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“What are you writing?” Her voice softened slightly as she drew nearer, her bare feet squishing in the grass. Her hair was drenched.
“A poem about a dream I have sometimes,” I said as I pulled my foot up into the seat, wrapping my hands around my ankle.
The porch didn’t creak when Sorina reached the landing, not as it had when I stepped onto it earlier. I wasn’t surprised. When I wrote about her, which I always did after the dreams, I wrote her as a tiny deep red bird, soaring through a pitch back night sky. She was always being chased by something, but I couldn’t finish the poems.
“Let me read it.” She held out her hand, and I hesitated for a moment, fearing the steel of her eyes. Eventually, I relented and handed the notebook over. Sorina looked at the open page for only a fraction of a second before flipping through the other pages. Her eyes took everything in, like she was reading every word. Which was impossible.
I didn’t have to wait long for her critique.
“This reads like … what is the word for it?” I noticed then why I thought her voice sounded strange earlier. Her accent was gone. When the principal had brought her to class my first day, parading her like a trophy, I’d shivered at her voice, her thick accent. It was gone now. She continued, “This reads likeporn. Yes, that’s the word they use for it.”
I jerked my eyes to hers. There’s no fucking way she could have read everything in my notebook in that quick flip through the pages. “What? It does not.”
“Do you know anything about men and women?”
“I know a lot about men and women,” I seethed. The poems in those pages, the ones I wrote as I touched myself, had nothing to do with what I knew about men and women. What happened at the ranch was not the same as the stories I poured into my notebooks. What happened there was a violence against my flesh. What I wrote about was an exorcism. The girl from my dreams, blood dripping, ecstasy on her tongue—that was healing.
“You need a muse,” she offered, handing the notebook back to me.
I took it, purposefully touching her fingers. She locked eyes with me as I slipped it back in my pocket. “I have one,” I said.
The air felt sultry between us. And when she asked me if I wanted to come inside, I nodded.
I saw little of the house that first day. After she shut the door behind me, she started walking up the staircase in front of her, leading me down a dark hall and into a bedroom.
What I assumed washerbedroom.
We did not speak as she opened the shades, letting the moonlight in.
When she motioned for me to sit on the bed, I did. She didn’t join me, instead she walked to a black ornate vanity. She took a seat, looking at me through the mirror in front of her before she spoke again in her timeless and placeless voice. “How was school today?” she asked, reaching for a brush.
I relaxed into her headboard before I spoke. Being near Sorina felt strange and familiar. Though I’d spent mere moments with her since we’d met—I’d spent hours with her in my dreams.
I felt like I knew her, but that was merely a want.
“School was okay,” I said
“That seems like a lie,” Sorina said, pulling the brush through her wet strands.
I smiled. “Today in English we went over poetry, which is my favorite,” I said, thinking of her assertion of my poetry.Porn.
“I’m hardly surprised.” Her lips curled up, and in the mirror I could see how sheer her clothing was.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I wasn’t surprised by what I read in that notebook. Poetry … it fits you.”
I softened. “Yeah, that’s what they said.”
“Who?” she asked, moving the brush to the other side of her head.
“Mrs. Vaughn didn’t make us read anything out loud or anything. We were all quiet for twenty minutes, writing. Mike Walters and Bobby Morrison were behind me, laughing the whole time, and when I turned mine in, Mrs. Vaughn started reading it immediately. She didn’t do that with the others.”
“Something on the page pulled her to it.” Sorina sounded faraway as she brushed her hair.
“Yeah, I guess. She told me it was ‘lovely.’ I wish she hadn’t said anything.” I laughed.
“Why? Did the boys harass you?”
