Teenie Weenie
by Kelly Murashige
In mid-July, the summer before our second-grade year, my grandmother took us to karaoke.
It was unbearably hot, as it was every summer, and though the rooms of our half-day classes had been air conditioned, when my grandmother picked us up, we begged her for something to help cool us down.
“Oh,” she said, grinning. “I know just the place.”
It was called Kara O.K., a name I later used as a temporary drag queen name at a bachelorette party. Modest and small with eggshell-colored walls, it offered private rooms. We were trapped in a claustrophobic cube as my grandmother wailed her way through Whitney and Céline. Every time my grandmother looked over and caught us wincing, we claimed it was brain freeze.
After four and a half minutes of sing-ranting about some woman named Susan, my grandmother switched gears, cleared the queue, and selected a new song. This track was even older than the others, beginning with a tinny chorus of backup singers. Years later, you would tell me the coy, whispery voices of those women may very well have been your sexual awakening, and though I laughed and pushed you off my bed and onto the floor, I secretly thought, Thank God it wasn’t just me.
At eight, we didn’t know what it was we were experiencing. All we could do was glance at each other, scandalized, as my grandmother sang about a shy girl in a bikini.
We stared at each other for what felt like forever.
Then, one breath later, we burst out laughing.
That silly bikini song became our best inside joke. We shoehorned it into every conversation we could.
Six years later, the July before our last year of middle school, the pool reopened after months of renovations. I didn’t want to go, knowing it would be packed, but you insisted, swearing you were about to die from heatstroke.
I met you at the pool, dressed in a baggy old T-shirt. You were already in the water, clinging to the wall.
“Hey,” you said, lifting a hand.
You then pushed yourself up.
Water sloughed off you, puddling at your feet. You were in a bikini I had never seen before. Neither yellow nor polka-dotted, it was black, stringy, and sleek.
You looked different to me. Older. Like someone I didn’t know.
You had outgrown me, I realized. You were a stranger.
I stood there in my T-shirt, arms crossed over my chest. The bikini underneath had begun to pill and fray.
“Come in,” you said. “It feels so good.”
My mouth opened and closed around words I could not say. After a prolonged silence, I shook my head and walked away.
Later, it would shock me that I had left like that.
What shocked me even more was that you had let me go.
The awkwardness of that day lingered like a sour taste. Even once school started up again, we kept finding reasons we couldn’t meet up. We avoided each other like something horrific had happened. As if we’d gone out fighting, not just fizzled out.
Years later, once we graduated, we both sighed with relief. I was heading to Los Angeles; you’d be in New York. Neither of us would bother returning for a reunion.
I see you, though. I see you still.
The other day, I dreamed I was standing in front of a locker. I knew it was you hiding in there, knees curled to your chest, hair snaking down your spine.
I approached, then knocked, my heart pounding hard
Like the girl in the song, you would not come out.
I woke up slightly breathless, then sat up and grabbed my phone. The only way I could sleep now was to play that stupid song.
I listened to the percussion, like a spoon on a tin can, the chirping instrumental reminding me of the Christmas songs we would sing in school, back when all we cared about were the breaks we’d spend together.
It took me a minute to drift off again. Once I did, I found myself right back at that locker. This time, I stepped forward and opened the door.
You smiled up at me like I was just what you had wanted, as cool and refreshing as the shave ice on our tongues.
