An actress or.
Be very careful what you are afraid of. When Mary was twelve she had wound up, after a pact with various devils of her aunt’s acquaintance, on billboards, pictured in profile, and horizontal on a swing, her young girl’s nudity rendered strategically legal by a scattering of dove-white sugar cubes and blood-black cherries. Her best friend sent her a postcard from the girls’ detention school at Sunnyvale, with a scrawl of her bunkmate’s smuggled-in eyebrow pencil: You’ve made me a star here! Squeeze my bunny & send me smoke & lipsticks! No grisby, please! (No WHERE to spend it!) P.S. you’ll never live me or it (it! it!) down!
Her cousin Robin’s letter arrived shortly after, and she read his hurt, proud, pouting words with surprise. Someone at school had shown it round class, although the focus of interest among his purebred and socially backward mates had been the sweets and not the girl. But still. She set his letter down, went up to her room, took her clothes off and stared at herself in the mirror, wondering if he believed that what was shimmering there belonged to him and him alone.
He confessed to her that there was a memory which he reserved for aphrodisiac fallback, the irresolution of which never failed to arouse him to a full stand. Up through a narrow lime-green door to a stifling, dark, and curtained room, his mother in close conference with the royal seamstress. Though who was the sinner and who the confessor?
What he did not tell her was that her stolen diary was the source of every bad thought he had ever had.
The cousins passed their adolescence separated by what appeared to them the biggest, emptiest landmass on the planet (in truth, it was a coastline and a single day’s drive). They saw each other at holidays and resumed the hothouse struggle of secret games, made humid and brittle with a new touch of desperation. Their summers together were long gone. For the first year they had exchanged dutiful letters and though they noted (in deaf-mute privacy, never in writing) an increase in mutual archness and name-dropping, a decrease in pet-names, nicknames, references to private sillies, neither one was able to rein in the wild horses tugging them apart. And when they no longer had their own tradition to safely refer to, they found themselves engaged in a competition for coldness and brevity, and distance turned eventually to silence, with one memorable quarrel left bouncing like a lonely buoy on the shipless sea between.
She: I’m afraid you’re purposefully misunderstanding me etc.
He: Bullshit etc.
Within a quarter hour of letting that final letter slip into the maw of the mailbox, he would have given anything to take it back again. But adolescence turned his limbs to stone and he did nothing nothing nothing. Alone, however, their shared memories took on a miraculous, mythological glow which armored them and grew both dearer to them and more impenetrable as each successive lover came for their soul with the butterfly net of “show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”