Gringa by Sandra Scofield Page A

knew that if you made a rich girl pregnant you didn’t have to get married, you could go to jail. But there were lots of girls who didn’t have fathers who cared. (I knew this, but I didn’t know any of those girls. I didn’t have any friends at all. What would I have done? Gone up to a girl and said, you’re no better off than me, let’s be friends?)
    I knew Natty knew the tricks. I knew she made boys glad to be with her. Kermit had told me a story, not so much to amuse me as warn me. (“You better not get yourself in trouble!”) He said, she gives head. Once some boys had given her a package of banana popsicles, and she’d laughed like crazy and passed them around to everybody standing near. And I knew something they were too dumb to see, even Kermit: she was using them to practice for the real world, when she would get out of here.
    The sun was glaring. We walked over the hills, carrying an ice chest and blankets and a portable radio. (“Come along and be my party doll!”) We stumbled, our bare feet sinking in the sand; our breath was coming hard.
    â€œJesus Piss it’s hot,” Natty said, and the boys laughed. “We gotta be crazy coming to the goddamned sandhills in the middle of the goddamned day in the middle of the goddamned summer!” she shouted. “Like it is fucking HOT!” and at that the boys screamed with laughter, looking at her and at each other. I straggled behind with Chip, carrying the blankets.
    Someone said, “Hey, how about this tree!” (more hysterical laughter), and just like that, we plopped down and began to drink beer. I drank mine too fast and it made me belch, and when I looked around to see who’d heard me, everybody started laughing, and I laughed too. I stretched out and put my head in Chip’s lap. Natalie lay on a blanket between Hoot and Charlie. They told dirty jokes and sang with the radio (“My little ruuuunaway!”) and kept popping open beers. Charlie said something that made Natty pretend she was mad, and they wrestled and brawled and ended in a hot sandy embrace, the length of them, right in front of all the rest of us. She pulled away and stood up. “Christ, I am H-O-T!” she said. We all said, “Amen,” like in a church.
    â€œYou know what let’s do?” she said. “Let’s take off all our clothes.” Nobody said anything. In a minute or two Charlie got up and took his jeans and shirt off, standing in his jockey shorts. “Oh no, macho,” Natty said. “Aaaall clothes!” she growled, leaping across Hoot and pulling Charlie’s shorts down around his ankles. “Off off off!” she cried, and in a flash she was naked, and then Hoot. The three of them began to dance around like Indians in a cowboy movie, their hands back and forth against their mouths, dancing around Chip and me, still lying on the blanket. “No fair! No fair!” Natty poked at us, and Charlie and Hoot joined in. They shouted, “No fair!” a dozen times or more, and then they stopped, still, spaced around the two of us on the ground.
    â€œCome on, Abby, take it off,” Natalie said in a soft sweet voice. The beer and the sun had made me dizzy. I saw Charlie and Hoot standing with their hands on their hips, their faces wet with sweat, their penises hanging crazily in the sun. I thought how much it would hurt to have a sunburned penis. “Off,” Natty said, quite firmly.
    â€œCome on, Natty, please,” I said. I looked at Chip. “You won’t let them make me, will you?” I asked.
    â€œJust hold on,” Chip said, but his voice was a boy’s voice, with no authority. It made the others grin. What was he going to do about it? I felt something knocking inside me, I couldn’t tell where the thumping was, I knew it had to be fear, and I thought: I can’t die of this. Then, simply, as if it had been rehearsed many times, Natty