Gringa by Sandra Scofield

and couldn’t climb out, and I let myself believe it. I let them lie, and I bought the lie, and it was me who slid down.
    There had been Farin, and then there had been Larry, so what was it to lay a cool hand over Karlie, and then Maynard? They gave something in return, whether they meant to think of me or not. They wriggled faraway extensions of themselves inside me; I learned to put my hand on a wrist to quiet it, and to make the feelings happen myself, in my own rhythm. I learned to take pleasure from these shabby hours on the edge of town. And when I saw my dates in the halls at school, they grinned at me, the way Kermit had grinned that time in the car, telling me about Natty. And those grins—there was nothing hateful in them, nothing terribly smug. They said: Don’t we know it’s fun? They were all so gawky and young! They had big Adam’s apples and their ugly hair. And none of the “neat” girls—the ones in expensive dresses, with hair done at beauty parlors and pulled up in tortoise shell barettes—would have anything to do with them in a hundred years. Sometimes, for just a moment, I felt those boys tug at my heart; weren’t we all in the same sinking boat? Sometimes now, looking back, I think: I should have let them all. I should have lain in the back seats of a dozen cars and made them feel important, because in the end, don’t I know they had little dreams and lost even them? Don’t I know I wasn’t any better?
    IN THE SUMMER I WORKED as often as they needed me, relieving clerks on vacation. My mother asked me, “What are you going to do with all that money, Abilene?” I’d bought a few clothes, and my bicycle. The rest was in a savings account. As soon as she asked me, though, I knew the answer was that I was saving to go away—from her, from West Texas, from all the Thursday nights at J.C. Penney’s, the cycle of dates and necking and the lack of hope. My mother saw it on my face; she never spoke to me again of my money, never once asked me what I was going to do after high school. She hardly spoke to me at all. The hard part was going to be getting through another year.
    Then one hot summer afternoon Natty came by my house looking for someone to “round out” a car full of boys. She was with Chip somebody, and Hoot Gibson, whose real name was Andrew, and Charlie Jamison, all of them out of school now, hot shot graduates. Hoot held up a six-pack and said, “Cold suds for a hot day,” and somebody said, “Hell, two girls will do, let’s get the show on the road.” Natty sat in the front between Charlie and Hoot, while I sat in the back with Chip. He was as quiet as I was. Besides, we couldn’t have gotten in a word over the other three.
    We went to a place in the sandhills that Charlie knew. That Natty probably knew. That I’d thought about a hundred times. I knew that sooner or later a lot of kids went to the sandhills, white and pale and yellow and gritty and hot in the sun, with sand that ground itself into your pores, into your ears and nose and mouth, that found its way into your private parts and made your hair heavy, sand that was soft to lie on. I’d never been there, but I’d dreamed about the sand, a Texas Sahara, to be lost in, to lie down in and say no, please don’t, not meaning it, and later stop stop, when it was too late. Nobody had ever asked me to go to the sand, because nobody had ever asked me out in the daylight. But I knew the questions girls asked themselves out there: If I let him will he love me? and If I let him will he think I’m awful after? I’d thought about how it would feel, white and twitching on the sand. I’d thought: What if it hurts? and then, So what, it’s only the first time it hurts. There were bargains made in the sand, and babies, and sometimes trouble. Not rich girls. Boys knew their fathers would be waiting up when the girls got home,