If You Had To, Or Else

I am shirtless in Lily’s bed, cutoffs around my knees, and this time, the reason is that Lily’s applying a temporary tattoo to my lower back for 90’s day. We’re sophomores, a driver’s license away from crossing railroad tracks for snowcones on fall Fridays instead of pepping up boys for a game whose rules we’ll never bother to learn.

“Hold still,” Lily says.

“Kim said, when she was fifteen, the Abercrombie catalog was soft-core porn.” I tease my hair over my face. “She thinks I’m being sex trafficked.” Kim is my brother’s girlfriend; she wasn’t even talking to me when she said this.

“You’re right here,” Lily says. She’s sitting on my thighs. Her mattress is harder than mine, and her sheets smell like the inside of a Bath & Body Works, cherry blossom and sweet pea.

“She’s worried,” I insist. Lily’s thumbs rub the band of my underwear.

“You’re done,” she says, and when I wriggle my shorts up, she smacks my butt. “Let it dry.” She’s lies next to me, smile shiny. We share vanilla frosting lipgloss, the luck of girls that’ll never have braces. She pulls off her shirt. “You want to be, don’t you?”

For her, I pick stars, place the middle one lower than anyone will see. “No one wants to be,” I say, but I’m buzzed from boredom, so much of it, I can’t think.

I hold a wet washcloth over the stars. Lily clenches her butt. “You want something to happen,” she says. Once she has a car, she’ll invent this game: stalls on train tracks, won’t push the gas until I beg; she likes it best if I almost cry.

She digs her phone from under her pillow, waves it overhead. I press my face into her shoulder. I know the drill, exactly how much we’re willing to show: not our faces, almost everything else.

Lily’s @justcuddlin, amassed enough followers to livestream by posting kitten videos, but her mom made her give the kittens away while they were still cute.

I get sprinter’s pulse when Lily says, “Hey guys.” She’s breathing on my ear, arm slung across her eyes, but she sounds far away. We push in, reach for each other. We never go live for long, and after, I look for her, as if our legs aren’t still intertwined. 

We watch the replay, her chin on my shoulder; it’s hard to pick a favorite part. On there, I look like I’m stifling a giggle, and I didn’t feel them, but now I notice Lily’s fingers in my hair. We’re both wearing lacey bralettes, straps that criss-cross in the back, mine rose, hers black. We look like girls who know what we’re reaching for. The comments are fast, but I read a few:

where do you liv?

I like the one that never talks

where are the kittens?

there are perverts on here

bitch

“Only we know,” I say, and I wonder if Lily’s jealous of the fake us too, if she watches and wonders what’s real.

“We won’t get caught,” she says. She scrolls slides from an old Abercrombie catalog on her phone. On our stomachs, we finger past quotes without reading, linger on a photo of a naked woman riding a horse.

“I’m not afraid,” I say.

“What was Kim’s point?” Lily asks, a piece of hair in her mouth.

I twist to check out the butterfly on my back. I like Lily’s mattress better than mine.  “I don’t know.”

“Tell her we looked,” Lily says. She bends over her bed, feels in my backpack, hands me my phone. “Do it.”

I flip over. “I don’t think she cares.” 

Lily presses the phone against my stomach, smirks. “Say, you looked at the catalog, and then you got sex trafficked by people that won’t let you go until you get off. Ask her what you should do.”

“I’m not going to say that.” I lean back.

“Don’t be mad.” She pulls a hair off her tongue. “Would you?”

“What?” I want her to say it.

“Touch yourself?” She asks. “If you had to, or else.”

“Or you’d be in danger?” I imagine suspension over a volcano, lava bubbling. 

“Exactly,” she says. “And they’d have to be watching.”

I picture the models from the catalog in the corner, the women mean, the men pretty. “Why?”

Lily twists her hair. “If nobody’s watching, it doesn’t count,” she says. “Those are the rules.”

Stacy Austin Egan was born and raised in Austin, TX. Her fiction chapbook, You Could Stop It Here, was published by PANK Books in 2018, and her short stories have appeared in Driftwood Press, The New Plains Review, Philadelphia Stories, december magazine, and others. She holds an M.F.A from McNeese State University and a B.A. from New York University, and she is represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic. She teaches writing and literature at Midland College. Find her online at stacyegan.com