Page 84 of No Sweeter Poison

“Hurry up.” She drops it in my hand and snatches a water bottle from a spinning display. “It’s freaking me out. Do you think it has fingernails yet?”

I try not to let my impatience show as I take the pill. It gets lodged halfway down my throat and I finish half the water bottle in several big gulps. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m being ridiculous? What about you and my brother? No self-control, it’s disgusting.”

“Lettie, maybe one day when you’re older, you’ll feel differently.”

She flinches as if struck. I have no idea what triggers such a rapid shift in behavior but she snatches the water bottle back from me and closes the top. “Don’t infantilize me. I know what sex is and I know you and my brother have been fucking since you laid eyes on each other. What grosses me out is doing it without a condom, as if either of you two idiots can afford getting knocked up right now.”

My cheeks heat. I’m not sure what to say as she turns around and heads up front to the register. She pays for the ruined box and half-finished water bottle before discarding both in a nearby trash can. I press my palms against my cheeks in the hopes of cooling down as I follow her out of the pharmacy.

We meet outside and Beni is down the block, parked outside a tall stone building, wedged between two lampposts. The August heat clings to my skin and everything sticks now that we’ve left the pharmacy’s cool, air-conditioned oasis.

Neither of us knows what to say to each other. I almost expect her to head for the car when she says, “I’m too young to be an aunt.”

I consider my words carefully. “I think you’re too young, period.”

She purses her lips. “Just because you’re a few years older, doesn’t mean anything. We live very different lives. I was mastering poisons and building weapons from scratch when you were kissing boys at high school prom. Be realistic.”

“I don’t mean that way,” I tell her. “I think you grew up sooner than you were supposed to. Mentally, you’re much older but emotionally, you haven’t caught up yet.”

“You sound ridiculous.”

“What’s bothering you more? The fact that I had to buy a morning after pill or why?”

Lettie, for all her bravado and mastered inscrutability, is still only eighteen. Because she’s so good at carrying herself so well it’s almost impossible to remember how young she really is. Until that youth reveals itself in rare situations such as this.

“I think it’s repulsive what the two of you do together.” She shivers. “Getting naked in front of another person…I cannot imagine anything worse.”

“Maybe you have a fear of intimacy.”

“Do you have any idea how many germs are in a person’s mouth?”

I can’t help it when I laugh. “Trust me, Lettie. No one’s thinking about germs when they’re kissing each other.”

She scrunches her nose, hesitant to take my word for it. Beni finally notices us standing outside of the pharmacy and moves to the car door. I hold up a hand, gesturing for him to wait, and loop my arm through Lettie’s.

“Come. Let’s take a walk.”

“Why?”

“Because I have a feeling your brothers never gave you a proper talk about the birds and the bees.”

Lettie shuffles uncomfortably and as we make our way up the hill, she turns to me. “How can you stand to be touched by someone that way?”

“Do you not like being touched?”

She hesitates before answering. “I don’t mind when my family hugs me. Or you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my friend and my family loves me. It doesn’t bother. But strangers?” she shakes her head. “People have to get close so that the touch doesn’t bother. And I don’t like people getting close. Not when they either end up dead or leaving.”

Something tells me Lettie’s aversion to sex doesn’t have much to do with the act of sex at all but rather the intimacy associated with it and her intimacy problems can easily be traced back to her family. I imagine their father wasn’t the only loved one who was brutally murdered—perhaps there were others. Other people whom Lettie loved and let close just to be disappointed when she lost them all over again. Their mother isn’t around either which means there probably wasn’t anyone else to talk to about this. At least I had Karina as I got older.

Who does Lettie have?

“Not everyone ends up dying or leaving, Lettie. You know that right?”