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Show in her shower and scrubbed my hair. And Stacy? That bright, bright diamond of a girl who roller skated with movie stars and showed me how to make barrettes with beads that poured like a waterfall down my hair. By the time she reached high school, she had moved beyond make up, stolen candy bars, and kissing in the bushes. Her junior year, her parents sent her abroad in hopes of curtailing her dangerous behavior. The sunless days of Denmark's winters . helped little. Drugs and alcohol were easy to find. Not long after she returned to the states, her father kicked her out of the house, set her possessions down outside the guard gates to the Charleston Naval Base, and Stacy has been on her own since. The last time I saw her we were in high school. She invited me to spend the night. Our sleeping bags laid out on the floor in the family room, we had little to say to each other. Earlier in the day Stacy had smoked cigarettes while we were out driving, and I was aghast. No one I knew smoked. From my Latin class windows, I would watch those students from high school smoking off campus and wondered what they talked about while they leaned against the hoods of their cars, wondered if they had sex in the back seats of their cars, wondered what it felt like to wear jean jackets with patches and have hair that fell down your back. To be with someone, a friend, who bought cigarettes as easily as if she were buying milk and then expertly dangled them from the window of her parents' car was incomprehensible. I tried to appear as though I were fine with it all, nonchalantly brushed aside her offer of the pack, but inside I was frightened, unsure what to do. That night, on the floor in sleeping bags, our conversation was not about Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill or the houses we would own. Her mother had asked me on the 142 |
