Chapter 2 — Sundown Park

The sheet came off the bed like a confession.

Jessica stood with it bunched in both arms, the cotton still holding a shape that was not hers. Afternoon had slid toward evening while she unpacked. Her dresses hung in the narrow wardrobe with space left over, which made the wardrobe look like it was waiting for a different girl. Socks in the top drawer. The photograph of her brother on the desk. The scholarship letter flattened under the lamp so it would stop curling.

The mattress, stripped, looked worse than it had dressed. A faint map of someone else’s night. Jessica carried the sheet to the machine in the hall closet Jennie had pointed at with a toe. She did not ask which buttons were which. She guessed, poured in too much powder, and shut the door on the problem as if laundry could be a kind of prayer.

When she came back, the room was only a room. That should have helped. It did not.

She sat on the chair because the bare mattress still felt occupied. The city made a constant sound under the window, like a radio no one had agreed to turn off. In the other room Jennie’s music had gone quieter, then stopped. Water ran. A cabinet knocked. Ordinary noises. Jessica’s hands would not stay still in her lap. She kept seeing the knotted pale thing on the floor. She kept hearing don’t tell me you’re still a virgin, said the way other people said do you take sugar.

Overwhelmed was too clean a word. She felt as if she had been asked to live inside a sentence she only half understood.

Tomorrow college started. Tomorrow she would have maps and lists and a reason to be tired that her mother would approve of. Tonight the hours were empty and the emptiness had Jennie in it.

Jessica stood up before she could talk herself out of standing.

The white skirt was the only thing in the suitcase that was not a dress. Her mother had bought it for “if there is a function,” which meant: if the city required her to look like she belonged at a table. It sat high on her waist and ended mid-thigh because that was the length the shop had had in her size, not because Jessica had asked for less cloth. She paired it with a plain tucked shirt and the good sandals. In the wardrobe mirror she saw a girl who looked like she had stepped out of a bus and into someone else’s idea of summer. The skirt moved when she moved. She pulled it once, as if pulling could add inches.

She did not think pretty. She thought clean. She thought I can walk until my head quiets.

The front door of the flat clicked behind her. The stairwell smelled of damp and fried oil. On the last landing a boy carrying a helmet looked up, then looked again, longer, as if she had walked out of a different building than the one he lived in. Jessica said excuse me and went around him.

Outside, the street did what streets did in the city: it stared.

She felt it before she understood it. Two students on the opposite pavement turned their heads together, like birds. A car that did not need to slow, slowed. Jessica kept her eyes on the cracked concrete and told herself this was what happened when you were new. New people got looked at. The skirt was only a skirt. Her legs were only walking.

She did not know how the cloth sat on her hips when she took a step. She did not know what the tucked shirt did to the line of her. She had never had to know. In the village, looking too long earned a man a reputation. Here, looking seemed to be the weather.

She turned the corner toward what the housing paper had called a “green belt,” hoping for trees.

“Jessica.”

Her name, called like a joke that had found its subject.

Jennie was coming down the building steps in shorts that were an argument and a tank top that had given up being a tank top halfway through the straps. She had put on a shirt, which by Jennie’s standard counted as dressed. Flip-flops slapped the stone. She caught Jessica by the elbow as if they had already been in the middle of a conversation.

“You should have told me if you wanted to go outside,” Jennie said. “I’ll show you around.”

Jessica stopped. The elbow-touch was light and still too much.

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Disturb me.” Jennie looked her up and down without pretending not to. The look snagged on the white skirt and stayed there a second longer than manners allowed. “Babe. You walked out of the building in that and you thought you were going to have a quiet little nature walk? Half the street is having a religious experience.”

“It’s just a skirt.”

“It’s a problem,” Jennie said, almost fond. “A pretty problem. Come on. If you’re going to be looked at, you might as well know which blocks are boring and which blocks bite.”

Jessica almost said she wanted to be alone. Alone was how she had survived the bus. Alone was how she intended to survive the year. But Jennie was already walking, and not walking with her after being claimed in the street felt like another kind of rudeness. Jessica followed. The skirt whispered against her thighs. A boy on a bike turned his head so hard he wobbled.

Jennie noticed. Of course she noticed.

“You’re going to have to learn a face for that,” she said. “Not sorry. Not thank you. Just bored. If you blush every time a man invents a reason to watch you cross a road, you’ll run out of blood by October.”

“I wasn’t blushing.”

“You are the color of a first lie,” Jennie said. “It’s fine. It’s your first evening. I’m taking you the long way so you don’t get lost tomorrow and wander into the wrong kind of helpful.”

She showed her the grocery with the cheap rice. The stall that sold tea that was actually tea. The photocopy shop that would do assignments for people who had money and no time. The ATM that ate cards after ten. The lane to campus, already familiar to Jennie, still a rumor to Jessica: a wider road, a painted gate in the distance, banners for societies Jessica had only read about on the admission portal.

People looked at them both. They looked at Jennie the way you looked at a girl who had already decided the looking was her property. They looked at Jessica the way you looked at a window you had not expected to find open.

Jessica kept her arms at her sides and her mouth shut and tried to memorize left and right. Tomorrow she would need this. Tomorrow she could be a student instead of a spectacle.

“One more thing,” Jennie said, when the campus gate was close enough to count the flags. “I want to show you something interesting.”

“I should go back. I have to—”

“You have to sleep on a wet sheet if the machine hasn’t finished, and you have to start classes in a building you haven’t seen, and you have to send money home before you’ve earned any. You can spare a park.” Jennie’s smile was bright and not entirely kind. “Sundown Park. Formal name. Pretty, right? Like a postcard.”

Jessica had grown up on actual fields. A park sounded like a smaller, tamer version of something she already understood. Grass. Benches. Maybe a fountain. She let herself be turned down a side path that slipped between the college wall and a row of old trees.

The sign at the entrance was faded. SUNDOWN PARK. A painted sun half-sunk into letters. Under it, in marker someone had tried to scrub off, a cruder name showed through like a bruise.

Jessica did not stop to read the bruise.

Inside, the light was thicker. The city noise dulled under leaves. For a few steps it was almost the kindness she had come outside for. A path of packed dirt. The smell of water and cut green. A couple on a bench, close, the girl’s face tipped up.

Jessica’s mouth softened.

That, she thought. That she understood. A boy and a girl and a public place and the shy bravery of a kiss. In the village it would have been a scandal. Here it looked almost allowed. Almost sweet.

Jennie walked beside her with her hands in her shorts pockets, watching Jessica watch.

The couple did not stay a postcard.

The boy’s hand went from the girl’s waist to the hem of her top and then under it, not hidden, not even pretending to be hidden. The girl laughed into his mouth and shifted, and then she was in his lap the way furniture is not supposed to be used. A button opened. Then another. The top came up. Jessica saw the pale shock of a bare breast in evening air and thought, first, that she had mis-seen it. People did not do that. Not on a bench. Not with a path.

The girl pulled the boy’s shirt. He got it off one arm at a time without taking his mouth away. His belt made a sound Jessica felt in her teeth. The girl’s skirt bunched to her hips. There was a moment of awkwardness that should have stopped them — a laugh, a glance down the path — and then there was no awkwardness, only the blunt, rhythmic fact of two people starting to fuck on a public bench while the leaves went on being leaves.

Jessica stopped so hard her sandals scraped.

She could not believe her eyes. That was the sentence, whole, useless. Her mind offered it and then had nothing else. The boy’s back worked. The girl’s hands opened and shut on his shoulders. A sound came out of the girl that was not a kiss anymore. Further down the path, as if this were a rule the park had and not an accident, another pair was a dark knot against a tree. Jessica’s gaze snagged there too, uninvited, and came back because the bench was closer and therefore worse.

“Jennie.” Her voice had gone small. “We should— we should go. They— someone will—”

“Someone already is,” Jennie said. She had not stopped walking until Jessica had, and now she stood like a tour guide at a monument. “Welcome to Sundown. Locals don’t call it that. You saw the marker. Sex park. If you come through at this hour you will definitely see someone. Some nights you see a queue of someones. Campus crowd, office crowd, people who like the idea of getting caught more than they like a bed.”

Jessica’s face burned so hot it felt like a mistake her blood had made.

“That’s— that’s not allowed.”

“A lot of things aren’t allowed.” Jennie tipped her chin at the bench. “Doesn’t look like the park cares.”

The couple did not look up. That was the part that undid Jessica more than the skin. They were not hiding. They had decided the world was furniture. The girl’s head dropped back. The boy’s hand gripped the bench slat. Jessica heard the wet, ordinary sound of bodies and wanted the ground to be village ground, which at least had the decency to be shocked with you.

She turned half away and still saw it, because the park had been built with paths that did not offer mercy.

“Why would you bring me here?”

“You said you wanted to explore.” Jennie’s tone was almost reasonable. “This is the city, Jess. Not the photocopy shop. I could have let you find it at night by yourself in that skirt and then you’d have learned the hard way what men think a girl is doing when she walks Sundown after dark. This way you learn with me, which is cheaper.”

Jessica wrapped her own arms around her middle, a poor substitute for more cloth.

“I thought it was a park.”

“It is a park. People picnic here at noon. Kids, even, before four. After that the sun goes down and the name starts telling the truth.” Jennie glanced at her sideways, taking in the white skirt, the tucked shirt, the way Jessica’s throat kept working. “You’re looking. You know that, right? You can be horrified and still be looking. That’s allowed too.”

“I’m not—”

She was. That was the sick extra heat under the shame. Her eyes kept returning as if the bench were a fire and she had been raised in a cold house. The girl’s legs. The boy’s mouth at a collarbone. The unbelievable plainness of it. Jessica had spent eighteen years keeping her own body in the category of private. Here, private had been dragged into the open and left on slats.

A man passed them on the path and looked not at the couple first but at Jessica, at the white skirt, at the fact of her standing still. His mouth moved on a thought he did not say. Jennie stepped half an inch closer, a claim, and the man went on.

“Breathe,” Jennie said.

Jessica breathed. It did not help.

“Can we leave.”

“In a minute.” Jennie was not even watching the bench anymore. She was watching Jessica the way she had watched her unpack: like the interesting thing was not the act, but the girl who had never stood near one. “This is the surprise. Not them. You. Look at your hands. You’re shaking like the park reached in and touched you, and nobody has. Yet.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.” A small smile. “I’m showing you the neighborhood. Tomorrow you’ll walk past this gate on the way to lecture and you’ll remember the bench, and some boy in your class will say Sundown like a test, and you’ll know what he means. That’s a kind of education the scholarship doesn’t list.”

On the bench the girl’s voice broke on a sound that made Jessica flinch. The boy shuddered and went still, then laughed once, breathless, as if they had shared a joke. He reached for something on the ground — a packet, a tissue — casual as a man packing up lunch. The girl pulled her top down and did not hurry. When she stood, her skirt fell into place like a curtain at the end of a play. They kissed, ordinary again, and walked toward the far gate together, fingers hooked.

The bench was just a bench.

Jessica stared at it until the empty slats were worse than the full ones.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“Home is a machine full of someone else’s sheet,” Jennie said, but she turned, finally, and started back the way they had come. “Come on, virgin. Walk. If you stand there any longer the next couple will think you’re waiting for a turn.”

Jessica walked. The white skirt felt thinner than it had on the stairs. Every brush of air against her legs was information she did not want. Behind them the trees went on dripping dusk. Somewhere deeper in the park another laugh rose and was cut off by a mouth.

At the faded sign Jennie paused and tapped the ghost of the marker name with two fingers.

“Sundown,” she said. “Remember it. And remember you didn’t run. That’s the part you’ll lie about later, if you start lying. You stayed long enough to see the ending.”

Jessica did not answer.

They took the lane back toward the building. Campus flags lifted and fell. A group of boys coming the other way went quiet as Jessica passed, then loud again after, the way boys did when they wanted you to know you had been discussed. Jennie flipped them a look that was half greeting, half warning. Jessica kept her eyes on the pavement and thought of her brother’s photograph facing a brick wall, and of Sunday, and of the version of this evening she would never put on a phone.

In the stairwell she pulled the skirt down again. It came back up when she climbed.

Jennie unlocked the flat. The machine in the closet was still turning the sheet through water, over and over, as if repetition could make cloth innocent.

“Noodles,” Jennie said, already at the counter, already herself. “And don’t sit in that skirt on my couch unless you want the couch to have a religious experience too.”

Jessica went into her room and closed the door.

The bare mattress waited. She sat on the chair in the white skirt with her knees pressed together and her palms on her knees and listened to the city find its night sounds. Every time she blinked she saw the bench. The lifted top. The belt. The girl’s head dropping back as if shame were a country she had a passport out of.

Jessica pressed her knees tighter.

Tomorrow, college.

Tonight she would sleep, if sleep agreed to come, in a room that still knew what it had been used for, in a body the street had already started to vote on, with a park in her head that would not go back to being only trees.

She told herself she would never go back there.

The lie was small. It fit easily beside the other one, the one where she had only been horrified, and had not looked.

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