Skinny Dipping

Bailey Sims

We stood in Annie’s bathroom, just her and me, sucking on flat tummy lollipops she’d ordered online with her mom’s credit card. Annie was obsessed—we all were, really—with anything bad for us that wouldn’t make us fat. Cotton candy vape pods from the sketchy tobacco store on the corner, 32oz diet sodas from the gas station that came with free refills, and anything you could buy on the internet that had “skinny” in the title. “You know,” she said, pulling my hair behind my shoulders and starting to brush at the bleached ends, “you’re almost there. You just need to lose a little more around your stomach.”

She sat on the counter behind me, her bare legs on either side of my hips. She smelled like suntan lotion and sugar-free cherry. Across the room, I watched us in the full-length mirror. The lollipop gripped in my fist. The roll of skin beneath the underwire of my bikini. Annie’s long, skinny legs—skinny like an athlete, even before she’d started with the 6 a.m. runs and 600 calories a day after graduation.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You know you’re really pretty.” She pinched a half-inch of fat on my side, her fingers cold and leather-soft like a doctor’s. “It’s just that college is different. Especially in California. I want you to be your best.”

I swallowed my green-apple saliva and smiled with sticky lips pressed together. My stomach was starting to hurt, but I didn’t tell Annie that.

“Berkeley and LA aren’t that far,” Annie said.

They were more than nine hours apart by train, but Annie wouldn’t care about that because it was me who would be visiting her. Our friendship was like that—me the one with the train ticket and the motion-sick ride, her the one waiting on the platform. And besides, she’d argue, UCLA has the better parties.

“Annie?”

She pulled the brush down my back in one long stroke. I shivered. “Have you ever done drugs?”

The bristles stopped on my spine, right where my belly button would be if I turned around.

“Why would you even ask me that?”

“I just wondered.”

“I’m guessing Lauren said some shit? Why would you believe her anyway?” Her legs swung away from where they were resting on my hips.

“I guess she was just lying then.”

Annie laughed. “Surprise, surprise, Lauren makes shit up. Don’t tell anyone this, obviously, but I think it’s kind of good she’s moving to Chicago. She’s got weird, like, hippie vibes.” She rolled her eyes. I shifted between my feet, feeling the memory foam rug rise and fall under my toes. “We’re so much closer anyway.”

I smiled until I got a look at my green-stained gums in the mirror, then shut my mouth. “Yeah, she changed a lot senior year.”

“Probably cause her parents got divorced. It like, fucked her up or something. Whatever.” She dropped the brush on the ceramic countertop, stepping closer to the mirror. Her hair fanned across her bare shoulder as she positioned herself sideways and turned her head to watch her body. Suntan-oil brown stomach and thin white tan lines parallel to the straps of her bikini. A short chain with a pink-jeweled heart hanging from her belly button. I watched her move with a crawling feeling between my hips. I could trace her outline with my eyes closed.

“You look fine, Annie.”

“Fine isn’t good enough.” When she said things like that, they almost became fact. She leaned in close to the mirror. “Put on some mascara or something. We’re going out.”

It smelled like salt and damp fabric all around us, the Florida heat still weighing down the air even after the sun had gone down. I took a sip of my White Claw from the pack Ella’s sister bought us, aluminum cool on my tongue. My free hand threaded fingers through the shadow-cratered sand.

“What do you think will happen when we all leave for school?” Lauren asked. I watched her eyelashes flutter in profile. Remembered the glassy green of them when she leaned closer to me one night after everyone fell asleep, her wet, slack lips whispering that she found cocaine on Annie’s bedside table. Reminding me that cocaine suppresses your appetite, saying Annie wanted to be crackhead skinny. I’d leaned back onto my pillow and pretended to fall asleep.

“Nothing. We’re still gonna talk, like, all the time.”

“I don’t know,” Ella said. “New York is far.” She was going to NYU in the fall. Lauren to Northwestern, Annie UCLA, and me UC Berkeley.

Annie sucked on her vape. The white cloud drifted through the night like wax in a black lava lamp. I pulled the tattered corner of the quilt we all sat on over my ankles.

“So is California. There’s no point worrying about it now.”

“Let me hit that.” Lauren held her palm up, and Annie tossed the vape into it.

Ella crushed a can in her fist, aluminum crunching and echoing down the long, empty beach. I imagined the sharp edges, the places it cracked into a point and left jagged metal exposed. “Damn it,” she said. “That was the last one.”

Annie and Lauren groaned. I held my can from the top, rotating it in circles near my tucked-in shins like aerating wine. I could feel the liquid crashing against the walls and breaking like waves, hear the carbonation under the rush of seawater if I strained.

“Can’t your sister get more?” Annie asked.

“No. She’s out with her dumbass friends. And she told me not to bother her again.”

“What about your fake, Lauren?”

“Yeah right.”

“Isn’t there still that stuff in your parent’s basement?” I asked. We’d stashed a few bottles down there, ten dollar plastic handles of vodka and Fireball shooters the morning shift guy at the gas station let us buy.

“Yeah, like, a drop. We finished most of that shit.”

I leaned on my elbows, letting my head fall back. Wind rushed through my hair, a chill tickling the back of my neck.

“At least in college it won’t be this fucking hard to get alcohol,” Lauren said. Everyone was silent for a moment, like nobody could decide what was left to say. “This is fucking depressing.” Ella stood up, brushing sand off her shorts. A few stray pieces landed on my lips, stuck to my cheek.

Annie lay on her side, silhouetted in moonlight. She crossed an arm over her chest, rested her cheek in her hand. “We’ll be friends forever, guys. Nothing can change that.”

Nobody spoke. We folded up the blanket and disappeared into the darkness at the edge of the horizon.

The car idled in the parking lot three buildings down from the liquor store. Annie tapped the steering wheel with her index fingers.

“Okay, who’s going in?” Lauren asked.

“You should. At least you have a fake, even if it’s shitty.”

“I call getaway driver,” Ella said.

“It’s my fucking car.”

Annie leaned back in her seat, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Annie and I can go. We look the oldest.” My chest felt warm like quicksand, bubbly with alcohol.

“And what would we show them at the register, our junior licenses?”

Let’s just draw straws or something.” Lauren had her feet up on the dashboard in the passenger seat. She twisted to look through Annie’s center console, pulling out a mechanical pencil. “Here.” She pushed the eraser until a long piece of lead stuck out from the top, then snapped it at the tip. “Three of us go in, one of us drives.”

She broke off two more pieces of equal length, then one shorter than the rest. “You know the short straw’s supposed to be the bad one, right?” Ella leaned forward next to me.

“Whatever.”

We all pulled a piece from Lauren’s hands, graphite staining our fingertips. “Fuck you bitches,” Ella said. “Getaway driver it is.”

The automatic doors slid open in front of us, a gust of air conditioning blowing past our cheeks. I could feel the dried sweat on my body from the humidity. Fluorescents spotted my vision against the darkness outside.

The plan was for Annie and I to walk in first, and then Lauren would come in behind us. We’d linger in the aisles while Lauren went straight for the wall of vodka and picked out a bottle of Pink Whitney.

I felt Annie’s knuckles brush my side, then she reached her fingers around and threaded them through mine. My arm froze. She leaned closer and whispered in my ear. “In case he gives us shit about being too young. We can call him out for, like, discrimination.”

She pulled me forward, down an aisle lined with bottles of whiskey. The doors opened again, and I could hear Lauren’s Doc Martens against the resin floor. Annie and I watched through the space between bottlenecks. Her breath, sticky-sweet cherry, against my ear.

“Come on,” Annie said.

Lauren stepped up to the register, and the man behind the counter looked at her over his glasses. The pink bottle sat between them.

“Excuse me.” Annie gripped my hand harder. “My girlfriend and I were wondering if you have a public bathroom?”

“No,” he said. “And you have to be 21 to come in here.”

Annie smiled, pink gloss slippery on her lips. “Of course. Thanks anyway.”

She pulled me through the doorway, back onto the sidewalk connecting the strip mall. “That’s your distraction? Can we use your bathroom?”

Annie shrugged. “Maybe he’ll forget if he scanned her shit or not. It was worth a shot.”

The doors opened again, and Lauren walked toward them, shaking her head. “Asshole threw my ID in the trash.”

“It was trash anyway,” Annie said. “But it’s fine.” She pulled her sweatshirt up to reveal a flat bottle of rum tucked into the waistband of her jean shorts.

“What the fuck, Annie?”

“Isn’t that, like, a felony?” I said, looking around the empty parking lot. Annie smiled. “Only if you get caught.”

Annie’s backyard was cast in blue, underwater lights from the pool throwing reflections that swayed against lounge chairs and brick siding. Lauren took the bottle of Parrot Bay from under Annie’s arm, twisting the lid off and sipping straight from the bottle. She mimicked gagging.

“If you’re gonna steal something, at least make it something good.”

“I love this shit.” Annie took the bottle from her, tipping it over her lower lip and taking two big swallows. I knew she hadn’t eaten anything all day.

“You should slow down,” I said.

“Okay, Mom.”

Annie and I sat on the edge of the vinyl chair, Ella and Lauren across from us. She passed the bottle to me and I took a short sip. My mouth tasted like hot coconut.

“We should skinny dip.” Annie stretched her arms out, dangling the bottle between her fingers. Almost half of it was already gone.

We were silent for a moment. Ella shrugged. “Why not?”

Giggling, our voices echoing against the pavement, we stripped our clothes off until we were nothing but bare skin. Annie put a hand on her naked hip. I could see her ribcage through her back, subtle ridges like sand swept flat. She took another sip from the bottle and the blue glow shone against her teeth as she laughed. I kept my eyes on her jaw as she walked toward the steps to the pool, her body in profile.

“Fuck it,” Lauren said, holding a hand over her nose and jumping into the water. She emerged with black mascara streaks trailing from her eyes like tears. Ella did the same.

Annie took her time, kicking her feet around in the shallow of the steps. She turned to look at me. For a second, I forgot we were both naked. She motioned with her arm, and I joined her at the edge of the pool, feeling cold travel up my body like hands as more of me slipped beneath the surface. Annie’s hips brushed mine for only a moment before she dove under the water, coming up with her hair matted to her head, eyelashes dripping.

In a week, everything would change. Ella would be one more person on the crowded city streets. Lauren would pack her winter clothes for the Chicago fall. And Annie and I would settle in on opposite ends of the third-largest state. We all floated with our faces stretched toward the moonlight. Our bodies disappearing into beige streaks beneath the water. Everyone watched the sky and I watched the way the slope of Annie’s nose led straight into the stars if I closed one of my eyes. The pool filter whirred around us, the only noise. But I knew what we were all thinking. We’ll be friends forever. Nothing can change that.

My hair rippled in the water beneath me, twisting and tangling. That night, in the quiet of Annie’s room, when it was just us, she’d bring her hairbrush out from her bathroom drawer and tease out the knots, the bristles down my back the only space between us.