She has a candy-sweet smile, but she’s got blood dripping between her teeth from the bite she just took out of the girl that didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut in the bathroom between third and fourth period yesterday. You see her at mass every Sunday, but her eyes are open when she kneels and she laughs silently, privately at her rosary, the garnets that denote each “Hail, Mary,” glint black at you across the pews. You smile at her - you wish your hair was as perfectly curly and shiny as hers - and ask her if she understood Friday’s math homework, only to be shushed by the nun standing to the right of Father Matthew, just as he places the flesh of Christ on your tongue.
She squeezes your hand, making sure you know to find her after service, and you watch her peach-colored skirt swirl around her thighs. She smells like rain and cherry blow-pops and her hair always bounces when she walks away, tied up in a high ponytail with a white satin ribbon. When she drives around town in her car, it always has the top down and there’s always some low, croony woman singing on the radio.
She always has a flask full of whisky in the backseat and a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment. You follow her everywhere because even though she’s a good girl, she goes to church and says her prayers and volunteers at the soup kitchen twice a month, she’s absolutely terrible for you. She is everything you want and she is everything she could possibly be to you, and you know it’s dumb, but that’s what being 17 is for, right?
But she doesn’t blush when you brush up against each other, and you know she has never once thought about how you might taste. She has never stayed up late thinking about what would happen if you got into the same school and roomed together. Would you hold her attention better then? Away from the distractions of home. You think not.