Don't Kiss Me: Stories(17)

At lunch I traded my sandwich for a pink pencil, cause Jean loves pencils and we never seen a pink one.

Jean says, Did you feel better? I say I did.

Jean says to hide, and we do, and we whisper how any minute we could pee, and I want to laugh and yawn all at once cause I feel so happy to be with Jean, but we have to keep quiet cause we’re hiding, and the first one to make a noise during loses.

We never talk about what happens if you win at hiding.

Hiding always ends with Daddy finding us.

Daddy asks me do I want to ride on his motorcycle and I say yes even though Jean says I’m a dumb bitch.

Just around the block a few times, my daddy says, and then I need you to help me out with something in the garage. I don’t listen to that last part. I go stuck clock. My face ain’t my face. I think how we’ll ride past that mailbox with the wood ducks and that flat dead cat in the road, and that house that got burned up by a drug addict. Wind in my hair, my hair that ain’t yarn.

Jean don’t have a daddy, so she don’t know. Cause how can you tell your own daddy no? You can’t. If you can I’m sorry for you.





A GIRL


There was a girl gone missing a few years back. Her momma standing out front of the Dairy Queen, eyeing your cone like you was hiding her child within. You seen Dee? Dee Switcher? You seen her? Nope was always the answer, but I’ll keep an eye out. And before you knew it that cone was gone.

That was the year that old bitch Miss Shane was teaching us algebra. Solve for x, children. Chalk dusting her dress like she had a ghost dress on over her other one. Them arms like dough on a spit.

That missing girl used to do her eyeliner during class. Over and over, underlining her eye like Miss Shane underlined them nasty equations. Solve for x.

We all had plans for that girl. She had a chest. She smoked them long thin lady cigarettes in plain sight of the custodian. When that retarded boy ran into the girl and knocked her purse down a condom spilled out, flashing there in its gold wrapper, looking for all the world like a coin.

The girl picked up her lipsticks and wallet and hair things and left it there, left that condom on the ground and walked off. Us thinking hard about ways to spend that coin.

There was other girls of course. The entire cheerleading team could get you going, save for the chubby one, but she’d do in a pinch. The majorette, Glenda was her name, rumor had it she’d drink too much at parties and beg you to fondle her.

So it wasn’t like this girl was the cream of the crop or nothing, there was plenty of girls. We wanted them all, Dee Switcher included.

Her momma was the town skank. Everybody knew. So you couldn’t take her all that seriously when her girl went missing. Stay home all night for once, our own mommas would whisper to each other, swat each other on the arm. You so bad. I know it.

Nobody ever picked up that condom. It got kicked around and pushed into corners, and once Dee went missing we all got scared of it, and kicked it harder. Girls would shriek should they see it rocketing toward them. Some boys too.

Then one day we all realized it wasn’t there no more. Probably the custodian got it. Or it was somewhere no one cared to look.

Her daddy came to the school on a Monday morning, no one had seen her daddy in years, but here he was asking where was Dee, why did the school let her skip so easy, where was the truant officer, demanding to know who took her, who had his girl? We watched the principal pet his shoulder like you would a sick animal, watched Dee’s daddy get led to the door, it was a bright day and for a second he got swallowed up by the glare. He didn’t come back.

There was a big homecoming dance a few months after the girl went gone. We all paired up and parted our hair and wore suit coats and danced slow when we were told to.

Dee’s momma showed up at the dance in a fancy nightgown thing, asking could she chaperone. We watched the principal lead her over to the punch bowl, but Dee’s momma wasn’t there for long, no one came for punch and after a few songs she walked out with her head so high you worried for her neck.

Some of us met at the diner after, eating pancakes while our girls fiddled with our belt loops under the table, if you were lucky. Others of us went to the after party at the Days Inn, but that turned out to be a bust. The stereo ran out of batteries and Miss Shane’s son showed up and puked into the trash can and everybody went home.

Dee had left school after fifth period, was the story. Snuck out while everyone was scrambling for their lockers. Rumor had it she was going with an older boy, he might could even be called a man. One day a skinny lady cop came and asked a few of us what we knew, but really we didn’t know nothing.

We skipped school all the time, was the thing. Sometimes it felt like if you didn’t skip you’d close your eyes and die, right there in the middle of Civics, so you did skip, and you’d go to the Circle K to buy Slim Jims or over to a friend’s house to look at his dad’s titty magazines. And nothing bad ever happened.

The lady cop seemed to find us not knowing nothing a relief. That’s what I figured, she’d say in agreement with you. Which meant, to us, solving for x really was an impossibility, a waste of time, so why bother?

At Christmastime Miss Shane told us she had skin cancer, she wouldn’t be back the next semester. We stared at that mole on her cheek, as we had done for months. That’s what I figured, some of us wanted to blurt. Miss Shane’s eyes went wet, we started feeling soft toward her, but after she assigned two chapters of homework for over the break we went back to hating her guts, which felt better, more normal, than feeling sorry for her, so in a way you got to feeling grateful toward her for being such a cooze.