[My interactions with a girl I know. I think this is most people's view of her.]
I’m Sorry, Sally Lolly
I was talking this morning to Sally Lolly in the empty school halls and she was crying. I asked her, “What’s wrong.” She said she’d tell me later. Then she quickly pushed me to the wall and told me there were pictures of her circulating because “Some bastard was MAD at the world.” I could imagine these pictures.
But I could not imagine her taking them. And I listened to the hiccupped account of this bastard from the same little girl voice I’d been hearing since eighth grade. The same voice that lit up all the texts I received from her, words she must have carefully chosen so that they truly reeked of Sally Lolly. Sally Lolly in the person, the skinny, the slutty, the happy, sad, violently greeting you with a punch in the boob. “What’s good son” I’d read on my backlit phone and I did not know how to respond. That’s Sally Lolly. She’d push you to the wall in tears and how did you respond?
Everyone knew she was making it all up.
Because this was not the only time this had happened. As she leaned in close behind a section of lockers I smelled weed and perfume, and my brain triggered the smell back to this same scene replayed over and over. Sally Lolly confiding. Sally Lolly needing you because you were the first person she set her weary eyes on.
I remember in the dingy halls next to the gymnasium, eighth grade it had to have been, because in my mind everything has the unsure look of a new school. Sally Lolly taking my hand. She takes my hand and hers is cold and rough, which it shouldn’t be. The smell of cigarette smoke, weed, incense. My mind might have drifted numbly away if it were not for the stone cold grip around my fingers. As it is, into my consciousness enters the usual words, the “mom” the “dad” the “brother”. Talking about money, about divorce. I am looking over her shoulder: everyone knows she makes it all up.
In ninth grade I am in more control of myself. All those talks at the table at the edge of the cafeteria. “Oh come on, Sally” I remember saying. Money, divorce. Her mother, her father, her older brother. Sex and drugs and money and divorce. Over my head, but I can still smile to the others. “I just lost my virginity,” she says to me. “Don’t tell anyone.”
An instant flash back to eighth grade. Cold hand in mine: “Jenny, I just lost my virginity…”
In ninth grade I am in control of myself. “Come on, Sally.” I say. Other people at the table laugh and so she wants to go somewhere more private. We’re soon leaning against a wall in an empty hallway and I am hoping to get a cigarette out of this at least.
In tenth grade her mother dies and the talks increase. Classes interspersed with musty weed, perfume. She’s high the entire week after the death and who can blame her? I take her hand and sit on the steps between the second and third floors. I hear about the first time she lost her virginity. And I say, “Eighth grade? Ninth grade?” No, seven years old. Her brother. I would laugh but my hand’s so cold.
Eleventh grade she moves to an apartment way downtown. I only remember the grey walls and a clogged toilet, and of course the smoky scent of her room. Her own, trailing scent. The way I’d run into her in deserted hallways. I look over her shoulder and save up for a good story to tell to smirking people later. Because we all know she makes it all up.
The heavy perfume. Eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh grade, all overhung by this heavy perfume.
Twelfth grade now, and we were there again.
Like I said, I was talking to her this morning. In the middle of the empty school halls. She was leaning over me with heat and tobacco, behind the big blue section of lockers. This time about those pornographic pictures. I listened as much as I ever did, which was not at all, and waited for her to ask if I wanted to go have a bogey with her.
When she did ask I said yes, yes, yes. I said it with a sincere happiness that surprised me. It was a little moment of lightness. Lightness at being in the hallways, alone, almost through with the entire four-year trial of high school. At a ciggy-rette in my future. And at how I was the lucky one, the one without the pictures in circulation. We went to my locker to get my big, stained pea coat smelling of three different kinds of drugs and fried chicken, and then we stood on the streetcorner out by Feldman Field. There was no one there. Only an icy pile of snow that was almost completely grey, and no wonder, with all the exhaust pipes sticking into it from parked cars. Sally only wore her little t-shirt because I don’t think she felt the cold anymore. Except, maybe, in her red and knobby fingers. I stood and heard shit talked about everyone I think she ever knew while the crumply Newport sucked me farther and farther into a shockwave of dizziness on the border of nausea. The ground buzzed beneath me… I’m sorry Sally Lolly I’m sorry Sally about the shit that happens to you.
Because I didn’t know how she could do it. She spat and I rocked on the lip of the concrete. I didn’t know how she could be able to, in the next two minutes, throw her cigarette into the snow pile and walk back inside.
