Vivian Faith Prescott
Boy Crazy
The salmon fisherman hired us 13-year-old
island girls as deckhands on his troller for the summer—
Me and my best friend, the fisherman’s daughter.
“Gotta keep you girls from going boy crazy,”
he’d said.
My stepmother had already forewarned me—
At thirteen, kids go crazy. Maybe she was
thinking of only herself, but I was already
sneak-smoking her cigarette butts and letting
a boy feel me up. The best way to keep us
out of trouble, our parents must’ve figured,
was to send us out on the Alaskan ocean
to work off all that frenzy. At sea, the fisherman
joked about our greasy salmon-scaled hair,
how no boy back home among the islands
would want to chase us and yelled at us
to clean the coho salmon even faster.
Side by side, my friend and I cleaned
and iced salmon, and at night we were like
fish eggs in a skein, snug in our diesel-smelly
sleeping bags tucked up in the bow bunks,
rocking with a wave-lull on the phosphorescent sea.
We cleaned hundreds and hundreds of salmon
that summer, until cleaning fish became muscle
memory—gill the salmon, cut into the anus
and slice toward belly to throat, pull the guts
and scrape the kidney strip. A week into our trip,
during a reprieve from rainforest showers,
we washed our teenage, hormone greased hair
and pimply faces with cold tank water, laid out
on the boat deck in our halter tops and cutoff
jeans and slapped horse flies away from each other.
Days and nights we spent splattered in blood,
with silver scales like falling stars flashing
throughout our hair, our hoodies caked
with dried slime. And on a rare day with
a break in fishing, when we couldn’t stand
our own stink any longer, we begged
until the fisherman let us row the dingy to shore.
Keeping an eye out for bears, we girls hiked
up the edge of a cold creek, stripped
to our underwear and splashed and laughed
like river otters, washing our bodies
with snowmelt and moss. And afterward,
near the shoreline, my best friend and I
laid out on the rocky beach, our fingers
reaching toward each other through blades
of shore grass, while the throaty raven cawed
out waterdrop plunks from the forest.
And in that sunlit moment, the prophecy sort of
came true—But instead, we’d gone “girl crazy”
and if someone was looking down at us deckhands
through a cosmic ship’s porthole, some might have
called us first love.