El Paso native Matthew David Perez's “Exposures” is a wonderfully crafted story that tells the innocence and dangers of youth. Preadolescent twins, Ophelia and Delia, find themselves in uncharted territory as they begin to discover a life that’s more than mere polaroids and child-like pleasures. Boys, alcohol, and skinny-dipping. The girls are puzzled yet confounded by this, as well as their friend, Larkin’s behavior. She doesn’t seem to mind the risks or dangers—until she’s in trouble and her friends have to save her. But can they do it?
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"Exposures"
They left behind packs of chewing gum of different flavors, empty plastic bottles of Sunny Delight, a jelly bean succulent they named Harold, dried makeup casings with just the last possible bits scraped out with a fingernail, two toothbrushes, a couple of tampons still in wrappers, a picture of their mother and father on their wedding day—her mother’s belly swollen and ready to pop—a polka dot umbrella, some dolls, two diaries, and endless mountains of clothes and shoes.
And then there were the things they hid from each other.
Delia loved taking pictures with a Polaroid she stole from a neighbor’s yard sale. The stacks of instant photographs, many blurry or with a thumb in the corner, weren’t found until many years after their deaths, and even then they were stored and forgotten. Behind the blurs and thumbs were the things Delia wanted to remember: blooming flowers, rain rivulets streaking down a windowpane, heavy vanilla-colored cream pouring from a glass bottle into a big bowl of flour, sugar, and egg yolks. No two photographs contained the same subject, Delia made sure.
Ophelia, meanwhile, loved green things. She collected anything green: a pencil the teacher left on her desk, a ring from a twenty-five cent dispenser at the grocery store, a rock with moss all over. Once, she found the shiny green feather from the neck of a pigeon in the park, and she wore it in her hair for days until the teacher made her throw it in the garbage. Later, when no one was looking, she nabbed it from the trash and snuck it home where she stowed it in a secret box of green bric-à-brac, lost for years like Delia’s photographs.
Ophelia was born ten minutes before Delia, and considered herself the wiser for it.
“Which dress should I wear?” Delia would ask.
“Let me see.” Ophelia said. She held one up to her neck, smoothing it over her shoulders and knees, and then repeated with the other. “The first one.”
“Why?”
“It’s prettier.”
“It’s also yours.”
“I know. Why do you think I picked it?”
Next would come the shoes.
“It’s not like we can really tell what’s mine and what’s yours anymore.”
“I know,” Delia said, clicking her heels together. “What about these? They have bows on them.”
“I like them. They say, ‘Look at me,’ but not, ‘Look at me.’”
A photo: looking down, at a pair of shiny, black dress shoes, with crisp, white bows across the throat line.
They lived in large house in the old part of town, where everyone had a nice lawn and a dog but no one tried to outdo anyone else. Their dog was a white Husky named Fido, and their mother claimed she invented the name. Regardless of the nomenclature, they loved that dog. They felt safe living with him. He kept watch of the neighborhood from the windows on both levels of the house, but he never barked. His eyes and ears followed the birds into their nests in a magnolia across the street, and he cocked his head at their willow-willows.
They watched him watching the birds, and summer afternoons drifted endlessly this way. At the funeral he lay by their matching closed caskets, his gaze fixed on a pair of identical cartoon birds, drawn into the elaborate memorial of colorful lilies. Child-things, meant to disarm those in attendance and hammer home the tragedy of these lost young lives. As mourners filed past the front row to give their condolences, Fido stayed in the aisle next to their wailing mother, watching the still birds.
A photo: a sleeping albino Husky, the sun filtering through a window and checkering across his clean, white fur.
A week earlier, the girls left church with their parents on a dry, warm morning. They wore matching sun dresses—Delia’s was blue, Ophelia’s green—and while the parents from all the different families talked about this and that. Larkin Mumpsin found the twins in a corner of the church courtyard, by themselves except for a statue of Saint Matthew reading down to them from an open book. Ophelia held out her finger for a green caterpillar crawling on the saint’s big toe while Delia framed the scene through her viewfinder of fingers and thumbs. Larkin ran over to them, almost knocking over the Lord’s birdbath in the courtyard sanctuary.
“What are you up to?” Larkin demanded, speaking to both of them as one.
“Nothing,” replied Delia.
“Looking at bugs,” Ophelia added.
“Bugs? Gross. I hate bugs.”
“This one’s cute,” said Ophelia, the caterpillar inching along her finger.
“Bugs aren’t cute. Maybe when we were five.”
“Well I like them. Look, it has little hairs all over.”
“Blegh! Come on,” Larkin said, “Let’s do something fun.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, something fun.”
They looked at her, Delia still framing, Ophelia letting the caterpillar crawl farther up her wrist, both waiting for Larkin to speak. A few chickadees splashed in the clear, shallow water of the Lord’s birdbath, picking at the inside of their wings with their little beaks.
“We could go to the pond?”
The two sets of identical eyes met one another before Delia spoke for her sister.
“We’re not supposed to go there without our parents.”
“They don’t have to know.”
“Would it be long?” Ophelia asked.
“No. We’d be back before dark.”
“We’re not supposed to,” Delia repeated.
“‘Supposed to.’ What are we, five?”
“No. I’m not five. Delia is maybe.”
Chick-a-dee-dee-dee. Splash-splash-splash.
“I have to go home,” Delia finally said.
“She has to get her cam-er-ah.”
“Fine. Meet me at the tracks. Okay?”
“Okay.”
A photo: a mother, standing at her doorway, leaning on the frame, her legs hugging each other. She appears to be waving.
The twins arrived later, Delia with her Polaroid hanging by a thin leather strap around her neck. They walked side by side from their house to the tracks, about twenty minutes at a quick pace. At home, they changed into cowboy boots but left their church dresses on, and they told their parents they were meeting a friend for a couple of hours, a harmless thing to say.
The road to the tracks went through a part of town even older than their own neighborhood, but no one lived there. It used to be the site of a limestone quarry, but the limestone was gone and so were the quarrymen who lived around there in one or two bedroom shacks and wheel-less trailers.
The quarry and the tracks running to it were abandoned, but the ghost town of shacks and trailers remained, and so when the kids in town said, “Meet me at the tracks,” everyone knew what that meant. This is where they found Larkin, on her hands and knees, looking into the darkness under a dilapidated trailer raised on cinderblocks.
“What are you doing?” they asked. Larkin jumped and hit her head on the bottom of the trailer.
“Nothing,” she said, rubbing her head.
“What’s under there?”
“A cat.”
The three of them knelt and peered under the trailer at the scrawny, muddy thing staring back at them with big, round eyes.
“So? It’s a cat,” said Ophelia. Larkin reached to the cat, and it hissed. “What are you trying to do?”
“Play with it some more. We were playing before you got here.”
“You were playing with the cat?”
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t look like it wants to play.”
“Well, I was having fun.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. Come on. Let’s go to the pond.”
Larkin hit her head again shimmying out, and when all three started in the direction of the pond, a flash of burnt-orange streaked from under the trailer and into some bushes on the other side of the road.
“What are we going to do at the pond?” Delia asked.
“My friends are there.”
“Who are your friends?”
“They go to Cathedral.”
“They’re in high school?”
“Yeah, they’re really cool.”
A photo: a burnt-orange nub, tied with wire to a railroad track. Next to it: a large piece of glass and a rag, maybe torn from a shirt. Everything caked in blood.
The pond was a small spot of water collected from the runoff of a few nearby canals that the rural areas on the edge of town used to irrigate crops. Although every parent in town knew about the pond, only the kids used it. They returned home smelling of the thin film of green that covered the entire surface of the water, and the girls picked out leaves and little sticks out of their hair for days.
A steep slope of dirt, trees, and boulders surrounded the banks. Only one flat rock came close the edge of the water, and it served as the pond’s diving board. There, three tall, firm teenage boys, naked except for white underwear, waited for Larkin and the twins. They rested their hands on their barn door backs and dared the others to jump. Larkin stumbled toward them through the overgrowth, Delia and Ophelia behind them.
“Hey,” the blonde one called, when he spotted them.
“Hi,” Larkin said.
“Hi there, girls,” said another one, with brown hair.
The twins nodded and smiled.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t you swimming?” Larkin asked.
“Chris is too scared.”
“No way, Ian’s the one who’s scared.”
“Actually, we were just waiting for you all to get here.”
“Well we’re here.”
“So, who’s first?”
“I’ll do it,” Larkin said. She was tall for her age, tall for a girl. She looked at the boys at their eye level, and her legs seemed to go for miles. Her clumsiness, and her perpetually tangled blonde hair, were not attractive in the conventional sense. But the fact that she was the first to pull her dress over her head, her pink panties down her curvy rear, and dive into the pond was what first drew the boys to her. It helped that she had already developed round, healthy breasts far beyond the limits of a training bra. While theirs were beige or pastel and wide under the arms, Larkin’s was neon green, held together with thin straps, drawing attention to her chest. When she flopped in the water, the boys jumped in after her.
“Come on,” they called out to Delia and Ophelia. “It’s nice and warm!”
They stayed on the flat rock. Ophelia took off her shoes and dipped her bare feet in the water.
A photo: teenagers, boys and a girl, swimming in a pond. Another girl sits alone on a rock, looking at the boys.
All day the boys tried to get them in the pond, and all day they refused. Larkin, too, tried to show them how much fun she was having. The boys picked her up from behind and tossed her screaming into the deeper water, where she would surface, adjusting her bra and gasping for air through deep laughs.
When the sun lowered behind the tops of the trees and sieved through in long rays, the boys exclaimed, “Hey, we almost forgot!”
The three exited the pond, and the girls could not keep their eyes off what the water revealed in their white underwear. They walked a ways into the trees and returned with six cans of cheap beer.
“No way,” Delia said.
“Come on, a little won’t hurt.”
Larkin pulled herself out of the water and skipped to the boy’s outstretched arm holding the beer. Delia stood between them.
“We have to go.”
Then she heard the crisp sound of a beer tab opening, and looked to see Ophelia sipping from the can. She remembered her sister opening toys on Christmas, while their parents filmed every smile, every tear of wrapping paper, with an oversized camera. She remembered Ophelia’s first baby tooth falling out days before her own. Everything since the beginning of time, she remembered.
She smacked the beer out of her hand, and the boys tried to calm them down. Eventually Delia dragged her sister by the arm back down the path leading to the pond, and the boys went back to drinking in the thicket of trees. While the sisters argued and pushed at one another, they heard Larkin call from the pond, “Help me! Oh, somebody help me! I think I am drowning!”
“What is she doing?” Ophelia asked.
“She’s just playing around.” Delia said
“What if she isn’t?” They heard it again. “Why aren’t the boys helping her?”
“Because she’s messing with us.”
“She could be in real trouble. We should do something.”
“You’ve done enough today already.”
The billowing of trees.
“Come on.”
When they arrived at the pond again, Larkin’s head bobbed in the water while her arms waved.
“Oh, please, help me!”
Ophelia lay belly-down on the flat rock and reached out to Larkin. They held hands but Larkin stayed in the water.
“What are you doing?” Ophelia said.
“Getting you in the water! It took drastic measures!”
She pulled, but Ophelia clutched onto the rock.
“Come on, get in!”
Overpowered by the length of her body and the strength of the young girl, Ophelia fell. On the way down, her forehead collided with Larkin’s nose, and the water around them was tinted red.
Delia screamed and ran to her sister. Ophelia clawed wildly, her eyes breaking the surface, and her mouth gulping down water. As the twins held hands one last time, Ophelia pulled her sister into the pond with her, and the twins who never learned how to swim drifted into the darkness.
A photo: two sleeping babies, newborns, wearing matching pink hats. One wrapped in a green blanket, the other in white.
---Matthew David Perez
Desiree Delgado is an English student at New Mexico State University. A Crimson Scholar, Blogspot blogger, and fiction editor for DiN Magazine, she aspires to become a successful Children's novel/YA fiction writer. She is in the process of writing her first sci-fi novel and blogging her next short story. She lives in Southwestern Texas.
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