SYDNEY BRINGS ME TO THE CAPE

Syd would ask me to close my eyes and touch the tip of her tongue to my eyelids and trace the tip of her pointer finger over my stomach and breathe in my ear and say…

Syd invited me to the Cape in the summer of 2019 and I spent three months waking up on Syd’s couch:

folded over the top

curled up at the end

splayed and butchered 

across from her

TV. She liked talking about her boyfriend, the 17-year-old, works as a lifeguard, big, garish, whose breath smells like nicotine and whose gums are too big for his face. She called him her beautiful boy and asked me if I’d ever been in love. Syd would ask me to close my eyes and touch the tip of her tongue to my eyelids and trace the tip of her pointer finger over my stomach and breathe in my ear and say

that’s what it feels like

my beautiful boy. I told her 

I don’t know if I believe in that kind of stuff. 

Syd liked to talk about fat girls and girls with big tits and girls who smoked and girls who tried too hard and how much we should never become them. We’d squeeze ourselves into swimsuits one size too small and compliment each other's thigh gaps. Syd liked things that other people found tacky, like puka shell necklaces and Syd would ask me to tie around her neck and I became diligent about asking her to apply sunscreen on my back every time we left her house. 

We would go up to the shacks on the water and pay $13 for soft serve that had been sitting there for 13 minutes and lick sprinkles and sweet milk off of each other's hands and get bits of napkin stuck on our tongues and we would laugh at the boys who came up to us and offered us free beer and expensive company and we would shove each other giggling through the lies we would tell them:

we were twenty

we were students 

we were sisters

we were lesbians

Syd never wanted to swim, but I asked her every time because she would say that it would mess up her hair. So I would try to swim by myself until I got bored with myself and then I would join her. We would let our shoulders burn because I liked peeling the skin off of them for her even as she winced and she told me no one would ever understand her like me because who would do this for her and I could see her eyes tear up toward the end, but her skin was smooth and my hands didn’t mind and when we were finished, she would make me promise that I could never leave her.

Syd liked movies that made her cry and when she cried she would grab my arm and dig her nails in and bite my shoulder, we kept watching until she was sick with grief and then she would whisper to me that 

her beautiful boy 

would never tell her stories and then she would push her finger to my lips and tell me to keep a secret. 

Syd and I spent the rest of our nights asking each other 36 questions and staring into each other's eyes for five minutes at a time. Before we would go to sleep Syd would ask if I had had my first kiss and I told her

I don’t believe in that kind of stuff 

so she would stick her tongue out at me and sleep in her room. 

Syd found it hard to sleep in a bed with anyone.

AUTHOR: Emerson Rhodes
ARTIST: Renee Zhu