---

She’s eight years old in a sleeping bag, face turned up to a small white tv mounted to the wall, the kind with an arm that bends in or out, towards or away, from the wall. And on the screen, fuzzy and moving like ripples of black and white bacon, porn, with a semi-clear banner running continuously on the top of the screen “Music to have sex to”. And Rebecca doesn’t know what that is, but she knows what it means; even so, she doesn’t know how and that’s what makes her feel rotten. And up on the twin bed, under a comforter of obnoxious sunflowers that mirror the splattering of sunflowers elsewhere in the room, her cousin Madeline is toying with her bobbie, twirling the rat-tat-tatty stray strings of the white blanket with one hand, the tv remote in the other. It’s Madeline who really knows, knows what it is (she never knew what it meant), because her brother told her and then there was the one time she’d seen her parents do it even though their room was a full flight of stairs up in the converted attic, but she’d been known to sneak around.

The picture is always blurred, but they can piece it all together and categorize it under one idea: Naked. She thinks she saw a pidgin once, before she knew it was called a penis, though she’s never really sure, but at the Labor Day picnic at the end of that summer, she politely refuses her hotdog in favor of the chicken.

When it started exactly, she can’t say; but there she is, sitting at her school desk in Mrs. Zizas 4th grade class next to mammoth, black Ryan Meek and he’s saying My yeast is rising! like he does everyday before lunch and Mrs. Ziza is telling the students to clean up their crayons and get their lunchboxes and suddenly, naked bodies appear in her head and the larger than life breasts. She is a Sally-Surf-Board by comparison, has a donkey-teeth overbite and her fathers pet name for her is Rizzo the Rat, from the Muppets. She’s never even touched a boy except once when she accidentally brushed against her cousin Frankie on a sleepover in his waterbed. Down in dads basement office she asks Jeeves for pictures of “sexy women” and prints them out while her younger brother plays Sonic Hedgehog on the Nintendo 64. She’s looking over her shoulder to make sure he’s still absorbed and then tucks the photos away into her voice activated password journal, promising herself she’ll look like them one day.

She’s quiet in school, getting quieter everyday, afraid that if she opens her mouth those women will speak and then everyone will know the secret she keeps.

But she never says Stop. She never says No. And every sleepover at Madelines house, she brings her Eyeore notebook with the denim cover and her contribution to the Milky Pen collection and Madeline writes their sleepover schedule and always there is Nudie Time, which Rebecca can never say aloud but hopes to see on the schedule each time.

Sleepovers are almost always at Madelines house, and almost always spontaneous. At a cousins birthday party or a family picnic, Madeline and Rebecca conspire behind the garage or under the deck to figure how best to convince their parents that they deserve a sleepover. Madeline pulls out a napkin lifted from the buffet table and Rebecca produces a milky pen, and together they draft a pro and con list, going over each item, practicing their defense. And always there is the push to sleep at Madelines house. When Rebecca finally tells her mom everything that happened years later, Ma regrets having let her daughter go, says that there was evil in that house, that’s why it happened there, and why it went on for as long as it did. It was at Rebeccas house that the girls eventually would be caught, when Ma, while tidying up the sleeping bags and the fort made from pillows and air mattresses in the spare room, would find a handmade magazine, stapled together, colorful with crayons, and so kid-like, like the drawings that hung on the fridge down in the kitchen of Easter bunnies and the Good Samaritan and Victorian Houses, that she had to look through it twice to make sure the drawings of nearly naked women in scant clothing were actually there. There’s was a house where nothing stayed in the dark, except Rebecca’s secret.

But at Madelines house, the girls could sneak into the kitchen at midnight and microwave Oscar Meyer Bacon pre-cooked! and nobody would hear, or smell, or care. They could watch PG-13 movies from the rental store and eat Lunchables dessert trays. And Uncle Jimi would play with them, let them smear a mud mask all over his face, sit cross-legged on Madelines bedroom floor with glitter barrettes in his hair and pink shadow powdered up to his bushman eyebrows. They could spend hours alone in Madelines above ground pool where they’d strip off their one piece suits and swim naked, eight, nine, ten years old, swimming underneath each other then struggling to get back into the wet, tangled suits when Aunt Sharon would come to the edge of the pool with Lindt chocolate truffles, their favorite. Clinging to the wall of the pool, bathing suits still askew, just their heads above the rim, mouths open like baby birds for her to drop the chocolate in, giggling like the little girls they weren’t. And then up in the clubhouse Uncle Jimi made, the starchy blue industrial scrap carpet under their bare toes, the crooked door jamb firmly secured, undressed and peeking out the small window, wondering if the neighbors in the backyard could see them and delighting in the possibility that they did. There’s a wildness to it, a corporeal, sensually indulgent instinct that Rebecca can’t get enough of and gets all fidgety for while her friends talk about Brittney Spears and bell-bottom pants at recess.

In the fifth grade, Rebecca cuts up her underwear, a red bikini pair with a thin white band from Limited Too at the Willowbrook Mall that cut into her still pudgy hips. She sits on her bed with a pair of craft scissors trying to make herself a thong like she’d seen a woman wearing on the Naked News that streamed crystal clear on Madeline’s little white tv.

What are you doing? Becca! Her mother walks in.

Rebecca throws the scissors down and face plants into her Runaway Bunny stuffed animal.

I was cutting them because because- because I’m fat!

Emma sits on the bed to comfort her, assuring her that her preteen body is not fat, just finding its shape, while Rebecca cries real tears that have nothing to do with that.

Her parents have no clue that she knows what she knows, even when she blushes red and sweaty at cousin Freddie’s funeral repass, sitting besides her dad while he tells Uncle Kevin, with disgust, that Target has begun selling sex toys. She turns clammy at the mention of Howard Stern and focuses on the roll now turning to crumbs between her fingers.

Uncle George stops by the table and kisses Rebecca on the cheek and calls her a pretty girl, a Polly Pure Heart. She wipes his kiss, keeping her lips zipped and her eyes down, her hair falling into her face, but she likes the shield against the secret she keeps.

It wasn’t just about what Madeline and Rebecca were doing, the games they were playing that made her feel guilty; Rebecca knew she would have been vindicated for that by any outsider looking in. Madeline was older, the instigator, the one people expected this sort of thing from because she would fold and bite her tongue like a ravaged animal when she got angry, and scream like a demon when she didn’t get her way and punch the girls at school who got in her way. And anyone with two eyes could see that Rebecca with her Mary Miggs curls and her brown doe-eyes and fear was the good one. She was the one always being bullied by Madeline, the sweet innocent one, the one Aunt Sharon “accidentally” screwed the pooch on when painting her nails. A meticulous job on Madelines but with Rebecca, Oops, sorry.

And it is Madeline who orders Rebecca to strip down each sleepover at midnight. It is she who fills Rebeccas head with pornographics. And when Rebecca enters middle school, it is with Rebecca that Madeline insists she needs to practice, practically dragging Rebecca into the back seat of her parents green mini Van out in front of Uncle Michael’s house while the rest of the family slices through a Curly’s ice cream cake and fills their bowls with watermelon and silky cream fruit dip, and while Jonathan and Jordan and Michael catch toads in the backyard and Ma and Aunt Sharon, Aunt Roe, and Aunt Becky and Aunt Solange carry trays in and out of the house, Grandma at the sink washing dishes, no reason to think Where’s Rebecca? Meanwhile, there’s Rebecca, staring at braces with purple colored bands that are beginning to fade and tinge yellow and, when Madeline leans her face towards Rebeccas, thinking how her cousins lips smell like macaroni and cheese. But Madeline insists she needs to practice, that there is this boy she likes and has plans to kiss the next week at school. Rebecca is a fill in. And she hates it; it makes her want to puke up the broccoli and cavatelli and chicken cutlets she ate an hour ago, but then Madeline is happy with her and shares secrets with her and calls Rebecca her best friend and Rebecca feels special and particular and secretly wild and looks anxiously towards her own chance, her own boy to kiss so she can try all she’s learned.

But when she sees boys at school, she averts her eyes and when they talk to her she smears a scowl on her face like a wolf protecting its pack, but really she’s scared they’ll know the secret she keeps and see the filth on her skin. And she’s tired. Exhausted, trying to hide.

So while tucked beneath quilted covers, a Mighty Bright book light illuminating the pages of a Nicholas Sparks novel, she waits and supplements, hungry for flesh and sweat and the closeness she once tasted, waits for her turn. And then Madeline stops calling her over for sleepovers and Rebecca walks between classes, alone, because no one can know the secret she keeps.