Farah Carmine was seventeen when she fell in love for the very first time. Not the superficial love that most adolescent girls experienced. She fell in love with a boy who offered her a greedy, clumsy love. He was late afternoon in the summertime, vanilla coke and broken pinky promises.
The first time he kissed her, it was like a sigh of relief, tracing her birthmarks with delicate precision, as if she were a broken porcelain cup that had been glued back together countless times before. His kisses were as addicting as acid. Well, as addicting as practically any drug you could take at a party, not at all worrying about the consequences. And, maybe what Farah Carmine liked about the boy most of all, was that he was a good liar, making her forget all about her vulgar existence.
And frankly, the brunette became bitter and untouchable, only opening up to the boy who couldn't feel his own bones anymore. Because she never seemed to run out of tenderness for him. He caused emotional overflow, tears and restless nights. And she was tipsy on desire.
It had been two years, and the girl was writing about him all over again, in the little diary concealed in the back of her mind. And she was certain she would write it all so much better this time. She would let him fuck her at nineteen. Should she have given in at eighteen? She had already told him where the pain choked her body, and begged for the boy to fix her. She would say more this time. Beg on her hands and knees. Anything.
✮
Farah Carmine would be the last person you would think of upon hearing the word 'kook'. Her once perfectly styled hair and pearly white smile had disappeared, disheveled curls and frowns taking their place. And yet, her aura remained a crimson red, her world the color of pearls, softly glowing in the strain of melancholic undertones. Her beauty was like the edge of a sharp knife.
Her accidental encounter with the Pogues turned out to be full-ride. Divinity stained her fingers and mouth like cherries in the heat of the summertime. It curled its way through her veins, and she felt it in her bones, aching. Because Farah Carmine made the constellations flicker, tanned skin gripping the light of sacrifice.
And she didn't think she would ever go back. Back to The Cut, back to the rotting hell she had made for herself. It didn't matter to her that she never graduated, that she never picked up her last paycheck from her job at the local kiosk, that her parents were probably sitting at home, smoking Marlboro cigarettes and wondering where the hell she had gone this time.
Nothing mattered, yet she was looked at with pity masked in glassy eyes. Such a waste of a girl, leaving behind every good opportunity she had, the perfect figure of Outer Banks. Sun-glossed, coffee-brown hair whipping in the wind that cuts down from the jagged rocks along the coast, sea salt clinging to her skin as she watched Kie and JJ fish for dinner, John B. putting together a bonfire somewhere behind her. And she sat in her solitude, fingers delicately picking at the flesh of a coconut in her hands, eyes trained on the sun disappearing behind the darkening horizon.
Full Pogue. Farah Carmine was in a paroxysm of rage. Constant visions from her past flashed across her mind, visions of a boy, visions of bodies twisted in bedsheets, bodies pressed up against one another in a crowded room, rager.
"If you could go home to your parents house on Figure Eight this instant, would you do it?" Never, she wanted to say. Because a sweltering mid-July was what she lived for. An aging girl haunted by her own nothingness, a pathetically intense feeling humming in her chest like the sound of a radio murmuring in the distance. But there most definitely was no radio, not for miles. No Pogues or Kooks, no parents telling right from wrong. And that was how Farah Carmine thrived.
