The pretty ones are always trouble. That's what my best pal Ed always said. I reckoned it was because he could never get a girl was even close to pretty, not even if he begged.
And I got Alicia.
She was the prettiest girl I'd ever kissed. Sounds soft when I say it out loud, but it was so. And not just kissing. She was running way ahead of me. Left notes in my pockets, dirty stuff, saying how she liked my smell and the taste of my tongue in her mouth and my fingers wet inside her. And she wrote 'I want to fuck you' at the end of every note, and little smiley faces in the o's.
We almost got caught once, my hand down her pants and my mam knocking at my bedroom door, asking if I fancied a hot drink. We laughed about that then, Alicia's hand over her mouth so my mam wouldn't hear. But it seemed there was no place we could go, you know, not without there was a chance we'd be caught.
That was when Alicia suggested it. At first I thought she was just goofing around. On the third day that she said it, I knew she was serious. She had it all figured out, too.
"They got a bed nobody's using," she said. "That's all we're after. And we could clean up afterwards and nobody'd ever know."
Then she pressed against me, and licked my lips and laughed like it was all just a game. And she put her pants in my pocket that day. I swear she did. I found them when I got home.
Alicia was meaning the house across from us. The people there were away. They'd left a key with my mam, just so we could check on things. It would be easy just taking the key. So I took it.
We did it in every bed in the house. Not all in the one night. We took to going there after dark, when all the curtains in the street were closed. We did it on the stairs once. Alicia was crazy as well as pretty.
I told Ed. Not about the where, but that we'd done it.
He shook his head and said there'd be trouble.
Then came the last night. The people of the house were back the next day. My mam got a postcard of Paris at night saying when they would be home. We did it three times that night. And afterwards Alicia said she wanted a souvenir, like this was her holiday too.
We could take something, she said. Something small that would never be missed. Three times in the one night. I'd have burned the place down if she'd asked me.
She found a necklace in a wooden box, all sparkly even in the streetlight yellow of the room. She tried it on and asked me what I thought. We'd just fucked three times, and Alicia was naked, kneeling before me with nothing but a necklace on, and it glinted in the light.
I meant to go back after I walked her home. To tidy up, so's nobody would know. But then I saw Ed. I wanted to tell him. Not all the details, but the bit about three times. I don't think he believed me. Hell I almost didn't believe it myself. We shared a cigarette, Ed and me, and when I handed it back he said he could smell her where my fingers had held it.
The police came the next day, knocking at our door. They wanted to know about a necklace was took from the house across from us. They'd found one of Alicia's notes to me, in one of the unmade beds, not a dirty one, just something about how she loved me, true and forever. And smiley faces in all the o's, like before. There was no name on the note, just mine.
I told everyone I took the necklace. I loved her and told them I took it. And that brought a whole heap of trouble, and trouble like that don't ever go away. I could see people looking at me different. I remember Alicia said we maybe shouldn't see each other till things quieted down some, and I agreed. And when I did see her again Alicia was with someone else, kissing him the way she once kissed me.
Now I think maybe Ed was right about the pretty ones.
322 Review publishes provocative emerging and established artists. Conceived and operated by current and former Rowan University graduate students of the Master of Arts in Writing Program, 322 Review is aggressively seeking the best fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and mixed media works of visual art.
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