Hawthorn Girls

Hawthorn Girls

by Sarah Cline

Spring, in west Texas, just before the end of things.

I frowned and nudged the gas pedal as I neared the side road that branched toward the kudzu-wrapped church where Anne and I had met the summer before first grade.

Our families didn’t know each other yet. Just chance, that we’d sat next to each other one Sunday, when an ornery summer wind muttered at the doorway.

The preacher had been in rare form, jowls aquiver and sweat rolling down one temple. “And in lakes of fire, the sinners burn! And in ashes and torment, the nonbelievers burn!”

He kept saying it like that, with the quivering, rageful burn, barking the word, rolling out the r like a possum under the wheels of a semitruck.

Beside me, Anne quivered with repressed laughter. A smile tucked itself into the corner of my mouth.

Every time the preacher hit his growling, gravelly burn, she ducked her head, shoulders shuddering, and I bit my lip, chewing back the laughter that galloped circles in my chest. I stole a glance at her face. Bright-eyed, freckled. We both had red hair – in itself a surprise, as most of the area was Mexican – though hers was prettier; long and silky-straight and woven with threads of autumn brown and late-summer gold, while mine was orange-red and short and springy.

After mass, we did not speak. We didn’t properly meet until the first day of school. She sat at the back of the classroom. I steered toward her as if on instinct and sat down, feeling – knowing – that I was meeting my best friend.

But during mass that day, I didn’t know it yet. We were still strung like violin strings pulled too tight, about to snap or sing.

In the parking lot, a patient atheist leaned his back against an old hawthorn, and scanning the departing crowd for a familiar face, fished an American Spirit out of its cardboard coffin. He was impossible not to see, the only person out in the lot, slipping the cigarette between his lips as Anne and I descended the church steps side-by-side. As our families separated in the dispersing crowd, just as the man lifted his lighter and struck the spark, I heard her growl, “burn.”

I erupted into laughter – heard her join me – and we walked away from each other shaking so hard I thought I’d die before we reached the car, and Mom hissed at me, “Quiet yourself.”

Too late for that.

Anne flicked a switch inside me that turned on something loud.

~

There are moments between girls that fuse them together forever. Having your first kiss with the same boy, the same night, on purpose, fifteen minutes apart, and giggling every time he caught glimpse of either of us and ducked out of the room, red-faced and guilty. Starting out together at a Guinea Pig Rescue to rack up some volunteer hours for our college resumés – though neither of us ended up going – and learning to care for creatures no one else wanted. Telling her parents she was staying the weekend at my house, and telling my parents I was staying at hers, then driving 700 miles out of state for an abortion in Junior year.

One life, two bodies.

For a little while.

Then I started going to church alone while Dad got a second job and Mom stayed home with the new baby. Anne stopped going altogether, and rolled her eyes when I mentioned it.

Then I was done being the tomboy and wanted to be called Timothea, and Anne, who had always been the pretty one, kept calling me ‘Tim.’

Then she started dating, working, saving up for breast implants so she could move to Vegas and be a stripper and give everything she made to animal shelters. But I was the stupid one that got pregnant, and was too scared to have sex again for three years.

Girlhood had tattooed Anne into my flesh, and like any other sin, I’d have to live with it. But it wasn’t shame, or regret.

It was weariness beyond our years, as we both got tired of growing apart.

~

White-blossomed boughs quivered at the edge of the dirt parking lot. I hopped out of my beat-up Camry, and threw the door shut. Things were quiet, tucked between the whisper and scratch of the hawthorns on the south side of Saint Felix’s.

It was early, but I wanted to check on the pregnant females that had been rescued the day before. There were always too many pregnant females abandoned at the Rescue.

I stepped inside. Heard the chirping of the guinea pigs, soft and sleepy. Cages lined the walls. Artificial light poured yellowy-grey from the alcove in the far right corner. I frowned. Somewhere was here.

And something was wrong whispered the same instinct that, when I would go on to work at the animal shelter, and, later, the old folks’ home, warned of sickness, of death.

I found Anne in the back corner. Beautiful red hair dyed black, those fishnets I hated running up to a short, black skirt. She stood at the counter, stroking a baby guinea pig on the heating pad as it warmed up.

“Rejected by his mother?”

She glanced at me. Turned her gaze down. “She left him out of the den. The other females were trampling him.”

“What should I do?”

Anne gave me a dry look. She knew me well. In that way that only best friends who no longer liked each other could.

“You don’t need me to tell you.”

A tight smile, and I went to warm the milk.

The guinea pig was no bigger than her little finger, brindled brown and black, as she twisted and deposited the baby in my hands. I juggled the milk bottle, clutched the guinea pig to my chest.

“You feed him. I want to check on the mother.”

“Cool.”

She shuffled past me, awkward in the narrow space of the kitchen alcove.

The crunch of gravel announced other trucks in the parking lot; full-timers and adult volunteers.

My last few moments alone with Anne.

Lips parted. I tried to think of something to say, but all that came was, “What do you want to name him?”

Anne strode away. “It’s up to you.”

I longed to acknowledge the understanding shared between us; that graduation day would end our girlhood, and our friendship, with a stiff hug. That I knew she’d outgrown Saint Felix, and would sever her roots, fly off like a bird, while I would remain, winding deeper amid those same roots; my family, my faith, my community. We would become someone the other did not recognize. Too different to do anything but fall in love, and grow slowly, agonizingly, apart.

But I said only, “Hawthorn,” and turned back to the little one. He needed me.