The darkness lifted when summer came. Her mother took her to a beautician who created a hairstyle that was soft and wavy. Her baby fat melted away into immature curves. She no longer wore glasses and lost the barrier between her self and the outside world. She found her smile and several girlfriends who learned with her how to manage the inconvenience each month could bring. She was surprised that people seemed to enjoy her company, that she could say something to make them laugh. She talked with teachers and wrote in journals. It was a good year. She sang as she worked her way through the crowded hallways. She was perky. And she learned that her new body cast a sort of magic on the boys around her.
In study hall, girls were passing around a worn book with dog-eared pages. When it came to her, she devoured it. A historical romance taught her how to be coy and what men thought when she was. She learned to cast her face down and her eyes up when looking at a boy and to speak softly, so they had to bend to her to hear. She found that a soft laugh gentled her words which made the young men around her feel strong and protective but left their defenses weak so that she could gather them like fallen petals.
In math class she sat sideways in her desk, the attached desk next to her holding her elbow, her feet propped in the cubby hole underneath.
“So....are you going to be at the basketball game tonight?” Robbie cleared his throat twice while he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Are you? I don’t like to be there by myself. I’m kind of scared of all those people.” She glanced to the right and cut her eyes back to him.
“Oh, yeah, I’ll be there. I can look for you if you want.” He leaned forward over the back of her desk, her lily of the valley fragrance pulling him to her.
“Would you? That'd be great. I think my mother could bring me about 7.”
“Seven, great, yeah, I can be there then. The game starts at 7 anyway. I’ll look for you.” He was too eager, so eager that he practically bounced in his seat thinking about it.
“Robbie? Can you tell me the degrees of the angle opposite the hypotenuse?”
“What?” Robbie grasped the front edges of his seat as he struggled to focus on the words that had flown past his ears while he imagined how she tasted.
“Perhaps you could pay a little more attention to the lesson than to your classmate?”
Mr. Rogers’ eyebrows dug a channel in his face as he glared at the boy while his friends snickered. Mary Anne stared at her teacher with complete innocence on her face.
Robbie wasn’t the only one she caught that year. Every few weeks a new boy would take the chance that she’d give him just a little more, but like the honey drawing flies doesn’t know its sweetness, didn’t quite understand what she was doing. She thought she was flirting. She knew the boys were cute and fun, and she enjoyed the different ways they kissed her. She knew that sometimes they couldn’t breathe when their hands felt their way around her body, but she was too innocent to realize that they talked. It was all fun to her. No boy had awoken in her that same desperate need to devour him with her mouth and body. All she knew was that they thought she was cute, and they liked to touch her . She knew she could make them stammer. She knew she could look at one and he’d follow her like a puppy dog, but she didn’t know that they stood in the locker room and compared notes, bragging about how long they kissed her or what parts they touched or dared one another to see who could get the farthest. Hers was a sexiness made all the more dangerous in its innocence.