. You said my name, and I came back into the bedroom for a sleep-heavy hug, dropping my purse on the mattress when you didn’t let go. I stayed a few minutes longer than I should have, suspended in the amber remnants of your sleep. 

You kissed me at the door, rolling your smiling eyes when I wished you a happy birthday. 

*

I walked to work with my eyes down, thinking about what secret I would tell you. During my breaks throughout the day, I stared at my phone with nothing in my brain, trying to think of something that you wouldn’t already know. 

The issue was having to tell you something more than “I cheated on a geometry test in high school” or “I lost an ice tray behind the fridge and bought a new one instead of moving the fridge.” I knew that you meant something bigger, something meaningful. Otherwise, it wouldn’t really be a gift.

I texted you even though I knew you were busy: I don’t know what secret to tell you.

You texted me back so quickly, I knew you weren’t paying attention in class: Anything that means something to you. 

My head was full of all the half-memories I tried to conjure. I needed something that would mean something to me, and to you, and that wouldn’t scare you away. 

I knew the answer by the time you met me outside so we could walk home together. My chest felt like a fishbowl; I dragged under the weight but took your hand and pretended to walk lightly.

*

You insisted on helping me with the pie, which at first meant crowding me in the kitchen and complaining about the heat from the oven. I was annoyed, but then you licked a drop of sweat from the side of my face and I laughed at how gross we both were, powdered with flour and greasy with Crisco. We began blanching the peaches and transferring them to the sink to be peeled.

Now, we are another level of disgusting. We are saturated with peach juice, so much that it covers our skin and our clothes and the floor. I want to quote to you, The walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the ceiling, but I’m not sure you’ve read that book. 

Would you open your mouth and catch it on your tongue? Would it be delicious? 

We finish and clean up, sitting cross-legged in front of the oven to make sure the ugly lattice crust doesn’t burn. 

“When do I get my secret?” you ask.

My secret. Your present. I’ll tell you once the pie’s finished.

*

A birthday miracle: the pie doesn’t burn. We shower off our mess while it cools, reconvening in the kitchen with wet hair like 4th graders at a sleepover. I stick candles between the woven crust and light them, and you cover my mouth when I start to sing. I hum behind your hand, suffocating in giggles until you blow the candles out and let me go.

You cut slices and place them on my seashell plates, and we sit at the coffee table like always. You fork peaches into your mouth and say that it’s different from the pies your mom makes, but not in a bad way. 

I give you a new notebook and a set of fresh pens to keep in your backpack. You thank me for everything, your eyes genuine but curious. You won’t push it, but I know. These aren’t your real gifts. I have one more present to give you. 

*

It starts with shaking and the taste of peaches in the back of my throat. 

First, you need to know that girls are sweat. Girls are humidity. Girls are eyes kept down in the locker room, secrets passed on notebook paper, holding hands at the mall on a Friday night. They are jealousy and blocked phone numbers at 2 a.m. My favorite girls are lip gloss that turn into spit. 

“You never told me you liked girls,” you say.

I liked one girl the most. She was sweet nausea and headaches. Candy and lipstick and prom. She ate my brain with chiclet teeth and wouldn’t wash the blood from my hair when I begged for help. But, she was elation and grinning into my pillow. Screaming into my pillow. I fermented, then rotted, then turned to poison that burned through her skin. 

When I cried, she cried. When she vomited, so did I. Kneeling side-by-side in the girls’ bathroom, we couldn’t hold each other’s hair back while we prayed with bile on our tongues. She starved and turned to acid that melted through my fingernails. I watched from across the mirror as I did the same, craving her and despising her for how she loved me, then hated me. I didn’t know better. Do I know better now?

“It wasn’t your fault.” 

I was so young. It wasn’t my fault, and 

it was all my fault 

now I’m more careful. I don’t see her anymore, but I still host her parasite. She lives in my flesh and chews on my bones. I learned to ignore her, but sometimes she bites down hard when I get close to you.

“Oh.” You think of what to say. “I’m sorry.”

But you’re not her. You’re different. 

“How?”

You’re new. You’re clean. You’re a boy.

Boys are grass. Boys are sunburnt skin. Boys are smiles hidden in hoodie sleeves, thighs touching on bus seats, glancing down at dry lips and wondering. They are devastation and avoided gazes, flaming blushes. My favorite boys are candles that melt and trickle down, burning hands. 

I like one boy the most. You are a rollercoaster going uphill and then racing down, slamming into my open arms. You are apple slices and socks and the first day of fall when we turn the air conditioning off. You hold me like a clean hotel bed and clamshell me inside so I can’t leave, so I don’t want to leave, but you’re safe. You are a flower that grows inside of me only with permission, and one day I will tell you that you are always allowed, my constant comfort. My new secret.

*

You ask me a few questions, angling at the specifics of my past, but I resist. Telling you everything would ruin your birthday. I’m loose now, lighter than before, maybe the lightest I’ve been since you moved in even though we are both now heavy with peaches. 

To distract you from your questions, I dip my finger into the pie filling and reach to trace it on your lip, telling you to be still. You almost obey, but when I come close enough, your teeth close around my knuckle so, so lightly for just a moment. I smile so that you’ll release me, letting me try again. You let me paint peach syrup over your boy lips.

“Do you ever wish I was a girl?” you ask when I pull my hand back, admiring your sweet face.

I lean over you and kiss you. You have peaches on your breath, and the syrup between us turns to spit. I live inside you, but you are not my peach pit cottage. Do you understand? Do you live inside me? 

“No, I just wanted you to be sticky,” I answer.