Just the Pits Shrunken First Semester chapter 8 by maximally

By two in the afternoon, the guest room was the hottest place in Santa Clara County, and Max had personally checked.

Victoria didn’t run the upstairs AC before six. It was a rule, like no shoes on the white rug and no carbs after eight, and it had survived four summers, two heat advisories and one very long conversation with Max’s dad about the PG&E bill. So the box fan in the window just pushed the same hot air from one side of the room to the other, and the sun came through the blinds in stripes, and the whole room slowly baked like a loaf of bread nobody was watching.

Artemis had kept her promise, which was the first thing that happened after the foot. Nobody had asked her to. Max certainly hadn’t. But around noon, she’d sat up, looked at her own sole like she’d just remembered something, and said, “I said I’d wash them,” and gone down the hall to the bathroom and run the tub for her feet. She came back pink-heeled and smelling like Izzy’s coconut body wash, and she didn’t say anything else about it. Max didn’t either. He didn’t know what he would have said.

Then she’d brought up lunch. Victoria’s small plate turned out to be a saucer with four chilaquiles on it, each one the size of a surfboard to him, and a dollop of crema like a snowbank. Max ate about a fingernail’s worth of tortilla and felt like he’d been to Thanksgiving. Artemis ate the rest, and then, because apparently that wasn’t enough, she dug a mason jar of black beans out of the cooler bag she’d driven down from Oakland and ate those cold, straight out of the jar with a spoon, sitting cross-legged on the bed and chasing them with an oat-milk iced coffee she’d made in a pint glass. Max watched the beans go down one spoonful at a time and thought about the stairwell, and the kitchen chair, and the oat milk, and said nothing.

Her phone buzzed twice. The first one was somebody named Dev saying covered ur shift, u owe me a closing. The second was Izzy, a single photo of the guest room door, taken from the hallway, with no caption. Artemis looked at that one for a long time and then put the phone face-down.

After that, she sketched him.

She asked first. She asked like five times. And the thing was, it was the first thing all day that felt normal, or at least like something that had happened to people before. She sat against the wall with her sketchbook on her knees and her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, and he sat on the nightstand next to a glass of water bigger than he was, and for an hour the only sounds were the fan and the pencil and, downstairs, Victoria vacuuming the same room four times. She drew him small in the corner of the page, next to the lamp, next to the glass, next to her own hand for scale. “Like the figure in the corner of a landscape,” she said, not looking up. “The one who tells you how big the mountains are.”

“Am I the figure or the mountain?” said Max.

She laughed. “Babe. Look at you.”

By three, she’d taken off the flannel. By four, she’d given up on the sports bra being a reasonable choice and changed into a black tank top that said NO GODS NO MASTERS NO GLUTEN in cracked white letters, and she’d twisted her hair up off her neck with a pencil stuck through it. Her skin had gone shiny across her chest and the backs of her arms. Every time she reached for an eraser, a drift of warm air came off her, and every time, it was a little stronger.

She hadn’t put on deodorant. He knew that because she’d said so, cheerfully, around three-thirty, digging through her duffel: “I left my crystal in Oakland. Whatever. I’ll just smell like a person.” And she did. She smelled exactly like a person who’d been six-foot-four in a ninety-eight-degree room for an entire afternoon, after two days in the same clothes, two pounds of co-op beans and no crystal. Max had been breathing it since lunch. It sat in the room like a second piece of furniture.

At a little after five, she put down the pencil, stretched both arms up over her head until her shoulders cracked, and left them there.

Max looked. He didn’t mean to. It was just that she was right there, lying back against the pillows with both elbows pointed at the ceiling, and from the nightstand he had a perfect, unobstructed, eye-level view straight into her left armpit.

It was a lot.

It was dark at the roots and purple at the tips, the same as her bangs, like somebody had dipped a black paintbrush halfway into a jar of grape jelly. It wasn’t a tuft, not really. It was a patch, thick and soft-looking and curling in on itself, matted down a little in the middle where it had been pressed against her side all day. The skin under it was paler than the rest of her, and wet. Not damp. Wet. It glistened in the stripes of light from the blinds.

And the smell. Even from the nightstand, two feet away, it came across the gap at him like an oven door opening. Onion first, always onion, but riper now, sharper, with something sour and vinegary riding on top and something warm and yeasty underneath, like bread dough left out to rise. Cumin. Pennies. Beans.

She caught him looking.

He knew she had, because she didn’t put her arms down. She didn’t do anything at all. She just went very still, the way she had at the table with the list, and then, slowly, she turned her head on the pillow and looked at him.

“Max,” she said.

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re about to say something, and the answer is no.”

She reached under the pillow with her other hand, the right one, which meant the left arm stayed exactly where it was, and pulled out the list. It was getting soft along the folds now. She’d unfolded and refolded it so many times today that the purple ink had started to blur at the creases. She opened it one-handed against her stomach and didn’t look at it. She didn’t need to. She’d had it memorized since breakfast.

“Four,” she said.

“Artie.”

“‘Her armpits. See post. It’s a lot.’”

“I know what it says. I was there.”

“Yeah.” She put the list down on her stomach. Then she picked up her phone, thumbed it open, and scrolled. She didn’t turn it around. She didn’t show him. She just read it off the screen in a flat, careful voice, like somebody reading a warning label out loud. “‘also not to be weird but my cousin doesnt shave her pits and i think about getting trapped in there way too much.’” She set the phone down, screen-down, next to her hip. “‘Like WAY too much.’”

“Okay, see, trapped,” said Max, and pointed at her with his whole arm. “Trapped. That’s twelve. That’s not even four. That’s twelve, and twelve is yellow, and you said greens first. You said it. Izzy said it. It’s color-coded.”

“I know.”

“So you can’t.”

“I’m not gonna trap you.” Artemis rolled onto her side, toward him, very slowly, keeping the arm up. The mattress dipped, and the glass of water on the nightstand trembled. “I’m not doing twelve. I read twelve. Twelve’s underwear. This is four. Four’s just—” She searched for the word. “Looking around. Exploring. Like a—like a hike. Except you can leave whenever.”

“I don’t want to hike your armpit.”

“Okay,” she said gently. “I hear you.”

She was going to say that every single time. He knew it now. She’d say it to anything. He could tell her he wanted to be put on a bus to Fresno, and she’d say okay, I hear you in that soft, careful voice, and look at him with those green eyes, and somewhere behind them, the post would scroll past in gray forum font.

“Here’s what I was thinking,” she said. “My arm stays up. The whole time. I’m not gonna put it down, not even a little, not unless you ask. If you want me to move it higher, you tap my elbow twice, and I’ll move it higher. If you want to come out, you just walk out. I won’t even touch you unless you say.” She paused. “And I’ll keep asking.”

“I know you’ll keep asking.”

“Is that bad?”

He didn’t answer that. He didn’t know how to. It wasn’t bad. That was what made it so much worse.

*

She lay back, rolled a little onto her right side, and propped her left arm up behind her head on the pillow, elbow pointed at the headboard. That put the hollow of her armpit right at the level of the nightstand, open and tilted toward him, like a cave in a hillside. Then she slid her right hand under him, palm up, and waited for him to step onto it, and when he didn’t, she waited some more.

He stepped onto it.

She didn’t put him in. She set him down on the pillow, a few inches from the edge of the hair, and took her hand away.

Up close, the heat was unbelievable. It was the hot breath off a dryer vent, the air over a parking lot in August, but wet. It rolled off her skin in a slow, constant wave, and the humidity was so thick that he felt it settle on his face and arms and soak straight into the napkin poncho. The poncho, which had been a napkin at nine that morning and a dish towel’s worth of other people’s sweat by noon, went limp and clung to his chest.

In front of him, the hair started.

To him, it wasn’t hair. It was a thicket. Each strand was as thick as a guitar string and stood up out of the skin, curled, and fell back down again, so that the whole patch looked like a field of black and purple reeds somebody had walked through after a rainstorm. At the near edge, it came up to about his knees. Farther in, where the hollow got deeper, it was waist-high, then chest-high, matted together in damp curling clumps that glistened. Here and there, caught in the strands like dew on a spiderweb, were beads of sweat as big as marbles.

“Is it okay?” Artemis said from somewhere far above. “I can’t see you super well from here. Is it gross?”

“It’s a swamp, Artie.”

“Okay. Do you want to come out?”

He hadn’t gone in yet. He decided not to point that out.

He walked in.

The hair gave in front of him and closed behind, springy and slick, brushing his shins and then his thighs and then his hips. It was warm. Everything was warm. Every strand was coated in a thin, oily film that came off on his skin wherever he touched it. The ground under his feet wasn’t ground. It was her skin, soft and hot and wet, and it gave very slightly under each step, so that he walked through it like somebody wading into a pond with a mud bottom. The smell closed over his head like water.

There was no getting used to it. At the edge, it had been onion and bread and pennies. In here, it was all of them at once and something else besides, something thick and almost sweet and animal that went straight past his nose and into the back of his throat. He could taste it. His eyes stung. He breathed through his mouth, and that was worse, because then he really could taste it, salt and sour and beans, a whole afternoon of beans.

“You okay?” said Artemis.

“No!”

“Do you want—”

“I’m fine!”

He pushed farther in, mostly out of spite. The hair got taller. Down at the bottom of the hollow, where the skin folded into the crease between her arm and her ribs, the hair was so thick that he had to shove it aside with both arms, like a curtain. Beyond it, the skin dipped into a soft, deep groove, slick and dark with sweat, and when he put his hand flat against the wall of it to steady himself, he felt something he hadn’t expected.

Her pulse.

It was right there under his palm, deep and slow, a heavy, steady push like a bass line through an apartment wall. It pushed against his hand, and then again, and again. He stood there in the dark of her armpit with his hand flat on her skin and felt Artemis Vasquez’s heart beating, and for a second, the rest of the day just went away.

Above him, the arm twitched.

The entire hillside shuddered. Hair swayed around him like reeds in a wind, and somewhere far overhead, Artemis made a high, strangled sound.

“Sorry,” she gasped. “Sorry, sorry. That tickles. You found a—that’s a really ticklish spot. I’m okay. I’m not moving. Look, I’m not moving.” The arm went rigid. He could feel the effort it took her to hold it there, the muscles bunching and locking. “Keep going. I mean, if you want. Or don’t. Whatever you want.”

He took his hand off her pulse. He didn’t want to think about why it had been so hard.

“For the record,” he said, loudly, to the hair in general, “I’m doing this under protest. I want it on the record. I’m doing this so you don’t let Victoria do two, and so Izzy doesn’t ‘help,’ and that’s it. I want it noted, I’m not doing this because I—”

The door opened.

It didn’t swing open. It flew open, all the way, hard enough to bounce off the doorstop, and Izzy stood in the doorway in the same hoodie, a different pair of cutoffs and one sock, scrolling her phone.

“Artie, can I borrow your charger, mine’s fried, the cord’s all bent and it only works if I hold it like—”

She looked up.

Max couldn’t see her. He was waist-deep in the hair at the bottom of Artemis’s armpit, half behind a matted clump of purple. But he could see a slice of the door, and her bare foot, and he heard her stop talking. He heard her look. There was a long, specific silence, the silence of a girl taking in a scene and filing it carefully away for later use.

“Oh,” Izzy said. “Four.”

Nobody said anything.

“Bold,” said Izzy.

She crossed the room without hurrying, unplugged Artemis’s charger from the wall next to the nightstand, and wound the cord around her hand. On the way out, she paused in the doorway.

“Skipping two? Mom’s gonna be so hurt,” she said, and left.

She didn’t close the door.

“Izzy,” Artemis yelled. “Door!”

A pause. Then, from halfway down the hall, Izzy’s voice: “You’ve got, like, two hands!”

Artemis didn’t move. She lay there with her arm locked over her head and her face going dark red from the collarbone up, and Max realized she wasn’t going to move, because she’d said she wouldn’t. Not even to shut the door. She’d said the arm stayed up.

Downstairs, faint and offended, Victoria’s voice floated up the stairwell: “Isabella! What did you take? Is that the good charger?”

The door to Izzy’s room slammed. Music started.

Artemis let out a long breath through her nose. Her whole side rose and fell with it, and the hair swayed around Max’s chest, and a fresh wave of heat came off the skin.

“Sorry,” she said quietly. “About her.”

She picked the list up off her stomach and the pencil off the nightstand, arm still locked over her head, and ticked four. Then the pencil drifted down one line and hovered.

“I’m counting five,” she said, a little hoarse. “I’m sorry, but look at me. Look at this room. I’m a swamp.” She ticked it.

Max didn’t say anything. His face was burning hotter than the armpit. He thought about that silence in the doorway. He thought about how it was going to come out later, in the kitchen, or in a text, or in another folder he hadn’t seen yet. he went in on his own. i saw.

So he did the only thing he could think of. He doubled down.

“I hate this,” he said.

“Okay.”

“No. Listen to me. I hate this. I want you to really hear it. I hate the smell. It smells like a bus station. It smells like a gym bag somebody left in a car. I hate the hair. It’s disgusting. I’m covered in—I don’t even know what I’m covered in, Artie, I’m covered in it, it’s in my hair. I hate that I’m in here, and I hate that you think I want to be in here, and I hate that Izzy just saw me in here, and I hate that you keep saying ‘I hear you’ like it means anything, because it doesn’t, because you just hear the folder, you hear what she wrote, you don’t hear—”

He was waving his arms. He’d started waving them somewhere around bus station, and the hair kept catching them, slick and springy, so it was more like flailing. He shoved a clump of purple out of his face and kept going.

“—so I want it on the record, okay, I want it on the record, I hate this, I hate it, I’ve hated every single second of it—”

“Okay,” said Artemis. Her voice was very soft. “Okay, babe. Then let’s get you out.”

Her right hand came down. He saw the shadow of it first, moving across the hair. Then the fingers themselves, enormous and careful, sliding into the edge of the hollow, palm up, the way she’d been offering it all day. They stopped a few inches away from him and waited. Right there. All he had to do was walk over and climb in.

He didn’t.

He didn’t decide not to. He just didn’t. He was still talking, for another second or two, something about every single second, and then his mouth just sort of ran out. His arms came down. He realized that at some point in the last minute, he’d sat down. He was sitting in the crease at the bottom of her armpit, with his back against the hot wall of her ribs and the hair closed up around his shoulders like a blanket, and one of his hands had a fistful of it. He was holding on.

Her pulse was going against his spine. Slow and heavy. In, out.

The hand didn’t move closer. It just waited.

He didn’t move toward it.

Above him, the arm didn’t move, either. Nothing in the room moved, except the fan. Then, very slowly, the hillside of Artemis’s chest rose and fell once, and he heard her breathe out through her nose, and he knew.

She’d noticed.

And he’d noticed her noticing, and that was worse, because now there were two of them who knew, and only one of them had wanted it to happen, and he wasn’t even sure anymore which one that was.

Her eyes went to the phone. He saw it happen through a gap in the hair: a quick flick of green, down to the dark rectangle lying face-down next to her hip, and then back. Her thumb moved toward it on the comforter, and stopped. She didn’t pick it up. She didn’t say anything that sounded like a word. She just looked back at him.

“Hey,” she said.

He let go of the hair. He didn’t get up.

“I’m not gonna say anything,” Artemis said. “Okay? I’m not gonna tell Izzy. Not this part. You don’t have to come out.” She paused. Her fingers, still waiting at the edge of the hollow, curled up a little at the tips, like she wanted to touch him and had decided not to. “You can stay a minute. If you want. And if you don’t, my hand’s right here.”

It was kind. She meant every word of it. That was the worst part. If she’d laughed, he could’ve hated her. If she’d said see, I told you or picked up the phone and screenshotted the moment for the folder, he could have hated her for a week, easy, with energy to spare. But she didn’t. She just lay there in a ninety-eight-degree room with her arm cramping over her head and her hand open beside him, waiting, and smelled like the inside of a gym bag, and was nice to him.

He’d told her he hated it something like eleven times. He’d counted.

His body hadn’t said it once.

Max sat in the dark at the bottom of the hollow, breathing her in, and didn’t take the hand.