The Tesseract by Alex Garland Page B

cabin, laying palm leaves beneath them to protect their dresses from the rusty seats, there was a sense of anticipation. A few minutes later, it was difficult to imagine how the sense of anticipation could have been better rewarded.
    “What?” Ella gasped. “You did
what?
” She fluttered a hand weakly in front of her face and nearly knocked her glasses off her nose. “Quick, I’m dizzy. I may faint.”
    “It’s the truth,” said Leesha, glowing with happy defiance.
    “You realize—” Ella began, but she had to break off to fan herself more vigorously. A series of deep breaths gave her the strength to compose herself. Then, after a pointless glance into the thick foliage that surrounded the truck, she whispered, “You realize that there’s absolutely no going back from this point.”
    “Of course. But I don’t want to go back. I want to marry him, and he wants to marry me.”
    “So he says!”
    “I told him. I told him I wasn’t an inland girl.”
    “And?”
    “He told me he wasn’t even interested in inland girls.”
    “Oh?” said Ella, arching her eyebrows. “For someone not interested, he’s made enough trips over the boondocks.”
    “Only to keep Doublon and Simeon company.”
    “Mmm-hmm.”
    “Mmm-hmm nothing, Ella.”
    “Mmm-
hmm
.”
    “Mmm-
hmm
nothing! If I didn’t trust him, I wouldn’t be marrying him.”
    “Marriage!” Ella echoed, abruptly changing her tone. “It’s too wonderful for words.”
    “I’m telling my parents this evening.”
    “This evening! What do you think they’ll say?”
    “I hope they’ll agree to it.”
    “But of course they will! Turing is so…well! His father virtually
runs
the sawmill.”
    “Everyone says he’ll be the general manager when Tata Rudy retires.”
    Ella widened her eyes. “And one can only expect that Turing will run the sawmill after his father.”
    “Yes,” sighed Leesha. “But I’m not interested in that. If I could only tell you, Ella, when you’re in love, things like sawmills seem so unimportant.”
    “It’s
too
wonderful!”
    A silence began to grow. Rosa waited until it had reached a suitable length before she cleared her throat and asked, “What exactly is a blow job?”
    The nature of the act was both predictable (Rosa had heard rumors along similar lines) and unexpected (she hadn’t thought the rumors were true). Straightforwardly unexpected, however, was that halfway through Leesha’s graphic explanation, Lito popped into Rosa’s mind. Dismayed, forcing him out, Rosa told herself it was because she happened to have seen him that morning. He had been registered as something beyond a familiar local face, so his arrival in her mind was without any great meaning. Inevitably, she had fleshed out the image, and he was the first boy at hand.
    It was an argument that carried no weight, and after the briefest of absences, Lito popped back again. This time, Rosa’s dismay was at the rush of jealousy she felt toward Leesha. Then it was at the odd elation that followed, and finally at her own hot cheeks.
    Leesha noticed the blush immediately. She read it as innocence. Rosa, twirling the small silver-plated crucifix that hung around her neck, was content to let the mistake go uncorrected.
    Chismis
, gossip like a soft wind that raises heads from field work, strong enough to chill sweat.
Chismis
ladies, the ones who excelled in the collection and distribution of gossip. Nobody trusted them, but everybody gave them their confidence and secrets, because taking these things was their art. Ella’s art. Since she had been as young as five or six, people had identified Ella as a
chismis
lady-in-waiting. They said she made up for Coke-bottle glasses and thin lips by having second sight and a big mouth.
    When the end-of-school bell rang that afternoon, Leesha’s news had already spread beyond the boundaries of Infanta and was making its way cross-country to her barrio and her house. Rosa followed lazily behind, daydreaming,