Cum looks a lot like snot. Indistinguishable from it, really, crumpled into a waste-binned tissue. Fluid separating from pale jelly in my palm, like the cheap conditioner Mama drags with wide-toothed rakes through my hair on Tuesday nights. I sit on the dingy lip of the tub, chin tucked to chest, eyes on purpled knees flocked with downy-sparse hair, while she pulls yellow-white, waist-length coils like saltwater taffy. Rapunzel, my brother’s friend Rupin calls me.

Not what I expected, but it looks like the name. Protoplasm.

Naked men look like frogs, pinched in at the waist with wide shoulders.  Rupin undresses and I think of dissecting frogs in science, pickling formaldehyde and sharp-singed nostrils.

Rupin tells me I should be grateful he wants to see me naked at all, what with my tummy that billows like sheets flapping on the clothesline. Baby fat, he smirks at me, his finger tracing my cheek, him all inverted triangle torso and upper lip stubble and primordial ooze; the memory of scalpels on slimy-sick skin turns my stomach.