I learned the word fuck from a girl named Yoyo. She told me fucking was when you lift your shirt up all the way and I believed her because she talked a lot more than I did and because she had a brother and I didn't. We were four or five, out on the daycare playground, pretending that our horses were eating the sand from the sandbox. It made them strong to eat the sand but it also made them sneezy. They had those big honking horse nostrils, after all. Sand traps. We played that their saddles kept being knocked off by the force of the sneezes, so we'd bend over to pick up the far flung saddles and put them back on our horses' backs and then pat their firm, invisible rumps. We had run around and bent over so many times that we were hot and red, so Yoyo was like, "I'm sweaty. Let's go over in the shade and fuck."

She went under the tree and lifted her shirt all the way up. She couldn't see me with her shirt like that so she yelled, "Are you doing it too?" I didn't want to do it too because my cousin told me that my belly looked like it had a dead baby in it and I wanted to keep that shape a secret, but she was the only person who played with me consistently and didn't seem to mind that I hardly ever spoke—that I mostly nodded and smiled and made that rabbit-teeth face—so I didn't want to leave her to fuck alone under the daycare tree. I joined her, and we really did cool down like that. Shade for the face, air for the belly.

Yoyo said that the horses smelled the salt on our bellies and were licking our skin, so we laughed and squirmed and told them to stop because we were their owners, respectable and responsible. But really we loved the attention. Or Yoyo loved it and I did my best to imagine what loving it would be like.


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