Unglazed Water Sprinkle
Photograph by Carina Cain
By Carina Cain
Ruth remembers the day her period first came because it happened in a horribly unceremonious way. June was sticky and so the lake was an obvious solution. Everyone knew this, and Ruth was one of those people. So, when the sun was high enough to indicate a serious need for cool submergence, she stuffed some cheese puffs in a plastic bag, tucked her Motorola flip phone into the back pocket of her shorts, and scurried out of the house with a towel under one arm.
Ruth was freshly thirteen and on the cusp of rebellion. She practiced her fuck-it attitude by rolling up her shorts another two inches as soon as she was thirty steps and a long bend in the road away from her mother’s bedroom window. She was wearing watermelon lip gloss and no mascara, because Ruth wanted to be pretty but also wasn’t an idiot. Even waterproof mascara ran, and Ruth was planning on swimming, not bobbing around on a noodle with a craned neck for the entire afternoon.
Jackie and Grace were already at the dock that jutted out into the lake’s mouth, sunning themselves in the important way that comes with being middle school graduates. They greeted Ruth with squeals and warm arms that smelled like sunscreen.
“Here, put your towel down,” Grace directed. She wore sunglasses too big for her face and a new bikini. Grace liked to direct, which was fine, because she usually meant well enough.
“Yeah, here. I’ll scoot over.”
Jackie didn’t mind being directed, either. But sometimes Ruth saw a prickle in her. An urge to resist and lead herself. Only sometimes.
Ruth settled her body between them and felt that air of girlhood power zap down to her toes. She wondered if the boys and moms perched in beach chairs by the shoreline felt it, too. Interested and jealous, maybe. She’d turn around to check later. Now, Ruth stretched and let the collected heat of the day transfer from the dock to her gut.
There’s a mindlessness about lying beside cool water on a sweltering day in June; a lull in doing, and a relaxation into just being. So, wedged between her two best friends with the blanket of summer settling over her, Ruth loosened up. Slow-tempered, pulling with the slight current that gently rocked into the dock. Pulling in, breathing out.
A bright pink donut with sparkly sprinkles bobbed a lonely bob a hundred feet out from the roped-off kiddie area; inflated and forgotten, with no body to weigh it down. Ruth watched the blue lap at the pink plastic, gnawing with a water hunger that felt concurrently familiar and surreal. Ruth watched the water bite, and wondered what drowning might mean.
What would she do if the lake swallowed her whole—gulped her down into its belly? She could imagine the way the world looked beneath the surface because she’d seen it before, on purpose. But only after a big breath and conspiratorial looks with other kids playing marco polo. The lake water didn’t burn like the ocean.
Ruth remembered being six and watching a National Geographic documentary called Cara the Sea Turtle. She would come home from school and impatiently rewind the VHS tape to the beginning, to the part when Cara emerges from the sand, just born and looking impossibly small. Far too small to survive something as blown open as the ocean. She remembered being overwhelmed by the quietude of this turtle’s patient existence, and wishing she could float alongside her. Under was a muffled place, where silence smoothed over all the wildness. She remembered the weight of emotion that sat itself upon her chest and pressed lightly until her cheeks were wet. Her brother always found it hilarious that she would cry over a sea turtle.
Ruth saw the donut tip slightly and wondered at what point she would decide to stop fighting. Would it be an instinctual decision? Maybe she’d feel like an astronaut. Suspended in an endless amount of silence and untethered to any one place. Feeling outside of the world. Or maybe it would feel condensed and stifling and wrong. Like reentering the womb. Being unborn.
The pink thing righted itself and a small surge of relief pulsed in Ruth’s chest. Safe for now. She turned her head away and let the sun tap fingers over her left cheek. Anyhow, there must be more, after everything here. The thought, a relaxer, worked its way over her shoulders, down to her fingertips, over her hips, and into the bottom of her feet. Sometimes her mind worked like this—a constant clenching and unclenching of the worst case scenario. But still life-based. She wasn’t delusional, just a little worried a lot of the time.
“Jason Cooke made out with Lauren in his basement on Saturday.”
This broke Ruth’s concentration on the internal and resettled her focus on Grace, and the words that flew from her mouth with a hasty sort of disgust. Grace loved to gossip and Ruth loved to listen. Drama turned conversational lulls into play and made existence interesting.
Jackie whipped her head around and said the next appropriate thing, which was, “Shut the fuck up. I thought he had a thing for Rachel Sanders.”
Fuck was a new word they were all getting used to saying. They had eased their way into it over the course of sixth and seventh grade, starting gently with hell, bitch, and shit. By eighth grade the conditioning had worked and fuck was easy to insert into almost every other sentence. Getting told off by an adult simply meant they were ready for high school.
“Yeah, they were holding hands outside the post office last week,” Ruth offered. And it was true. She had seen Jason Cooke holding hands with Rachel Sanders ten days ago outside the post office. Ruth had also seen him running his tongue along Julian Rodriguez’s jaw behind the guest house at Julian’s first day of summer party thirteen days ago, but this information she decided to keep to herself.
Grace made a gagging sound and pretended to retch into the water. “We need to tell Lauren, probably immediately. Do you have her number? She needs to know before he gets the chance to impregnate her.”
Jackie diligently produced her LG enV Touch and handed it to Grace, who sat up and scooted her sunglasses on steroids further down her nose. She squinted into the screen and began typing furiously. Ruth shifted on her towel between them. Her lower back coiled uncomfortably.
“You don’t think anyone in our grade has had sex yet, do you?” Jackie asked. Her tone said she hoped no one had, but would love to speculate nonetheless.
The question was directed at Grace, obviously, who knew all the important details of their classmates’ ventures into intimacy. She was like a speculation voyeur.
“Definitely Mason Childs. He was showing everyone the condoms he keeps in his swim bag for when his club team travels for meets,” Grace said. Her fingers flew across the tiny keys and Ruth imagined curls of steam wisping from their tips.
“I’m not having sex until I’m sixteen,” Jackie declared, watching Grace send her digital warning to Lauren.
Ruth was surprised by how resolute she sounded. But she could understand the timeline. Only because sixteen sounded like some far-off place that took a while to get to. Sixteen was where a regular period, no braces, and college thoughts lived. A few thousand miles away from Kidville, at least.
“Oh, for sure. But my mom said I should start birth control next year anyway. Just in case.” Grace said this like it was no big deal. And that’s when Ruth’s insides sort of stuttered and joined hands with some of the discomfort that heated her back.
She was wearing watermelon lip gloss but no mascara and she still wanted to swim. Starting birth control next year sounded like unscented lipstick and two layers of mascara and partial submersion with no movement. And Grace sounded like she was ready for that. Ready to avoid motherhood.
Ruth tugged at her bathing suit bottoms. She felt tightly wound from the inside out and sticky. Everything seemed cramped and too hot all at once.
“Yeah, for sure,” she said.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw a tan blob bob once then settle over the water. Without turning her head Ruth knew it was the unglazed belly of the neon pink donut, flipped into submission. The holographic sprinkles were somewhere under the lake’s topcoat, glittering down into the deep. She wished she could still see them. She wished the donut could have stayed pink side up for just a little bit longer. Grace was HTML web browsing now on Jackie’s phone, Ruth could see, scrolling. Having a respite. Lauren had been warned about Jason Cooke, given due cause not to let him put his mouth on hers down in his family’s basement, or let him get close enough to impregnate her before the beginning of ninth grade. Before they all shut the car door and sped toward sixteen. Sixteen, so sweet, so sweet, so sweet. Taking care not to be made mamas before college. No babies, no mamas, only empty kid wombs.
The donut bobbed in her peripheral and Ruth’s crotch was wet. An urge to hate the water surrounding her bubbled up in her chest, even though it hadn’t even touched her yet. Everything felt gross, and damp, and grown up, and wrong. Grace stopped her scrolling.
“Holy shit, you guys. Michael Jackson just died.”
Carina Cain is a Bay Area local who graduated from Lewis & Clark College this past summer with a B.A. in English. She is admittedly too fond of the hyphen, and wholeheartedly believes that arts education is fundamental to the well-being of society.
