And then he said, “But, Baby.”

Posted on February 29, 2008
Filed Under nonfact |

She had always been this tiny thing that people needed to touch. Even before she became small to the average eye, inside, where secret thoughts festered, she was miniscule. Women would come to sit at her yellow formica table to drink cup after cup of dark coffee from chipped mugs, happy to share their lives and breath with her father, happy to belong for just a moment in his world because his world was a sheltered, lonely place that no one was often allowed trespass to.

These girls would be enraptured that he would fill their mug at one time and then another, tell them they needed to leave him alone and that was how they found the secret passage into his life. They found his daughter, sitting in a corner, reading memoirs of Rodin and being a silent observer. They were jealous of his affection for her, something hard and fast and untouchable. Something they could never have priority over, yet something so unquantifiable as to be a ghost, never fully showing it’s presence in plain sight but knocking over papers in the night.

This man and his child, they were partners in crime because the women would come and want to love him and he wasn’t available for that but would provide company until his patience waned. That’s when their affection would turn to her and they’d stroke her hair and call her their little girl. She let them pretend that they were her everything, because really she had nothing.

Everyone wanted to touch her. And she would pay them for their affection with lies and hugs and help them with their math homework.

Inside, she was the oldest girl in the class of sixth graders, seemingly caught up in the usual drama of who wore Guess jeans and had their period. Which boys were cute and who had a boyfriend. By twelve, she was so far apart from these children as to think them her children. They needed to be coddled and have their egos fed, to know that they were the kings of seventh grade and that kissing with tongues made them adult.

A girl, the ruler of all by default of beauty and money, was the first to be known as hot. Brooke didn’t wear Guess jeans, she wore baggy Calvin Kleins that emphasized her prepubescent hips and the breasts that weren’t large and vulgar, but weren’t as flat as a wall either. Brooke was perfect in the eyes of seventh grade and she was going out with Spencer.

The child would arrive in class after a weekend of lies, being pawed for and she’d be sick to the bones from the weekend’s end and everything that meant left with it. And she’d stare at Brooke, this perfect little badass that knew the world revolved around her. She wished she was Brooke, with the innocent fumblings and first sips of beer and 16-hole Doc Martens. Brooke was as simple as she wished life could be.

And while Brooke was living this perfect existance with her Spencer and hand holding and kissing when teachers weren’t looking but children were, the girl wanted Spencer to stop calling her at 10 o’clock. She regretted Spencer knowing about her double life and the reason she didn’t wear sandles. She regretted letting him into her mind even once, because then all he wanted was to touch her, just like everyone else.

And once she let him, it cascaded into a flurry of untold truths and challenges and left him the only of their class to die by his own hand.

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Comments

5 Responses to “And then he said, “But, Baby.””

Evi on February 29th, 2008 5:04 pm

Deep, dark, spooky, and yeah, a bit morbid, but great writing, ZJ. Keep it up.
Tara R. on February 29th, 2008 5:42 pm

Wow… that was fabulous!
janethesane on February 29th, 2008 7:04 pm

Good stuff. Very provacative. Fiction or memoir? Or both?
HP on February 29th, 2008 7:53 pm

What Evi said.

Blog Hopping–HP
Huckdoll on March 1st, 2008 11:41 pm

I’m wondering the same as JTS…