Undesirable
By Jennifer Celeste-Roberts
In middle school, She discovered she was undesirable. She remembers attempting to reach through the inch-thick screen with desperate words, how her best friend had rejected her with caution, as if she was something delicate that needed preserving. “You know, oranges come from orange trees. And apples come from apple trees. You can’t grow an orange in an apple tree, and you can’t grow an apple in an orange tree. Do you understand?”
She stared at the screen, its pixels nearly large enough to surround entire letters, to surround her. Her pointer and ring finger hovered over the N, over the O until he typed again. She pictured his green eyes piercing the screen, remembered the time she read his messages after they exchanged passwords, how she tried to convince him she suddenly discovered the cinematic masterpieces that were Bleach and American Pie. How embarrassed she’d been when he found out about it.
“I’m an orange. You’re an apple. Both are good, but they just don’t go together.”
From then on out, she thought herself an apple.
*
In middle school She fell for a skinny Columbian boy—She didn’t know where he was from, exactly, but She was sure he was Columbian—with thick black hair and an even thicker spray of freckles on the left side of his face that appeared to split his face in half vertically, ending right at his nose. He wore the same glasses She did and wore shirts with odd phrases slapped on the front: things like Deux Ex Machina and Stay Calm and I Pee in Pools. Everything about him felt poetic.
At Hot Topic She found a shirt with Free Hugs ironed on the front in big green letters. She resolved to wear it to school, knowing that, though She didn’t have many friends and was a bit chubby, all the better for her crush, who might enjoy the extra cushion. She hoped the crush would read the shirt, would stare at her, would at least notice what it said, but when She spotted him hugging another girl—one with a flatter stomach and silkier hair—and when She caught him sketching the skinny girl’s face in his notebook, She knew that no amount of Free Hugs T-shirts could convince someone to touch her.
*
In the summer She thought she fell for a boy, and for once, he liked her back. He was the son of her mother’s church friend, but the most She and the boy had in common was that they both had intensely religious mothers and that they both had a fascination for shows like Teen Wolf and The Bad Girls Club. Their short-lived romance lasted a week: mild delights with foreseeably anemic ends. They sat in the living room watching television in silence, two zit-faced bumbling pre-teens with no idea how to love the other, if love at that age was possible.
She remembers when he slid down the faux-leather sofa to embrace her, how the couch squealed as he made his way down. She stiffened when his arm met her waist, and sensing her discomfort, he placed his arm around her shoulders instead. She was sweating; She kept her arms frozen by her side, haunted by the time someone pointed out her body odor in sixth grade when she started to hit puberty. She did not want this boy to find her utterly repulsive; She did not see how he could not. But his face was focused, like he was taking a math test he hadn’t really studied for. Her thumbs were circling each other, and her eyes were fixed on the screen. “Did you see that?” she said. “You missed the best part.”
Then his free hand reached her face—She was worried about the acne—and rotated it to face his own. Dryly, firmly, his lips pressed against hers. For a moment they stayed there, like wood touching wood.
When it was over, they splintered.
*
Her first real relationship started in the fall of Sophomore year, a relationship forged through text-messages in the middle of a hurricane in October; they dated for two years but they never had sex, never really got close, and never really tried. She told him she was waiting for marriage; She believed in her heart that she was.
They’d been dating for a week before they finally saw each other again in class. She pictured herself running toward him, arms fanned out in both directions. They would run toward each other and end up in a dramatic embrace—the kind where her legs would be around his waist and he’d be twirling her mid-air. In her dreams she saw this, She saw herself kissing him, but when they finally met in person her body did not let her. She was a small wooden figurine, an apple plucked from a tree and placed in a basket. Statuesque, immovable.
She saw herself freezing, ice spreading from her toes and crawling up her body. How did the girls in the movies do it? What if everyone stares? Why can’t we just talk?
Awkwardly, as if by duty, She lifted her arms and hugged him. He wrapped his arms gently around her waist, and when she let go, he smiled, grateful as someone would be when finding a single candle to light the house in the middle of a hurricane.
*
She didn’t know love until she met the Pisces. Her senior year started with a breakup and fell into the lap of another boy, one She told herself she’d be willing to unravel for. He was kind, and philosophical—if not a bit pretentious—and he told her all about how she deserved better and how their destinies could be found written in the stars if they looked closely enough. After him, she started stargazing. She found the Big Dipper, and the Little Dipper, and Aries, and when she showed him, he told her he was proud of her.
The Pisces had a secret relationship with a Jehovah’s Witness, and he often vented about what it felt like to be hidden. So, apple as She was, she told him that she understood, that She would never make him feel the way the Jehovah’s witness made him feel, that he should forget about Jehovah and His Witnesses and take his own advice. But instead of love, he gave her nudes. He was saving the love for his girlfriend.
The closest they came to love happened at a party, when he led her to the bathroom and grabbed her by the hips. He pulled her body close to his, tracing his hands around her thinned-out frame, touching on her what he could not with the Jehovah’s Witness. She told him she was a virgin, that she was on her period, that all she wanted was a kiss. And so they did, their liquor-laced breath encompassing the small room around them, fogging up the bathroom mirror.
Finally, She kissed him, hungrily, as if being brought to a buffet after being starved for three weeks. She allowed herself to fall upon him, to devour him whole; and after competing for his affection, after years of self-loathing and shame and rejection, She decided that if anyone was ripe for the taking, it was him, and She would take him. She didn’t have to be an apple, and this one didn’t have to be an orange.
But when he pulled his lips away, she heard him say “all you want to do is kiss me,” and then he asked her for a favor, dimming the lights and crowning her head with his hand. “Do this for me, okay? Since you’re on your period.”
She’d gotten so close—so close to the guy she wanted, so close to the moment in the movies, so reluctantly, drunkenly, she obliged. And she allowed him to pull her head down, watching as he unzipped his jeans, mumbling “But you have a girlfriend,” all along the way.
*
After the Pisces returned to the Jehovah’s Witness, the apple started drinking. Her friends blamed her for that evening, and She blamed herself, wondering what she could have done to stop it, to stop herself, stop him. She told herself she swore off men, that they were more trouble than they were worth, and that maybe She was too.
It was the Aries that stood beside her then, that made her believe in horoscopes again. But he was a troubled young man—the kind to get expelled for selling pills in the high school bathroom, the kind to consider that a reward for authenticity. And still, She found herself leaning into him, trying and failing to fight herself along the way. But She couldn’t help that she was lonely. She couldn’t help that he was nice.
Their first kiss happened at night in his car; for the first time ever, the boy She liked was less experienced than she was, and when he kissed her, he kissed her sloppily. “Do this,” She told him—straightening out his back—to remain firm, to let her fall into him. She told him to let her become like water, to let himself become like wood.
*
She waited until she was 18 to lose her virginity. It happened with the Aries.
It was nearly summer, and it happened after school. They were wrestling in his inexplicably blue room, smacking each other with pillows after smoking two blunts in his living room and eating cookies from Subway. It wasn’t particularly romantic, nor was it steamy or passionate. It was brought up off-handedly, nonchalantly, as if suggesting they should go for a walk, or go to Walmart instead of Target: “We should fuck,” he said. And so they did.
It took them a while to get things going, and even then, it was not awkward. “It’s a good thing we both have a sense of humor,” and then they laughed, and persevered.
It was over fairly quickly, and when they finished, they lay down staring up at the ceiling without touching. When they finally did touch, an act of friendship more than an act of romance, they put their clothes back on and he drove her back home, the music in the car so loud there was no room for silence.
And when She got home, She thought back to her mother, who would shake her head in disapproval if she found out. She was going to hell for sure; if there really was a heaven, She was no longer worthy of it. She wondered if She ever was.
She thought back to her childhood, to all the boys She failed to love, to all of the opportunities She failed to take, to all of the times She could have said “yes” and to the moments She should have said “no.” She began to realize that She did not remember what She saw in those boys, only that She did—and that She wanted them to see her too. In the car She saw herself as a pre-teen getting rejected behind a computer screen, saw herself reaching for oranges when She was born among the apples. She saw herself falling, reaching, rotting, screaming, unsure why the love She desired always escaped her, why the love She accepted was never enough.
All her life, She knew she was an apple, but it did not occur to her until that moment just how badly bruised She’d been.
Jennifer Celeste (she/her) is an Afro-Latinx writer based in the greater NYC area. She holds a master’s degree in English from Seton Hall University and is currently a teacher of English in New Jersey. In her free time, she loves going on road trips with her husband or cuddling with one of her three cats.