dethroned

One last time I went to see luna. Without tucker this time

I rang her doorbell and her dad eyed me up and down before turning and screaming her name.
She wasn’t angry anymore, she just had this resigned air

We sat on the front steps looking at the late afternoon sunshine until at last she said
“I’m leaving.”

I stared at her through my hair, trying to decipher that.

“my parents…insisted on a drug test. They started asking these questions about my friends, my schoolwork, boys. I’ve done the one thing they’ve found inexcusable.”

“I know,” I said softly. “did they want to…what. Get you help?”

“My god” she said. “I don’t need help.”

I let that hang. “Luna. Your friendships are breaking down. You lash out. You party. It affects your schoolwork. You stopped caring about your future. And I genuinely think you might be a chameleon.”

“A chameleon?”

“who are you, Luna? You change your personality for fun. I can’t find you in all the bells and whistles.”

“I hate you, jenny.” She said, but without heat. I shrugged.

There was nothing left to say. We had a shared past, but it was suddenly clear she wasn’t interested in more. With badly disguised longing she asked about Tucker.

She’s enrolled in some boarding school for troubled teen girls. Reform school, except you’re not supposed to call it that anymore. It’s in upstate New York, with the cows and the horses and Republicans. She’ll probably hate it there. She’ll probably start an uprising. Or she’ll become a sheep.

Is this what a fall looks like? I thought I’d feel better about it. Where’s my closure?

[picture from here.]

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omission or obligation

I thought I wasn’t going to put this up. I told myself that I had no obligation, that I kept this blog for myself. But I’ve committed to it now. I told myself, to avoid losing myself in all this mess, I should make my private thoughts public, so that my thoughts and actions and little hypocrisies are subject to the public, to the jury of my peers. Or at least available to them. It would obligate me to staying true to myself.

And to omit this would be a lie by omission. So, the ugly parts of prom will follow:

part I

part II

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the world as my oyster.

Tonight at dusk, Tucker and I crept over to Luna’s house and called her cell phone. We circled around the backyard and through the grass, which was cold with dew although the night air was only cool.

She popped open a window and hopped out, barefoot, hair unkempt and nail polish chipped.
“What the hell?” was Tucker’s charming opener.

“I’m grounded,” Luna said brusquely. While we gaped—Luna’s parents didn’t do grounded, the did negligence—she flipped her hair over her shoulder. “What the hell do you want?”

Tucker blinked, scowled. “We are trying to ascertain whether you are in good health, physically and mentally and maybe even emotionally. We are trying to be there for you.”

“Then maybe,” she retorted, “you should have watched my back at afterprom instead of going off to neck under the moonlight.”

There was an ugly silence during which my cheeks slowly flushed. Luna looked from face to face.

“You’re kidding,” she said flatly. “This is too precious for words. Feckin’ Tucker and little Jenny sittin’ in a tree, making love and peace and happiness. Wow, Jenny, you really committed to the cliché, hunh? Cashin’ in the ole vcard on Prom Night. I may puke with the sickly sweetness of it all.”

Tucker was enraged. “How dare you talk to Jenny like that! She hasn’t done a thing. She’s been nice to you, defended you when I haven’t. How dare you throw slander at her like that after all the times I’ve driven you to clinics and held your hair back and cut you off and drove you home.”

“So??” she screamed. "I’ve done the same for you. And you know what? Whatever. Jenny plays the good little girl, but no one stays that innocent. One day she’ll be just as twisted as you and me. And you—that little good girl vibe, that wholesomeness you wouldn’t stop talking about when we first hung out with her—it doesn’t rub off, dipshit. You’re trying to be good when you’re just as messed up as me! At least I’m self aware! I don’t delude myself!”

There was a little silence. Tucker spoke, calmer now: “Luna, this time you’ve gone too far with your hypocrisy. I know you think you’re untouchable, but you can’t talk your way out of this mess this time with that silvered tongue of yours. You have to appear in court, for crissakes. That’s not something to brush off.”

“Whatever,” Luna replied, looking away, the fight gone out of her.

“I’m through, Luna. I’m done holding your hair back and listening to you spew this crap. I’m out. Jenny, let’s go.” Tucker left, not looking back. Stomping through the grass. I lingered.

“Luna…please. It doesn’t have to be this way. Turn it around. Repent. Tell the judge you’re sorry, turn over a new leaf. Talk to your parents. See someone. Apologize to Tucker.”

She snorted. “You’re that kind of girl, Jenny. If the world were your oyster, you’d send it back to the farm to grow old and make pearls and tiny, adorable little baby oyster. The farm would be green and the oyster would live and die happily, free from pollutants and French chefs and tacky nouveau riche who think oysters and pink champagne are status. But really, it’s Maybachs and sleeping pill addictions that tell you money’s been bottled, chilled, and properly aged. But I bet you didn’t know that.”

She met my eyes dead-on, and I shivered. They had the dead look you see in inner-city cops and barracuda lawyers.

“Now, honey, I have predatory instincts. I would lever that sucker out and suck it down like fossil fuels at a Nascar convention. And squeeze a few fucking pearls out of it, too.”
She crawled back through the window and glided out of sight, and I was left staring into the empty frame.

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dignified worship: i has it.

I too have been known to writhe around at the ecstasy of hipster pictures to admire. But I like to think I'm more dignified when I do it.


















[photo from here.]

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The Afterprom

Prom 2.0: the Explicit Version.

The war. I won it. I should take a victory lap. I feel like I just killed a rabid panther with my bare hands. I felled an empire with a slingshot. I slayed a dragon with a toothpick. I can go to afterprom. Afterprom is the party following prom where people do things that could get them sentenced to an afterlife of the Hellish variety. Normally, some enterprising individual will rent out club space in the city and charge admission. Tickets are a certain price and said individual usually makes a killing.

This year, Betty Walker rented out the ballroom of a hotel. It’s gorgeous and tickets are $55 a pop. More for VIP tickets. Plus limo fees. It will be full of writhing bodies and sin and substance abuse. Part of the prom experience.

And I won the battle. I can go. We’ll go from prom, change into our afterprom dresses, and party it up. afterward we’ll crash in some hotel room Luna’s friend rented.

The battle with my parents was epic. They don’t know how bad it gets, or they’d never let me go. Still, I’ve promised to stay with Tucker AT ALL TIMES. I text them every time I change locations. I have the local police precinct on speed dial. They’re so naïve.

I’m feeling…optimistic. I can go out there, I can be that girl, I’ll be just like everyone else. Sometimes conformity is a comfort. It’s strange. Now that I fit in with people…now that I act like them, at least on the surface, they know who I am. I guess sheep don’t look the same to other sheep.

Tucker and I will dance and Luna and I will do the girl bathroom buddy thing. I’ll see Ashley with her soon-to-be-ex, James of the wandering ways, and I will tell her how gorgeous and kickass she looks. Tucker’s Round Table will be momentarily stunned, then hit me with a barrage of witty and vastly gratifying flattery. Ivan, from my English class, whom I’ve always had a soft spot for, will turn his attention away from his incomparable date for just a second when I walk by. I will see and be seen. And I’ll leave my thoughts here.

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somnambulant

Sometimes in the hallway at school, I find myself counting sheep to stay awake. 1, 2, 3 girls with identical side ponytails and JanSport backpacks. 3, 5, 7, 10 boys in letter jackets with their last names embroidered over the heart. In case they forget how to spell their names. Or if the homicide investigators need to identify the body. There are the reasonably popular girls with no guy friends—trendy but conservative tops and jean shorts—6, 7, 8 of them. No one really sticks out and grabs my attention. If I knew all the gossip, I’d probably be busy drawing invisible relationship maps and chains and timelines, but as it is, they’re faceless to me.

Maybe that’s just how high school is. Hand everyone the same homework and expect the “right” answer. Expect them to adhere to a down-to-the-minute class schedule with military precision. Until the bell rings you will listen to this lecture and takes notes as though your very life is dependent on the Defenestration of Prague but the second the bell sounds you will get the hell out and forget all about it in favor of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Make them wait in line for food and the pencil sharpener. Have them meet Presidential Fitness standards in PE. After a while, the conformity becomes natural. Like prison. They just become another jumpsuit.

We all move through class and halls and conversations on auto-pilot. It’s terribly clichéd of me, but we’re all sleepwalking through our world. My days are lethargic and full of dazedness and apathetic teachers. In most classes, I play that game where I slowwwly drift asleep and my head slowwwly droops until snap! My neck jerks and I wake up and repeat the process.

So at night I stay up and feel powerful and innovative and full of raw ability if only I could reach and scratch my itch, get out there in the world and do something and ease my yearning. I can’t sleep so I stay up and doze erratically while my mind churns and plugs away. And I can blame my continued captivity on my intellectual restrictions. Once college comes around I’ll need a new excuse, like everyone else.

But for now, I’m full of sleeping potential.

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Lying Shirts

There was this girl, who used to sit in front of me in History. She was...perfection in the eyes of her peers, though not in my eyes. I didn't understand it. Her hair was neat and clean and shiny, but it always had wisps over it, as though a subtle wind had blown precisely over her tightly bound hair, some tangent to the perfect circle of her skull.

I spent the long minutes of John Adams's presidency--the lonely parts of it--wondering what her luster was. I looked at the lint and the little piece of paper, torn from the edge of some looseleaf, stuck to the back of her light lavender unbuttoned button-up cardigan. I could see the black and white stripes of the shirt she wore underneath, to shyly peek between the somber brown buttons; that is to say, I could see through her back.

How strange that she had a black and white striped shirt, with the opposites lined up with perfectly straight, even borders. Did she know how wrong she was? The borders should be jagged, blurred, gray. They were all wrong. It was awful, disturbing. Why would she wear a shirt that would lie like that?

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