Dust Pit Piece
by Zoe Lubetkin
Early, before the gas station gets its noon delivery of sugar slush flavoring and the liquor store manager changes shifts with the guy who doesn’t card, Ella and I park in the lot. We sit in her brother’s car before the bright metal gets too hot and eat cherries for breakfast.
Ella tells me she can spit a cherry pit farther than I can. I say, try me, but more for the cherry. It’s Tuesday morning and already so sticky that the gas station water bottles fog up as soon as we put the cap back on. I want the cherry sweetness, despite how Ella always wins. Her spitting is legendary. She has been able to do a flower with her tongue since before we knew what it meant when men would stare at us at the bus stop after school. She could do a flower tongue and give them the finger. This is to say, I think she can spit it farther too.
Spit. Drop. The pits roll into the dust. She wins, her body does an excited circle, and she hops back up on the hood of our borrowed car. We’re the only car in the gas station parking lot besides a beat-up hatchback with a back windshield so dusty we could draw a complete design of hearts and stars and our initials. L plus E. That was our activity before the cherry pits. We decided earlier to try to spend the entire day outside, only partially because the tornado last night knocked down all the power lines in Ella’s neighborhood.
When I asked her about it Ella said being in a tornado didn’t feel like anything. She just said her ears hurt a little. She said last time there was a tornado she and her brother had huddled under her desk to tell stories, but this time he was at school, and she felt silly talking to herself.
Personally, I attribute that pain to her ear piercing, even though we were supposed to learn in science class that the eardrum is farther in. Her piercing hasn’t healed since she let Davey pierce it with a needle on a dare after we split one of her brother’s beers and went to a bonfire last week. She didn’t even sit down when Davey shoved it through, just winced when it went in.
It has hurt nonstop since then, she tells me. To which I say, you should take it out, and she looks at me all crazy, so I say, no you’re right it’ll heal soon I bet. I try to say it after pausing from one to ten Mississippi beats, so she knows I’m not just agreeing to agree. Because when Ella, sitting on the hood of the car, pulls her hair-tie out abruptly and immediately puts her hair back up, I can see that one earring and the crusted blood on the big fake gemstone. And she looks good with it, everyone says so. The guys at the bonfire last week said she looked “ace” and crowded around Davey and pushed him with their own scrawny shoulders. That night, they looked at the blood on the needle like it was proof.
The car top is too hot now, so Ella asks if we want to go to the river. It is a three-mile drive and takes seven minutes because we know the boys won’t be blocking the road with their abrupt pulled-over cars and foggy windows. It’s too early for that, they are probably asleep, like Ella’s brother when we tiptoed into his room to take the car keys from his dresser. It takes seven minutes because we go fast.
In the car we talk about her brother. He’s back from college for the first month of summer. Apparently at his school he studies in classes where the professor only writes one thing on the chalkboard the entire time and it’s a phrase like “psychological realism.” This is what Ella tells me. I think I would fall asleep if the only thing I could talk about for an hour was the modern compression of being and time. That phrase I heard from her brother himself. He called it a crisis. When we asked him for beers two days ago, he said, Lila, you would not believe what these people talk about. I replied that I probably wouldn’t. Then he handed us the six pack from under his unmade bed and went back to writing something in his little journal with a red pen.
On the way to the river, I’m thinking about the crisis. Ella drives. She and her brothers have the same freckles and large ears. Her fingers are long on the steering wheel, her palms leave little dark spots on the fabric because her hand is sweaty, neither of us have our license. The trees outside kind of droop for the same reason I sink into the car’s leather seats. Her brother’s car has AC, but we like the windows down instead, except when we follow a car and the dust kicks up into our faces, like now. I look at the trees and their dehydrated leaves.
When we get to the river there’s one other car parked. Theirs: red; ours: orange. There are no trees really by the river, the banks are all eroded, so we can see straight into the saw dusted river surface and see some shirtless people there. I don’t see faces but I recognize the car.
Ella does too. It belongs to one of the boys’ older brothers. Ella knows him because he came up to her personally at the bonfire and told her he liked the one earring thing. He said, that looks badass, so Ella wore her hair up the entire rest of the night. I personally thought that wearing it down was better to hide her ears. She’s been texting that boy, the older brother, on her new phone. She says that they send pictures. I’ve seen them, she makes me look at them sometimes, she asks me things like, do you think my nipple looks weird here, and I have to say, I think it looks fine. She says, fine like how, like fine like weird, and I say no, it’s great, and go back to whatever I am doing. Which is normally trying to pull the white strings off my cutoffs.
Anyway, we don’t even have our bathing suits because we left them on the clothesline to dry so we just sit on the fallen tree over the river. I don’t think Ella would have gone in anyway, her ear is too infected. We put our feet in the water. The boys splash each other. They try to splash us, Ella kicks water at them in return. I keep both my feet firmly on the beam. Ella just painted my toenails yesterday, they’re bright blue. It’s warm and I feel like I want a sandwich or the cherries, but we left the bag in the car. It’s just full of pits.
The boys say, should we get some ice cream. The older boy C says, we can go get it, and Ella grabs my hand to go, and we run down the fallen tree quick, so we don’t fall in. When C sees me behind Ella he nods at me, even though I don’t even have both ears pierced, and I nod back. Ella holds my hand.
We pass Ella’s brother’s car to get to C’s red truck. He lets Ella drive, and she speeds up right away. The wind breaks the heat daze open. We’re stuck behind a slow car; Ella says a swear word, but it doesn’t fit in her mouth like the cherry pit did. When I asked Ella’s brother if he was happy to be home, he said, I forgot how life here is so idle. But I don’t think it’s idle. We’ve passed the car, we’re going fast again, the wind whips dust in my eyes and I don’t think I even blink.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Zoe Lubetkin is a writer from Michigan. She is in the last year of her B.A. at McGill in English literature and currently working on an honours thesis about how novels of unconventional forms present the contemporary subject.