Florida
A boy in my high school showered three times a day. He wore sunglasses inside and had sex with my best friend. Their families vacationed in Florida at the same time.
My best friend was wearing a lot of scarves then. Cardigans, too. Cotton skirts in pastels.
They had sex in South Beach, on his family’s compound, or in a hotel her family might have owned. They had sex in a shed, on top of tools or cars. Neither of them liked the sex they had, near tools, cars, on compounds, in hotels.
I read about what they didn’t like about each other in text messages archived on his clamshell cell phone, but I also knew, because I was a person who had never had sex. The boy permitted me to read his messages with my best friend, slipping his phone under a shared desk during driver’s ed, while we watched videos of car crash survivors who admonished us for accidents they had had.
My best friend was assigned to the other side of the driver’s ed auditorium because of her name, which came shortly before the name of another boy, with whom she really wanted to be having sex. That boy drew guns for fun. He would have been goth, we said, if he went to a school without uniforms.
During this time, my other best friend was busy getting fingered in the corner of an L-shaped couch by a guy who worshipped Freddy Mercury. I wanted some. My other friend, not best, did less than her but more than me with a boy in the park. I kept track.
On Park Avenue, all the parties were careful, especially when so many doors had locks. In a rich person’s home, the doors are always closed. Children say wing and mean their bedroom. The parents usually sleep in a suite, the door of which my other not best friend and I locked so we could watch porn on channel 71.
This was before the TV got to triple digits. We were still double. The channel number was high, for that time. My other not best friend’s mother had a closet for her shoes. I closed the door of her shoe closet and lay down on the carpet inside.
When we were young, before porn, we had put some of these shoes on to play doctor with a tattered donkey and a turtle. We were high-heeled doctors who might have fingered the donkey and turtle we doctored, accidentally, up stuffing. I held the turtle tight, like it might tell me no.
The boy in sunglasses works in finance now. My best friend is no longer my best friend, but is also in finance. Other friends are in fashion merchandising, or aid workers. I think there are those in the army, boys with guns, who drew.
My other best friend gets pimped out now, on dates by her dad. Men with money, young enough, in merchandizing. She goes to a play with a man in merchandizing, who takes her to a steakhouse to eat lamb and orders martinis with olives. She doesn’t like olives. He tells her it’s an acquired taste. She doesn’t like lamb, he tells her the same. He tells her it’s all to be acquired, and calls a cab.
Nights, I lock my door. We have gotten in accidents. Everyone’s mother had shoes, but I do not know where they all were.
Sonia Feigelson (@FeigelsonSonia) is a Brooklyn-based writer and actress. Her work can be seen in or is forthcoming from Two Serious Ladies, Burrow Press Review, Temenos, Extract(s), and Quaint, among others. She was a 2010 recipient of the Memoir award from Random House Creative Writing Competition. Most recently, she was awarded third prize in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue 2016 Fiction Award.
Emma Horwitz (@e_horwitz) is a writer and dramaturg living and working in New York City. Her written work has appeared in the print and online journals Joyland, Two Serious Ladies, The Whale, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Bard Papers, Baby Teeth, Lux, and elsewhere.