Purple Ink
by Coco Hull
When I was eight years old, my family went on Christmas vacation at Bolongo Bay Resort, a cluster of pastel-colored beachside buildings on the island of St. Thomas. It was gloriously outdated, still running on the fumes of its 1980s splendor. Each night on my rollaway cot, with my parents in one queen bed and my two older brothers in the other, I looked at the crumbling popcorn ceiling before falling asleep. Back then, I often found myself wishing to be one of my brothers, unabashedly sprawled out in boxers on the expanse of queen-sized sheets.
My mom and I lounged on the beach while my dad and brothers snorkeled in the crescent shaped bay sprawling in front of us. My dad had brought Easy Cheese because if you sprayed it in the water while snorkeling, fish would come out to eat it. My mom flipped through an issue of People magazine she bought at the airport. The cover said, “Hugh Jackman: Sexiest Man Alive!”
I thought Hugh Jackman’s angular face kind of looked like that of a lizard. His smirk made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t quite place why. What did Hugh Jackman ever do to me? I looked away from him, away from my mom’s beach chair, and off to my left. A couple in their thirties or so lounged a few chairs away. Maybe they were in their forties? I could never quite place the age of adults. In my mind, all adults were vaguely 38 or 42. Perhaps because that’s how old my parents were.
The woman—one half of the ambiguously 38-year-old-couple—wore a purple bikini, which caught my eye. She had tanned skin and dark, long hair, which made my eyes linger. My family was a gaggle of blondes; every year our Christmas card looked like a ridiculous J. Crew ad. If we were the little waddling duck statues in Boston Common, this woman was a panther. We were all tall with awkwardly long limbs. Looking at her, I felt suddenly very aware of my spindly, thin legs.
She was one of those Italian sculptures on the posters of Mr. Lee’s history classroom. Her curves were ancient in a way that felt sacred and yet new, like a warm spring day. I wondered if she knew how beautiful she was. I wondered if her husband knew how beautiful she was. She sat up on her beach chair, and her tan, supple stomach hung over her bikini bottoms in a series of soft rolls.
An attack of cold water shook me out of my quiet observing. Frank, my biggest brother, was shaking the water out of his hair on to me. I screeched.
“Come on, Nina. It’s your turn,” he said, holding up the can of Easy Cheese. I immediately sat up. My brothers rarely invited me to join them, and I had learned long ago that asking a silly confirming question like, really? I can come? would annoy them, and my invitation to the big kids’ fun would be swiftly rescinded. I grabbed my snorkel and goggles and flippers and bounded after them.
In the water, I kicked hard. My lungs started to burn, but I implored myself to focus. I had to keep up with Frank and Tommy, who, of course, glided through the water with what seemed to be little effort. I hated my mom for making me do swim league that summer, but I said a silent prayer of thanks to God for making my mom so water safety-conscious, because I was able to stay just behind their flippers.
Tommy wielded the Easy Cheese, no doubt bestowed onto him by Frank. We approached a cluster of coral, and Tommy sprayed a long line of orange goo into the water. Fish came darting out to snack. They were yellow and blue and black with specks of red and white. The sound of a muffled giggle came out of my snorkel. Tommy turned towards me. I gave him a thumbs up.
Tommy looked to Frank. As if speaking a secret language, they nodded and swam towards me. Quickly. I didn’t need to see their faces guarded by the snorkeling gear to know the expressions of evil they bore. I was not invited on this adventure because of my newly improved swimming skills nor my desired presence. Frank pinned my arms behind my back. Tommy pulled the collar of my swim shirt away from my neck and sprayed the rest of the Easy Cheese can onto my chest and midriff. I thrashed. I screamed. Fish darted towards me. Tommy sprayed the cheese over my goggles. All I could see was orange. As Frank released me from his grip, hundreds of fish snacked on me like vultures attacking roadkill. I thrashed, swatting them away from my face. I ripped my swim shirt off my scrawny body: not an easy task while treading water. I felt weak and small and bony. Nothing like the woman from the beach. She probably would have floated beautifully in the water, her tan skin made gold by the sun, and let the fish kiss her like an ancient queen. I felt far from regal. My snorkel set came off with my swim shirt and I came up for air, gasping. Fish still nipped at my skin.
I threw my cheese covered gear at my roaring brothers and swam back to shore.
#
When my parents went out for dinner that night, they told us to order room service. I knew better than to ask them to bring me along, away from my cheese-wielding brothers. Tattlers do not belong in Frank and Tommy’s good graces. My brothers took the little bottles from the mini fridge and put them in Frank’s navy-blue backpack. I sat up from my cot, where I was reading a book from the Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo series. Katie was a red-headed girl cursed, or perhaps blessed, by a magical wind that would put her in the bodies of other people.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“None of your concern, little Nina,” Tommy said in a singsong voice.
“You know those cost money. Mom and Dad will see on the final bill.”
“You gonna go tattle?”
“No,” I said. I laid back down on the cot and stared at the ceiling fan. The cold air felt nice on my sunburnt face.
“Dibs on Jane from Missouri,” Tommy said to Frank.
“Dibs goes out the window if she wants me,” Frank snorted.
“What if she wants to be shared?” Tommy said. Frank laughed.
They opened the door to leave and didn’t say bye. It shut with a click and their fading laughter was replaced by the hum of the fan. What did they mean, be shared? I knew there were things I was too young to know. Sometimes when I walked into the kitchen, my parents would stop talking and give me the same smile they gave Grandpa when he asked if we had gotten all the boys out of Vietnam.
I sat on the scratchy, tan carpet with my diary and the pens I had gotten in my stocking that year. I held them in my hands, surveying each color, and set down the ones I didn’t want. Eventually, only the purple pen was suspended between my fingers. It was the same dark, deep purple as the bikini of that woman from the beach. I thought about her again and felt warm. Safe. I uncapped the purple pen and drew her. First, I drew her long hair, as if she was a mermaid. I drew her face, her full lips. I felt something I wasn’t quite sure I’d ever felt before. It made me wiggle my legs, tucked underneath me. I added a speech bubble above her head.
Do you like my body?
I added a figure next to her. Me. Except now my hair wasn’t blonde, it was purple, and instead of a cot, we laid together on a king-sized cloud. I added another speech bubble above my head.
Yes.
I continued drawing until I realized I was drawing both of us naked. The moment a tangle of purple breasts and hands stared back at me, I put the pen down. I wasn’t supposed to draw breasts.
Girls don’t draw breasts.
Girls don’t think about breasts.
Girls don’t get warm feelings between their legs about breasts, right?
I ripped the page out of my diary, folded it up, and buried it in the trash can under Tommy’s empty Doritos bag.
#
The sun was setting, warming my crispy skin as I sat on one of the small chairs of our balcony, my toes not quite touching the ground. I was small. The shortest not only of my entire grade at Cedarwood Elementary, but of second, the one below me, too. I wondered if I would ever grow to be tall like my brothers. Maybe one day I’d grow to be seven feet tall, and they would fear me, never again to attack me with Easy Cheese.
I smiled into the sun with my eyes closed. My mom had taken me to the spa for pedicures and let me pick out a matching polish for the both of us. I chose a sparkly gold color. I could tell my mom didn’t really like it. When I presented it to her, she looked to the manicurist, and they both smirked. It was like an inside joke that my color was ugly. But she didn’t say anything, and we both got sparkly gold toenails.
“What the hell is this?” my dad said from inside the hotel room.
“Language!” my mom said from the desk chair, where she was meticulously applying eyeshadow to her lids. I turned.
My heart sank. In my dad’s hands was a piece of paper. Yellow paper. The yellow of my notebook. From my perch on the balcony, I could see the purple of my drawing.
His eyes locked with mine as he walked over to my mom and dropped the drawing among the pile of tubes and compacts. As if to tell her, here, this is your problem to deal with.
My dad stood from where he was leaned over my mom’s shoulders.
“Tom. Frank. Let’s go. You’re gonna come enjoy a beer with your old man,” my dad said.
“Yes!” Tommy exclaimed. Him and Frank high fived. Sometimes I felt like men were a different species all together.
My mom turned towards me in the desk chair. She had a white hotel towel wrapped around her body. Another one held her hair in a twist above her head.
Girls don’t draw breasts.
Girls don’t think about breasts.
Girls definitely don’t get warm feelings between their legs about breasts.
What had I done?
“Nina, come here, please,” she said, her voice laced with extra syrupy sweetness, just like when she answered the phone. The sweetness didn’t reach her eyes. My hands shook with sweat and shame.
I shimmied off the plastic chair and came to stand in front of her. The purple woman stared back at me from my mom’s lap.
“It’s normal to feel a certain sort of, curiosity about women’s bodies,” she said. “When I was your age, I was also very curious about what my body would one day grow into. I would see your Meemaw get out of the shower, or see topless women in Africa in National Geographic, and wonder when that would happen to me.”
I felt the tingle of my sunburnt face as my cheeks heated. I wanted to shake my head, as if physical movement could eject the image of my topless Meemaw from my head. I knew the look on my mom’s face. It was the same one she gave me when I made a C minus on the Chapter Four math test last year.
“Are you,” my mother started. She looked away from me and closed her eyes, as if searching for the right words. “Do you,” she tried again and failed with a slight shake of her head.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s just a curiosity,” she said. But her statement sounded more like a question: it’s just a curiosity, right? I wasn’t sure if the question was for me, or for her.
“It’s normal to wonder how men will perceive you as you grow into a woman and your body changes. It’s normal to want them to like you,” she said. I didn’t know what “perceive” meant.
I nodded, which only made the tears rimming my eyes drop out. Some of them landed on my drawing, turning parts of it into a mess of purple ink.
“Oh Nina, it’s okay. Let’s just stick to the usual things you like to draw, okay?” my mother said. She ran a hand through my wet hair.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Okay, now grab your sandals. The Walshes from down the street got here today. We’re going to eat dinner with them. You can play with Jake. He’s a cutie, right?” Now she was rambling. I never quite understood why my parents liked to get dinner with families from home on vacation, when we never got dinner with them at home. Jake Walsh was in my class at school, and we had the same bus stop. He was blonde, just like me, and had Justin Bieber hair. All the girls liked him. But I didn’t.
That night Jake and I did not play together. He gave me a side hug when my mother and I arrived at dinner. After we ordered food, Jake went down to the beach with my brothers to toss the football around. Jake’s older sister, Marissa, had a crush on Tommy. The whole town knew it. She went down to the beach to play football too.
I sat with the parents while they drank and talked about people from home. Although I had already washed off the sand and sun of the day, I felt dirty.
Coco Hull is a writer based in New York City. Hailing from the Gulf Coast of Florida, she finds comfort in hot asphalt and the smell of chlorine. Often writing from the child’s perspective, Coco is fascinated by the way youthfulness interacts with sexuality, alcoholism, and family dynamics. She is also interested in the relationship between origins and identity, especially as it pertains to the American South. Coco’s work has been featured in Sinking City Literary Magazine and O, Miami Poetry Festival.