by Greg Walker
Her “friends” didn’t understand. They felt entitled to their beauty and the perks that came with it. They crushed hearts and hopes with five inch heels and still made time to party and gossip and rule their little fiefdoms. They were hated and feared and adored, sometimes all in one sitting.
Not all, but enough.
Enough that her change in attitude and philosophy, at first attended by outrage and confusion and betrayal, in the end brought down mocking and ridicule as the cliques reconfigured to fill the power vacuum she had left. Some of the things said to her by these “nice” girls would create rosary bead imprints in the sweating palms of a confessional priest.
If she wouldn’t be one of them, they would treat her as one of them, the lowly underclass whose flesh covered them in a banal, unremarkable way, existing for cheap amusement; the wanna-but-would-never-be prom queens and football heroes who would amass piles of money to compensate for their unattractiveness. The ones with brains, anyway. Those without any of the magic ingredients would drink beer and watch professional sports, join bowling leagues and have babies so they could hate the prom queens all over again vicariously through their sons and daughters while secretly hoping their children would gain admission to the royal court. Yes it was cruel and cynical. But it contained more than one kernel of truth if not the whole cob.
And to them she was suspect, the rules and roles too well defined to allow one rogue hot chick to trash them on a whim. She possessed a lifetime pass to the world’s best rides, and few believed she would simply throw it away when they would spend all of their lives trying to earn a few tickets.
It was all very John Hughes-esque. But the reason “Pretty In Pink” and all the other flicks did so well, films she and her father enjoyed together before his death, was because they captured the unchanging truths of adolescence so poignantly. But Molly Ringwald wasn’t near pretty enough to play her. Maybe an arrogant thought, she thought, but simply acknowledging something to be true didn't make it arrogance. Her high school Humanities teacher had suggested that you could lie to the world, but should never lie to yourself. The first part she had her doubts about, but the second became a personal mantra.
Later, after graduation, leaving her home state of Illinois with a part-time construction worker nomad named Paul and finally settling for a while in Las Vegas, she thought she had found something real. The memories stirred with his name created a simultaneous flash of anger and stab of pain. She did not cry, though. She had finished with that. He could have his junkie whore and when he tired of her, assuming he could get off of the drugs she had seduced him with, he would know one day what he threw away. Consolation for the future perhaps, but of little help now. She sighed. If his truck had just lasted a bit longer, she would be in civilization again with more options.
When steam had poured out from under the hood of the old pick-up and left her stranded in Oklahoma, she didn’t dare call a tow truck, didn’t know if they’d be looking for a stolen vehicle from Vegas out here. Her part in burglarizing the pharmacy might also come to light, and she vowed she would not do time in prison. Her cousin had spent two years there for possession and had returned changed. Haunted. Karen would catch her staring into the sky as if waiting for a piece of her soul to return. She and Karen had shared everything growing up, but she wouldn't talk about this. It began a rift in the relationship that widened and turned the one person that truly knew her into another stranger.
She couldn’t discuss things with her mother, who coveted all the things Karen rejected, nor with her father who died from pancreatic cancer just when she had turned seventeen.
The truck barreled down the road and she heard it long before it came into view. Custom tires lifted it high over the asphalt. Mud spattered the tires and quarter panels like war paint; the pride and joy of a small-town boy that defined his manhood with his machine. Those boys usually had girlfriends draped across them, as much a requirement of the total package as the “Git-R-Done” decal on the back window. And a girlfriend would be most welcome to buffer the scent of testosterone filling the interior like a little pine tree hanging from the rearview mirror.
With trepidation, watching a treeline of jagged, uneven teeth waiting to devour the setting sun, unwilling to spend the night out here, she violated her rule, turned, and stuck out her thumb.