BY SUTTON STROTHER
Angie can fit four inches of the Phillips-head, handle-side first, past her lips. She opens her eyes wide like she’s applying mascara and tries to push another half-inch down her gullet when her brother Chris rounds the corner into the kitchen.
“The hell you doing?”
Angie chokes around the plastic as her throat, of its own volition, ejects the screwdriver onto the table.
“Tiffany Ostertag says she got Matt Becker’s whole dick in her mouth without gagging.”
“No way,” Chris answers. Matt Becker’s dick is famously huge.
“It’s what she said.”
“Whose dick you sucking?”
“Nobody’s. I just wanted to see if I could do it.”
It’s a valuable skill to hone, thinks Angie, but no one really wants a thing like that in their mouth. You do it as a favor, or else it’s a price exacted for something you couldn’t get otherwise, even if that’s only the pride of a job well done.
She says this to Tiffany Ostertag at a party nine months later. The rim of Tiffany’s Solo cup is smeared with sticky lip gloss. Even though Tiffany has long since moved on from Matt Becker, Angie still imagines a ring of pink sparkly gunk around his dick.
“Lots of people like giving head,” says Tiffany. She sounds confident but never says whether she’s one of them.
Radhika Tandra is one of them, though. “I’m Radhika,” she introduces herself at the dorm mixer when Angie starts college that fall, “and my major is sucking dick.” Another girl whose name Angie never learns begins cry-laughing six feet away.
“I’m undeclared,” says Angie, not sure what else to say.
Radhika’s nose is long and aquiline, cheeks hollow, brows thick. She only wears black. She looks like the Wicked Witch of the West, minus the green skin. Angie imagines her tongue between Radhika’s thighs, the wet melting Radhika into a puddle until there’s nothing left of her but industrial goth clubwear. Oh, what a world! What a world! But true to her word, Radhika studies dick and dick alone.
They share one sophomore year. It belongs to an engineering major named Lewis or Travis who, either way, can’t believe his luck. It’s pale and chubby, like Lewis/Travis, but in the dark, licking it is like licking an elbow. What Angie likes best is the teamwork, the way Radhika’s fingers settle over hers and as they giggle and pump to the rhythm of the pop song buzzing through the speakers of his laptop. They take turns with their mouths. When she sucks, Angie tastes Radhika’s Sour Apple Pucker and thinks, not for the first time, if she had a dick she’d have Radhika and there’d be no Lewis/Travis. It’s a lie; with Radhika, there’s always a Lewis/Travis.
But by graduation, there’s a Gavin, always laughing or just about to start, freckled hand never far from Radhika’s. There keeps on being a Gavin, until suddenly there’s only a Gavin and Radhika’s wearing a ring and a bridal saree and Angie’s going down on somebody’s cousin in the reception hall parking lot. The cousin doesn’t taste like Sour Apple Pucker, and on her own, Angie can’t find a good rhythm. She apologizes.
“You found something,” says the cousin, wiping himself clean.
He puts her number in his phone and promises to call when he’s back in town. When he follows up, they go for milkshakes and axe-throwing. Their brothers have the same birthday, which portends nothing, but Angie takes it as a sign meaningful enough to frighten her. She doesn’t invite him back to her place. He doesn’t call again.
She hasn’t seen Radhika in three months. No one has, but their friends all look to Angie for explanation. Except they don’t ask after Radhika anymore, they ask after “the Wilsons” even though Radhika kept her maiden name. When was the last time the Wilsons came out to the bar? Is the drive too far for them?
The drive is too far; the Wilsons live forty minutes away in a ranch house they were already thinking of selling when Angie saw them last. When she sees them again, they’re in a two-story craftsman. And still, “We needed a bigger place,” they tell her, twin knife-smiles stabbing Angie through the heart, sharp enough to make their meaning clear. Soon “the Wilsons” is a monster with three heads; eighteen months later they stitch a fourth to their heft. It’s hard not to want to take a scalpel to this fleshy mass of domesticity and wriggling limbs, carve out the piece that used to be her friend, so Angie sees them less and less. Instead she sees Annalise and Kyle and two different Jennifers and, in between, some folks whose names she never commits to memory.
Meanwhile the Wilsons move to Michigan. Once they’re settled, they beckon for Angie. “We’ll pay for the flight,” they offer. They make it impossible to say no, so Angie says yes but buys her own ticket so later she can only blame herself for having a bad time.
She brings presents for the kids, two round-limbed girls with Radhika’s brow and Gavin’s laugh, and lets them bury her beneath the sand of a beach on Lake Superior.
“Now you can’t get away from us,” says Radhika, turning onto her side to brush a strand of windswept hair from Angie’s eyes. The weight of her body compacts the sand encasing Angie’s left arm.
Angie closes her eyes and hears the zip of a backpack. Something cold is pressed to her lips – an apple. Her teeth pierce the flesh. She rolls her tongue against its pulp. Her cheeks pucker at its tartness. The girls come running in from the surf to pour sips of water into her mouth, feed her bites of sandwich, braid her hair. Someone kisses her temple. Someone calls her a treasure chest. Someone calls her a flower then brings another drink of water to her lips, and she opens right up.
Sutton Strother is a writer and teacher living in New York. Her work has been featured in several publications including, most recently, matchbook, Fractured Lit, and trampset. Read more of her writing at suttonstrother.wordpress.com. She tweets @suttonstrother.