By Karin Cecile Davidson
The Geography of First Kisses
Compass Points
The first was Leon. A small, muscular boy. A midshipman at the academy. He knew about compasses, easterly winds, how to bring the boat about on white-capped seas. I went for his blond hair and his deep voice, both like honeycomb, thick and golden and crowded, the waxen chambers, the echo in my chest.
Summer grew brighter, and I refused to go back home to New Orleans, nearly sixteen, without that first kiss. Sweet sixteen and never been. We never said it aloud. Those of us who stayed in the corners at dances, at our own tables. All girls, all the time, not too shy, but not quite pretty enough.
For the month of August, I was away from that southerly place, where algebra notebooks got left behind and streetcars rumbled past and boys sat on the cafeteria steps, smoking because they could get away with it, and girls sat by them, the kind of girls I wanted to be. In that northerly summer spot called Castine, where the great aunts played games of Hearts and Gin in the afternoon, where the berries were small and bright blue, where the beaches were covered with rocks and sea glass and broken pottery, the rules seemed different. I dared myself to walk near the academy and its giant ship, moored by the town’s public dock, and when I did, the boys appeared. And then, even when I returned home, they kept appearing.
Leon with his bright curls. He had an arrow in his glance and shot me through the heart. My heart had room for so many more arrows. Little did I know.
Geoffrey with his roaming hands. Small, sweet hands that like to untie things. Apron strings, kerchiefs, the little gold clasp that held on my bikini top. His eyes were dark pieces of eight that blinked hard, sizing me up and then down, putting me in my place. “You baby,” he’d say, reaching out to pinch me.
Buzz with a laugh that broke apart the stars. He liked to drink and do it in his car. He took me to drive-ins and ordered iced cokes in paper cups that he laced with Jack. The smell of whisky on his breath and his breath against my neck. The only film I remembered half-seeing was Lipstick, Margaux Hemingway looking down and me looking up through the strands of Buzz’s long hair, the vinyl seat pressed against my bare back, the twist of double-braid lashing around my ankles.
Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive. Her stories have appeared in Five Points, Story, The Massachusetts Review, Colorado Review, Passages North, Post Road, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Acacia Fiction Prize, the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, the Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, a Peter Taylor Fellowship, and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and The Studios of Key West. Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she now lives in Columbus, Ohio.