bonemachine
She leans in and smiles a shark's smile, Barbie pink lips coming up, gums first, then all teeth.
"You've seen more of the world than I have," she says grinning. "And so what? 12 year old have seen more of the world than me."
She snaps up a cherry in her jaws.
"That's not something that comes with age. That's something you've either done or you haven't. I mean, there are kids who have seen blood spraying and body parts."
Grinning, with her spiked teeth coming together in perfect symmetry, she laughs.
"You know what I like? A good fight."
Wallowing would have been funny. Life is playing out like one of those 50's pharmacy songs he grew up with; too bubblegum to really be sad.
The year is 1987. On April 30th Whitney Houston comes out with the best selling track I Want To Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me). The first criminal ever is convicted using DNA evidence. Lethal Weapon racks up over 100 million dollars at the box office.
In 1987 there are five billion people on planet Earth.
To put that in perspective: 5,000,000,000.
There were 2,863,042,795 on the globe in 1957.
He's getting the sinking feeling that the numbers will keep going up because some people simply refuse to go away.
One trainer gets stuck in the mud while she's running. Her quads are slicked with sludge fused together by shards of broken glass and gravel. Gravel is in her palms and in the small, damp spaces under her knees. Gravel in her hair. Gravel in the insole of her trainer as she pulls her foot out. Bleeding between her toes.
Then you start to grow into your own body. You have boobs now, or your balls drop or something. You have all the things that come with boobs suddenly sprouting on that bare canvas of skin you call a chest. Or your balls doing whatever balls do at that age. I wouldn’t know. I am a girl. But yeah. So you have boobs now, in some fashion. Maybe they haven’t quite reached their full potential yet, but they’re there, and that’s enough. You get to be a kid and have all of those things you saw in movies when you were growing up; lacy training bras; parties where everyone chokes on Smirnoff ice; semi-permanent hair-dye; that kind of stuff. Never mind that you still secretly play with Bratz Dolls or Beanie Babies or whatever—there are boys now. Or maybe you’re interested in other girls. And suddenly we’re all knocking our braces together and feeling each other up. Then, oh, it’s off to school band or some shit. You get to play T rated video games if your parents are cool with it. If you were an adolescent in 2005 like me, you stay up late and listen to 92.0 K Rock on the radio. If you’re adolescent in 2015, I don’t know. But it’s more or less the same thing. You have baby boobs. You’re still playing with kids toys even as you get to explore all the happening things teenyboppers do on TV. Sure, it’s a little weird being caught between “child” and “young adult” or however the new marketing brands it, but it’s pretty good times. Until you get your period for the first time. You don’t know it yet, but your boobs will stop growing. And then you have all the things that come with boobs, but without all the fun stuff. They’re heavy sometimes. Sometimes you have the urge to press them down, make them go away. You wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself pressing them down. This can happen early as 16, like it did for me. You pressing down your tits, trying to make them flat like when you were a kid. You’re trying to go back.
She decides she isn’t going to let those thoughts rent any more space in her head. But the less she tries to think about them, the more room they take up. She hits her brow with her palms. She rubs down at the round of her frontal bone, the grooves where her eye sockets are. Using two fingers she feels the front of her face for an opening. Rent is up, she laughs.