Skin for Skin

by Jonathan Papernick

Her parents were four hours up the Interstate celebrating her baby cousin’s bris in Albany, and the new boy from English class, who quoted Nietzsche to the impertinent Miss Meade, sat shirtless on the orange rec room couch. Breath laced with cooking sherry and Marlboros, he was irresistible. His pale, concave chest scored with angry red pimples spoke of punk rock and wild abandon; his lithe body, a knife ready to spring. They made out in the darkness, side one of Astral Weeks spinning on the turntable. He pressed closer and touched her cheek tenderly, the throbbing vein in her neck, the gently curved clavicle she broke in a fall from her first bicycle. He wasn’t a spastic mauler like the rest of the mediocrities at her high school, not a clueless virgin impersonating the porn stars the other boys watched on their parents’ VCRs.

She whispered his name, halting his progression.

His voice was entirely changed. “You want to do it?” He took his time flipping the hair from his eyes in a gesture meant to seem casual, and removed his wallet from his jeans’ pocket, lightly fingering the raised circular impression to assure her that he had come prepared.

She felt the cool bite of his necklace against her skin, the pendant swinging around back as her fingers blindly explored his body, and she imagined a tiny motorcycle or pistol, something fearless strung at the end of the chain. And now, as he reset the pendant to its proper position dangling at his solar plexus, she realized that the constriction in her throat was entirely in-voluntary, and that the delirious moments before its appearance marked the end of a lifelong dream. Even in the basement’s gloom she could see it clearly, iridescent, glowing dangerously between them, like something aflame.

“Take it off,” she said, reaching for the gold crucifix at his neck. It was heavy; the miniature corpse reproduced in minute detail weighed something like two thousand years in her trembling hands.

“Why? Are you Jewish?”  

“My parents are.”

“That’s cool.” He laughed and dipped in for an-other kiss, but she wasn’t having it.

She told him to take it off or forget the whole thing. He hesitated, not sure she was serious, then fumbled with the crucifix before lifting it over his head with great difficulty, as if he were bearing the True Cross on his narrow shoulders, then tossed it across the floor.

“Now what are you going to take off?”  

“I’m done,” she said.

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “What’s your problem?”

He told her he had come all this way by bus and she owed him something. She knew what happened to girls who went back on the unspoken contract that was made when they invited boys over with their parents out of town. She had always thought a cocktease was worse than a whore, and now she faced the sickening prospect that everyone in her school would know what she was.

She had been with non-Jewish boys before, one or two had even worn simple crosses, but nobody so bold as to parade a gory crucifix before her eyes.

She had naturally turned away from being part of an unlucky, persecuted tribe. The way she saw it, there was no gain in membership, only grief. “I’m not Jewish,” she had told her parents hundreds of times. “I’m a secular humanist and I believe in self-determination.” She thought ritual circumcision was barbaric. But now, as he slid his hand around her waist, she wished that she were with her parents and aunts and uncles celebrating her eight-day-old cousin’s covenant with God and the Jewish people. That was where she belonged, not here in a darkened basement with a nasty, crude boy determined to have his way.

He stood naked before her, wearing only a pair of white gym socks that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in a very long time. “Your turn,” he said.

Now in the dim light she saw it clearly against his livid thigh and it shocked her more than the appearance of the crucifix, like the emergence of a sea monster from a bathtub.

“No. I can’t.” She had never seen anything like it before, but had heard somewhere that uncircumcised men were likely to give their partners greater pleasure. She could not believe that.

He didn’t seem fazed by her reaction at all, as if no were simply a prelude.

“Come on. It’s getting late.” And then, “I can ruin you.”

She thought of all the combinations of what might happen if he shot his mouth off around school, and she determined that she would be better off doing it with him to avoid a public shaming.

There was just one small thing.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, climbing off the couch and heading for the stairs.

She returned a few minutes later with a sharp Japanese paring knife that her mother used for salads in the summer, a bag of cotton balls and a bottle of witch hazel. “Okay, I’ll do it,” she said. “But first you have to let me fix something.”

“Skin for Skin,” previously appeared in Jonathan Papernick’s short story collection There Is No Other, Exile Editions, 2010. To learn more, please visit www.jonpapernick.com.