Judges' general comments can be found at the bottom of this entry
 
 
The First Irish Girl
By LeAnne Ray
Email: Lazloray8@yahoo.com
(copyright 2006)
 

God made me specially for the First Irish Girl. She was supposed to love me and know it. That’s all. It was a clear case of destiny, no coincidence. She landed where she did and I was like the munchkins, singing her to the golden beginning of a great and magical journey. The problem was that this path was very wet and, Pisces as she was, the First Irish Girl was not a swimmer. Things got deep and very wet, and then only the wetness was between us. This went on for a long time, long past the time we even spoke to one another anymore. Although I was in it to be loved by her, the First Irish Girl could not make the world right enough for her to be in it like me.

If I ever fell asleep next to her, The First Irish Girl woke me. In the wide-open middle of the night, she touched my face gently with her fingers, following the feel of the bones under my skin. She was crying to tell me how she loved me. She was crying to tell me how I was beautiful to her. She woke me to touch and kiss my body for hours, tenderly, ferociously. My breath quick, she traced my lips with her wet fingertips. In the time between night and day, before anyone was up, we went outside bare-footed in our underwear and T-shirts to breathe in the dawn coming down through the mist-lit lawns. We could do anything and wanted to.

She brought it up one night on the phone, “ Did you ever think about kissing another girl?”

Why, yes, several! How interesting you should ask! I notice their bodies all the time too. It’s been on my mind for months and for some strange reason, I don’t mind telling you!

“Yeah. Why? Did you?”

“Yeah. Who did you think about?”

I told her the names of a few girls at our high school. I said I thought they were pretty. She said she couldn’t see me with them. I knew where this was going. I first should have told her it was her I had thought of, but that wasn’t true. Although we talked for hours everyday, I had never noticed her. I could feel what she wanted so I said, “What about you?”

“Well. You.”

This was perfect. How easy! This was exactly what I needed: a clean, well-dressed, everyday girl with manners. I walked right into her suggestion and one week later found out I was right about me.

The night of my confirmation, the First Irish Girl and I went to the house of some Born Again Christians. It was a fondue birthday party for the Yet-to-Be-Born Again teenaged daughter. Hanging on the walls in every room were framed, embroidered Bible quotes and pictures of praying hands with haloes around them. In the kitchen, there were lots of slogans on magnets and towels telling us how to behave. The girl got a U2 tape as a gift from her parents. This was incredible because rock music was banned from the house. It was too closely linked to Satan. U2 had been screened and was ok. Her parents approved, but the tape could only be played at a certain volume or it would be taken away. Her parents prayed before anybody ate the cake. The First Irish Girl was looking at me.

After everybody else had left, we went into the bedroom of the To-Be-Born Again birthday girl. We told her we were going to have sex together that night. She said if we felt right about it, it was beautiful, and she was very happy for us. Her religion tells her homosexuality is abnormal and a terrible sin, she said, but she wanted to see more in the world. If she were wrong to think that, at the very least we would be in hell together. She asked if we wanted to know a secret. She shut her bedroom door, which was also not allowed in her house. She pulled an opened pack of Marlboro cigarettes out of her sock drawer. She said they were stolen. She said sometimes she went for a walk and smoked one. Smoking was a phase and she was sure it was just healthy teen-aged rebellion. She said it made her feel like a bad girl, which she liked sometimes. She had prayed about the cigarettes: God looked down quite favorably upon self-discovery.

Before we went to the party, the First Irish Girl had laid down on my bed. I sat next to her and our fingers touched. Nothing happened. She asked me if I really wanted to do this. I asked her the same question. Neither of us knew how. She said, “Maybe if you just kiss me.” I waited. I leaned down towards her and she put her arm around my shoulder. I opened my eyes at the last minute and she was looking at me. “Maybe we should just go to that party and try later.”

When we got back to my parents house all the lights were out as usual. In the refrigerator there was a single can of beer with a red, white, and blue label. I brought it upstairs. We drank half of it. It was disgusting. I sat next to her again. Nothing happened. I laid down next to her for a very long time. We said nothing. Our hands began to touch and then our breath and fingers intertwined, never stopped moving, moving over each others’ hands, only hands for a very long time. I turned over and kissed her, and we knew how.

She said she liked it the first time. We kept doing it and got much better. We did it everywhere, even in places where we shouldn’t have been doing it. It was everything; it was a new expansion of consciousness and if only the rest of the world could be so lucky! She became beautiful to me and I became beautiful to myself. We looked best naked with messed-up hair and rosy cheeks. I fell in love with her.

I faked orgasms with her. I faked them the whole time we were together. I thought she would feel bad if I didn’t have them. I wanted her to feel well received. I thought it mattered for her. I thought it made her feel satisfied and needed. I also never thought she was funny but I laughed at all of her apparent jokes.

Not long after the Born Agains, the arrangements were made. Based on the typical progression of relationships I’d seen, I realized this was bound to happen. She expected me to talk to her on the phone every night. She wanted to know whom I was with and when. She wanted to know where I had been. She wanted me to be everywhere with her. I expected her to not have sex with, date, or flirt with anyone else. She wanted this to last forever, for the rest of our lives. I did not know she did not want to come out with me.

Peter Gabriel gave a concert one night at the bottom of a big hill. We were at the top together. A group of friends from the First Irish Girl’s previous high school were also at the top. Someone had told them something. They said she was repulsive. They never wanted to be seen with her in public again. Go away, you homo, you dyke, you pervert. You are fucked up. I left her with them. She spent the whole concert telling them off: any real, true love is completely normal, and they needed to grow up, and they had no right, they had no right, no right! She came back to me crying. When we walked down the hill, the world was between us.

The First Irish Girl had a car. On a typical Friday or Saturday night, we’d drive down Interstate 94 into the city. There was a Chinese restaurant on Lincoln Avenue and the wait staff never carded us. We could get bottles of Tsing Tao beer with our fried rice. We drove around the city for a while afterwards, and then went back to one of our parents’ houses to touch and be touched until three or four am. Sometimes we would park her car off one of the country roads to my parents’ house. A few times we stayed in the city and parked in Belmont Harbor where the rocks are so hard. The rocks are so hard there, and no one and nothing can change that.

It was all good. It was all good in the eyes of God. I was a homo and I liked it. I never considered otherwise. I was happy. I was in love. The most important thing in life is that you are happy; my mother said this all the time. I would be fine. Bad things happened to other people. I could get along in the world. I was smart. I could take it. Whatever happens, happens. I just will keep it to myself and I’ll be happy. If someone doesn’t like it, too bad; I don’t need them.

It doesn’t stay that small. It doesn’t stay that neat. Attitude does nothing to protect you. People lie right to your face. People push you into walls. People chase you. People yell at you from moving vehicles, hanging out the window: Hey!! Are you dykes!? What is the point when they yell that? Obviously they already think I am, right? Or they wouldn’t be asking, right? And when my dyke-ness is established, did he – it is almost always a he -- want some information about it, or was he going to turn his car around and come back here and beat me up like a real man?

Things began to get slippery for the First Irish Girl. People at school began to call me a fucking dyke everyday. It was the first time I ever heard the word. The First Irish Girl walked right up to every one of them and screamed: “You are so fucking ignorant! Why do you think you have the right to say anything! What makes you so perfect! What do you care what other people do! You don’t have the slightest clue what you are talking about so shut the fuck up! And if I ever her you calling my friend a dyke, I will kill you!” She said they could call her whatever they wanted but that I was certainly not “some fucking dyke”. So kids stopped saying it to me. They started hissing it instead as they passed me between classes. Also, now they said they would kill me for it too. Even the skinny cheerleaders said it. I never told anyone. If adults thought anything different, why would their children act this way?

We began to argue. We drove down to the city in tight silence. I thought about getting out of her car at stoplights and walking away. She stopped telling dumb jokes and I stopped laughing. Fridays and Saturdays we just laid in the dark together, touching, and listened to U2. We just listened to U2 and had sex. We just had sex and then drove over to her friends’ house, where we stopped touching and where she kept looking at me.

The friends were boys and they were her friends. They were our age and their parents were never home. They served us alcohol in heavy-bottomed glasses and smoked cigarettes in their parents’ house. She smoked with them and laughed at all their jokes. Her laughter there was harsh. She agreed with everything they said. Then, she drove me home and went upstairs to my bed with me. We had sex. She cried. She told me she could hate me. She told me she was jealous of everything about me. She said she wished she could be me, look like me, have my life. She wanted me to promise her that I would never have sex with a man. She cried. Then we had sex. Then we fell asleep, touching all night, until she woke me, touching me, tracing my lips with her wet fingers.

She began talking to these boys on the phone after school. She started going out with them without me. She went to a prom dance with one of them. I gave her money to have her shoes dyed to match her dress. She told me if she didn’t go, she would miss out on the experience, the opportunity. She said they were just friends. She said she loved me and what we had was real and I was everything to her. She said they were just guys -- funny and hot they were, but guys. Nothing changed between us. We never stopped touching. We never stopped arguing. She never stopped crying. She was drowning.

The First Irish Girl said if she needed to run away, there was one person in her family who might be ok with the idea of us. Her uncle might be gay: he lived in the city with a very good-looking roommate, a man. No one had ever met the roommate except the First Irish Girl. She said the uncle acted really nervous. He smoked a lot of pot. Unfortunately, her rich grandmother would definitely disown her. Her father would be angry and say it was sick. She would probably never have to tell her mother. She lived somewhere in a huge city on the other side of the country. Her sister: who cared what she thought, but best not to tell her because she had such a big, fat mouth.

The uncle stayed at her house one night. He found every letter I’d ever written. Everything I’d ever written under the First Irish Girl’s mattress. Hours into the night and all night there were words about everything: every tear, every kiss, every promise, every hope, every touch, every thought, pages and pages. The First Irish Girl’s father did use the word: sick. He called my mother, who had her prior suspicions confirmed and remained just as silent about it afterwards. He threatened to kick his daughter out of his house unless she stopped seeing me. The First Irish Girl was hysterical, screaming at him, “But we love each other! We are in love! You can’t end what I feel! You’ll never stop that even if you put me in jail for a million years!”

We never stopped touching. We found each other in random places, arranged to meet at certain times in the bathrooms at school, or in the library, touching. We arranged to meet at stores, touching in the aisles between clothes, pressing in close together. She began to show up at school in the mornings late and hung over. She had been having too much fun with the guys. I told her I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. She said I was her only friend. She cried.

I started skipping my last class of the afternoon to touch and be touched by the First Irish Girl. My father received a call from my teacher and I went back to class. The First Irish Girl dropped out of school. Months went by. We stopped talking. We stopped touching. We did not see each other. I cried everyday for a year. She stopped by my house once and parked her car in the middle of the wide driveway. I stood in front of her. She never got out. We could not touch. We could not look at each other or the touch would be upon us. We said nothing; she drove away.

Six months later she called me. She told me she had been raped by two guys at a party. She was ok; she was really drunk when it happened. She just wanted to tell me. Another year went by and she called. She told me she was five months pregnant. She said she had just found out. She had never noticed anything different all this time! Wasn’t that incredible? Wasn’t that weird? Could that happen to someone who drinks a lot? Did I think the baby was ok? I didn’t know. I never heard from her again.

Judges' general comments:

This piece fascinated our judges. The subject, the writing, ad the depth here makes the reader think beyond the boundaries of the story—constantly checking one’s beliefs against the story’s unfolding. That is quite an accomplishment in writing. The biggest stumbling blocks we saw were the choppiness of the piece (short, unvaried sentences which lead to a lower-level, slower read), the time shift in the middle section, and the distance that the character has with the story (and thus the reader). We wanted to see the emotions of the girl in the story. We wanted to see her hopes and dreams. She seems almost ambivalent about the whole experience, like it happened, but it didn’t really matter, she’s just reflecting upon it. This last area, especially, is something to consider working on before publication…