Me and Jeannie

Summer was me and Jeannie in Aunt Bet’s kitchen, Aunt Bet swatting our pink fingers while we smudged all her tchotchkes, Aunt Bet curling our long strands at night with lace socks, me and Jeannie fixing hairbows in the oven with red pieces of ribbon twisted around a stick. It was Aunt Bet yelling at us in her cardboard voice, begging for Jeannie to “Stop that, Mavis,” calling upstairs for me to “Be quiet, Jean-Marie,” and the two of us laughing silently, figuring maybe we really could be each other if we wanted, sneaking from our twin beds while Aunt Bet slept, our matching nightgowns so long they grazed the carpets like cotton bridal trains.

Summer was me and Jeannie at the municipal pool, our bangs so white they turned kitsch green, our skin so wet our fingers looked like little dried cherries in the sun. It was me and Jeannie huddling in red towels under the cabana, us watching water hit the surface of the deep end like rain falling upside down, me and Jeannie whispering secrets in each other’s ears with cupped hands when Aunt Bet wasn’t listening.

Then summer was Jeannie telling me she liked boys with floppy hair, and me giggling, telling her the only floppy-haired boy I could think of was Raggedy Andy, me promising Jeannie if she jumped in the pool, I’d jump too, and Jeannie telling me I didn’t have to worry about that because she’d never jump in anyways, our little toes painted by Aunt Bet in the same shade of crimson-red.

It was me and Jeannie that summer, before long flower-stem Jeannie and me sweet-bread Mavis, Jeannie the kind of flower that grew toward the sun, me the kind of rolls you pulled apart, the kind Aunt Bet made, because they broke in so many places and they were soft when you ate them. It was before Jeannie was all the hot lights that made my eyes squint, my face dull and red in Aunt Bet’s dusted mirrors, before Jeannie met the ragdoll boy she would leave me for one day. Before he pushed her in the pool, me dissolving into my skin, her laughing, me knowing I couldn’t follow her, before Jeannie told me goodbye, that I didn’t have to grow up to be Aunt Bet one day, her smile all loose and sunbaked, my eyes all torrid and hot, before everything, it was just us, me and Jeannie, our little legs crossed under Aunt Bet’s table, red bows, red dresses, tight curls, identical in everything except our red smiles.

Emily Clemente is a first-year MFA candidate at Florida State University. She is the recipient of the 2022 Max Steele Award in Fiction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her writing has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Deep South Magazine, and Star 82 Review, among others. You can find more of her work at emilyclemente.com