We Are Twelve

by L. Bellee Jones-Pierce

Smushed between the car door and Sharon, I count historic markers and sing with the radio, my hair whipping and tangling in the hot summer air. Mama tools down the Natchez Trace, looking for a creek and waterfall she saw on Look Around Mississippi. Magic 96.3 has been fading in and out for the last few miles, but the new Coca-Cola jingle sounds out, clear, as we top a hill. 

Sharon pushes sunglasses into her hair and holds her hand in front of her mouth like a microphone. She waggles her eyebrows and pushes out her chest, singing about The Real Thing. I suck water from the Strawberry Shortcake thermos I’ve had since Kindergarten and wonder if I will ever need a bra. Sharon is already a D-cup, and her chest bounces under her baggy t-shirt whenever the car hits a bump. My bathing suit cuts into my shoulders. I am gawky, two inches taller than I was at the end of school, and just as flat as ever. My knees push into the vinyl bench seat of Mama’s Pontiac.

When we find the creek, Mama says we can walk far as we want so long as she can see us and we can see her. Like mirrors on an 18-wheeler. We leave t-shirts in the shallows where Mama plays with my little brother and pick our way down the creekside. We wade into the cool water, thrilled when it comes to our waists. 

While I nudge back toward the sand, make sure I can see my mama, Sharon slips beneath the water. She stays long enough for the surface to still, then bursts onto the shore with a splash. 

I giggle. When The Little Mermaid came out, we’d spent weeks singing and hunting crawdads, being mermaids. “We’re too old for all that,” Sharon insists. But the water makes her playful. We skip rocks and sing the songs she likes. Mariah Carey. Janet Jackson. That’s the way love goes.

She walks to a sunny spot and rolls her cutoffs high as they can go. “I’m gonna lay out,” she says. “Come sit.”

“I’ll burn.” I look back toward my mama and brother. They’re eating crackers on a fallen log. 

“You’re pasty,” Sharon pouts. “You don’t like the water anyway. You won’t put your head in.”

“I don’t have to dunk my head to like the water.”

“Do too, girl.” Sharon stretches back in the sand, pulling sunglasses over her eyes. “Yes ma’am. Yes, you do.”

  Minnows swim around my waist, quick slivers of silver and gray, and my toes sink into the creek bed. I voice the Coke jingle’s hook just under my breath and wade farther down the creek. Sun glints through the trees, across the water. I move slow, head bowed, tracking the minnows. A low branch snags my hair. 

Before I can reach up, the world tilts. I touch nothing but water. The once-clear creek darkens as my toes kick the silty bottom, looking for purchase. I want to breathe, need to, but hands hold me down, hard and warm in the small of my back. My own hands hit creek bed, and somehow, my body turns. I can see light and shadows above the water. When my head breaks the surface, I cough and gasp. My lungs ache. I reach for something, anything, to steady myself, and find Sharon. She coos over me as I begin to cry. 

“Hush, girl. You’re alright. Just dunked your head. Shh.”

I am sobbing hard, gulping air and trying to hug her, trying to say thank you. My insides roar, She rescued me. My voice won’t work. I open my mouth and taste wet palm, her skin against my teeth.

“Do you want your mom to come?” Her breath is a hiss. “I said hush.”  

She squeezes me tighter, and the creek clears around us.

When I am quiet, Sharon lets me go. She walks back to her sunny spot on the creek side, kicking at the water like her legs are new. 

“You should have come to sit with me. Are you going to tell your mom?”

I wipe my eyes with the backs of my hands. 

“You’d better not. Let’s fix your hair.”

I go to her. Tender, Sharon gentles the knots apart. “We need a dinglehopper, hey?” She pulls me close, our hips and thighs touching. Her arm around me is warm. Her nails press moons into my gooseflesh skin. 

When Mama calls us to leave, Sharon is chatty and helpful. She gathers our shirts and guides my brother to the car. I follow slow, and Mama asks if I’m okay.

“She tripped into the creek!” Sharon smiles at Mama, but her eyes turn to me. “I pulled her out, though. It was ok.”

We find the waterfall a short stretch down the Trace. It looks like a storybook. The creek drops off a rock shelf about twenty feet in the air and falls into a deep bowl of dark, cool water. There’s space in the rocks behind the fall, another shelf big enough to walk on. I walk to the shaded end and sit on the rock, dangling my feet. Sharon dives headfirst. She kicks below the water, all the way to the bottom. Just when I start to worry, dread souring my stomach, she surfaces right in front of me. I pull up my legs, hug my knees to my chest. She leaves a round, striped rock at my feet and floats away on her back.

Back in the car, sun-pink and damp, we stick to the seats. My brother nods off a few miles in. Sharon sits in the front, but I can hear her singing softly. 

I palm the rock the whole way home.