my lover is a pearl. our bed is a shell.

on defending the body, bacterial puberty, and falling in love with a woman.

skin boils to silver in this heat. bubbling softly, women’s pores produce shining pebbles and stones. chrome pours out and onto their sticky faces. customers toss coins and french bonjour’s to one another over the smell of food, an oppressive force that presses into any and all empty real estate between our bodies. i wander through the breathing mass as i am thrown, table to table. everything– the tapestries hanging from the glass ceiling, especially– twinkles with sweat. the convention hall is at capacity.

the mass spits me out into a seller’s booth outside. i am, then, hip deep in pearls: sleek. smooth. licorice black. my head is full of painful bricks. i am sixteen.

next to the vendor and her cash box, a replica of an oyster sits patiently. the woman– the owner of this toy oyster, i assume– bats her eyelashes. i take note of many things: the glint of her eye in the south pacific sun– the beauty mark above her lip– the spit, dripping from her mouth and down her v-neck. as for the oyster, i want to coax that plastic animal open to peer inside its acrylic guts. i am too shy to ask, so i purchase a bracelet for 10 USD instead.

how does an oyster form a pearl? bacterial defense.

each animal has the capacity to protect itself against irritants, germs and bad feelings. oysters do so with the same biomaterial as their shell; encasing the particle, the formation hardens into what humans call a pearl. i wonder what teaches a mollusk how to care for itself– to construct beauty from infection. what of a human?

i want to take the woman by the arm to discuss but, just as fast as we arrived, our teachers call us to the hot belly of our tour bus. i decide that i will answer my own questions on our scheduled visit to the pearl farm in three days’ time. i don’t know how to speak french, anyway.

full of indigenous choir students and our teachers, the vehicle coughs, gasps, and sputters to life. as we dip into potholes, i thumb the chips in my bracelet’s sea-gems. my stomach twists and, to distract myself from my fatigue, i think of my current boyfriend back at home in Hawaiʻi– a lump of burlap, sand, and bone.

i am a virgin where it counts. two weeks before our trip to Tahiti, i saw his penis for the first time. i even held it in my mouth once. i remember flitting to school the next day, whisking my friend Koby into a corner to whisper about the whole ordeal. i made certain to pepper in details like blowjob and it-was-fine-but-kind-of-salty while leaving out iterations of my disgust. before seeing what was under his pants, i had imagined boys like ken dolls. i felt red— betrayed— by that sorrowful, short lump and, ever since i saw it, a question had played on a loop: is this how it’s supposed to feel?

Koby didn’t need to know that part.

i exist in tandem with the passing mountains. Chet Baker’s i get along without you very well (except when) plays in my earbuds. a heat settles into my bones, forcing me to sleep. noticing my fatigue, my teacher– a sturdy woman with four children at home– urges me to hold down a nyquil-tylenol-ginger mixture. she threw the cocktail together the night previous, when we realized i had developed a low-grade fever.

“if you want to join your friends in a few days, you’re going to have to take your medicine,” she reminds me.

i want to tell her the truth of it all: that i am in the thick of bacterial defense– that going about the trip like normal will make the disease worse– that, if i suppress my body temperature at this stage, i might incite fire. i know what made me sick, and i cannot ignore my belly’s nacre and conchiolin and aragonite. advil only masks. it only numbs.

the liquid tastes bitter and gritty against my tongue, just like Mark did. i gag.

when it happened, i feigned bodily understanding. he was, of course, a boy and i, a girl. i knew what i was supposed to feel– what Koby must have felt. books had told me, and movies too. but– under those stars– i fell outside of myself. ignoring what he planted in my throat, i hoped it would not manifest as a carnivorous vine.

stray dogs bark on the street, bringing me back to my disease. in between shallow breaths, i repeat that night’s diary entry:

i did not look too hard at his boner because it felt contagious. i will accept his bacteria even though i don’t like the taste. i will swallow because he expects it and because i expect to like it, too. i am missing something, but i will let it fester. and, even though im sure of myself in this festering, i’m still scared. scared like when i was a little kid after i swallowed a watermelon seed. i think there is a secret i am going to find out, someday. soon. i don’t know where or what it is, but i will know it when i see it.

refocusing my attention toward the trees outside of the bus window, my uvula tickles. the bracelet jangles in my hand.

“my mouth feels full of fish bones. i am very tired,” i say to no one in particular.

i meet her when i am 24.

“you've been to Tahiti?” she asks me, wide eyed.

“it was for this international field trip. we ended up on Raiatea,” i sigh. “they wanted a Hawaiian choir to sing for the mayor, or something”

“i heard there are really nice pearls over there”

“yeah”

“did you go to one of those farms?”

“i got really sick about half way into the trip— like 104 fever sick,” i pause. “the day everyone went, i spent the whole time in a rent-a-car. it was the only AC we could find.”

a silence spreads and oozes between us as i remember the disappointment. i want to explain that missing the pearl farm represented an ultimate loss; where i felt my peers gained an integral truth to becoming an adults, i seemed to be left behind. something catches in my throat, but it is not tears.

“in Georgia–” she says, bringing me back to earth. “we don’t have many pearls but we have lots of peaches. i've always wanted a pearl necklace, though”

her eyes crumble against me like autumn leaves. the golden hour balances against her skin, the color of dark, gentle clay. she laughs in jazz. trumpets sound. then, double bass. the flute carries us into an embrace– our hands flexing together. i like the way she hints.

i visit New York in time for the holiday season, pushing past bodies of people in long coats and mittens. i ignore tinsel, nod at street solicitors, and stumble into the station, barely making the 4 train. i am to visit all available bead shops in the city.

when i arrive at the skinny, winding store, a woman stands at guard in front of the macabre display of brass and plastic. she leans against the case, expectant. i tell her that i am stringing together a necklace made of sleek, chip-less pearls; hanging from the organic beads are 4 charms: a rooster, peach, star, and deer.

“i’m looking for an evil eye to complete it,” i tell her, evaluating the charms behind the glass.

“what’s the occasion?” she asks.

“it’s a gift for my girlfriend”

she opens the case without another question. i think of my stud at home, dog-earing pages with her legs spread. i feel a rumbling behind my brow bone and check the insides of my ears. grass grows in my eardrums, where there used to be holes. i thumb the sides of my cheeks with my tongue: vines.

the first time she touches me, i invite her under my shirt. i want her to imagine my spit trickling down my collar. i want her to feel what she cannot see. i want her to let me peer into her, like a new-age Alice– like an oracle.

round beneath her palms, i vow to be any shape she wishes; her breath quickens against my neck. an earthen smoke forms between us and we inhale the blushing dirt. under her boxers, i know the smallest part of her flutters like an eyelash.

i move through her and a clear ocean laps at my fingertips. a swaying hut creaks 20 feet above her sandbar. my teenage laugh echoes from her cunt to my spit– a puzzle piece in that mystery of puberty– an answer to my want brought to a silver heat. between bulging, wet tongues, i see it: a pearl spinning in slick, sticky oil.

if i pull back, she follows. i feel those parts, barren against my mouth, as if her hairlessness were my own. i become of her. when i have opened her twice, or three times, i imagine that the path i charted leads to a room of stone and dirt and bioluminescent amoebas.

there is not a question left on my lips; only the nuclei of her germs, a familiarity of her nacre, and a secret made not-secret linger in the space between us. i let her harden around my hands– a shield for the world beyond the confines of this room. our sheets, a shrine– our bed, a shell.