Copyright (c) 2018 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.
CHRISTINE
At first her heart had
been pounding. Now Christine Louise Brown stood with her back to the cinder-block
wall trying to act casual. She was embarrassed. Her best friends: Nancy, Beth
and Susan had all been asked to dance by seventh-grade boys standing nervously at
the visiting-team side of the gymnasium. As the minutes dragged on and science
teacher Mr. Duff played Beach Boys and Beatles on his portable 45 RPM record-player,
all three returned breathless only to be asked to dance again by different boys.
Christy slowly felt the happiness draining out of her life. Last year in sixth
grade she had been very popular with other girls because her mother designed
and sewed custom made attire for her collection of Barbie Dolls … now all anyone
wanted to talk about was boys. Christy looked anxiously toward the group of
young men. There must be someone who
wanted to dance with her!
Hadn’t her grandfather always
told her she was the cutest little bug he had ever seen as he swung her from
his arms in the backyard by the tree-house? Hadn’t her real father called her an angel as he brought her presents for her tenth,
eleventh and twelfth birthdays? What was wrong with the pink polka-dot dress
she was wearing? Her mother had promised that she looked adorable in it … even
with her mask of red freckles. The laughter from the girls on the dance floor was
beginning to hurt her ears. She hadn’t started wearing makeup yet but neither
had Nancy and Susan. Only Beth did and she painted her lips with a transparent
pink that looked almost as if she were wearing ChapStick.
Mr. Duff started
playing old-stuff, a five year old ballad
by Mark Dinning. With tears stinging her eyes, Christy walked alone toward the
mirror in the girl’s bathroom. A shadow skittered across her path but she was
in too much pain to care. It was cold. For a teenager, the worst injuries are
not physical but social. The cuts don’t bleed but the scars are deep and last
forever. A shadow moved just beyond her
line of sight. Her foot tripped on something and she almost fell. When she
looked around … the floor, up and down the empty hallway, there was nothing
there. What just happened?
The blanched-red face
that stared back from the large mirror hung over a row of six sinks was not
hers. How could it be? She’d never been this unhappy in her life. She crinkled
her nose and tried to look ugly. There was not a great change. Someone came in
behind her and she pretended to wash her hands … over and over again. She didn’t
look up to see who it was. Would they ever leave? Finally the door opened and
then closed again. She was alone … but somehow this was worse.
There was nothing to do
but go back to the gym. When she returned to her lonely place by the wall, Teen Angel was just ending. She’d only
been gone three minutes.
-------2-------
As the year progressed
things only got worse. Things were always going wrong like it was a curse. Her
stepfather, David Monroe, lost his job at the Cloverdale Five and Dime. Her
mother didn’t give a reason, she just took a swing-shift job at a local cannery,
six nights a week, to make ends meet. Filling tin-cans with chunks of chicken
and sodium water and running them through a machine that cut her fingers and
sometimes sealed them against lids for a dollar twenty-five an hour. That meant
her mother was never in the house when Christy walked home from school. Midas,
the golden retriever her real father had given her for her ninth-birthday died
suddenly without cause. The Vet said sometimes these things just happened.
Christy overheard the
neighbor Mrs. Green gossiping to the postman as she was raking leaves near the
backyard fence. Thelma Green told Bob Anderson that David, her step-father had
been caught embezzling. Christy wasn’t entirely sure what the word meant but
she was almost certain it mean stealing.
Dave began drinking
shortly after his lay-off. At first
just one or two Coors a night … then six … and finally ramped it up to twelve.
Now there were at least seven empty bottles of Blue Goose vodka in the trash plus
empty beer-cans, each time she rolled it out to the curb for Thursday pickup.
The fights usually
began when her mother returned from work each night at twelve-thirty and often
went on most of the night. The yelling was loud and three times the police had
been called to quiet things down. Early mornings were filled with sobbing and
promises … always promises … that this was the last time.
There was no one to
talk to at school about her troubles. School had its own set of tortures. The group
of girl-friends she’d had for years suddenly broke up and scattered each time
she approached their circle. She became isolated … a loner. What she wore no
longer mattered. Her dresses were often wrinkled and dirty. It was as if she
had some invisible disease that everyone but her could see. Christy began to
fail every test. Half of her assignments were not even turned in. She thought
more and more about finding a quick way out of her endless misery … whatever it
took.
-------3-------
She remembered the
first day he walked through the
school … everyone did. It was the fall of sixty-eight, the beginning of her junior
year. He was bursting with self-confidence. Every girl’s eye followed as he
strolled past. You could feel euphoria radiating outward like some kind of
nuclear fusion. Light brown hair and eyes the color of summer skies hung over a
smile that made your legs weak. He was every girl’s dream date. You wanted to
reach out and touch him … feel the energy and the magic … and a few of the
bolder cheerleaders did. He had an electrical magnetism that attracted people.
He had the best seat with the most popular students in the cafeteria. If there
wasn’t a place for him … they made one. He tried out for the varsity football
team even though the other players had been practicing for a month and was easily
selected first-string Quarterback and team Captain.
Christy remembered
Johnny Lang’s first week at Cloverdale High School very well. He was certain to
become someone’s dream … but would never in a zillion years be hers. That was
the week she decided to end it all … but how?
-------4-------
Mom was home for once
when she walked in the door from school. It was Friday. Her stepfather was in
the living room drinking vodka and orange juice and watching Star Trek re-runs
on TV. Mother reached in her pocket as she took off her work apron and handed
Christy a quarter. “Why don’t you go to the drugstore and get yourself a
fountain drink,” she whispered.
Christy took the money
from her mother’s scalded-red hands and slowly walked outside. Mom wanted her
out of the house for some reason … another fight coming? It was too early for
that. She walked slowly toward Townsend Avenue. Perhaps an Iron-port and Cherry,
the large size for fifteen cents would help her decide the best way to end
things. It had to look like an accident … anything else would break her mother’s
heart. The rest of the money could go for candy. Why should she care about
pimples?
She stopped to pet a friendly
dog that jumped on her playfully. A
shadow moved just beyond her line of sight. A dog tag or something clinked
on the cement. Mrs. Dern came out on her porch and called her pet inside. Her
scowl said now the dog would need a bath … Christy had touched it.
The sun was just in the
right position to glint off from the city water tower. A ball of welded steel
big as a house supported by six, ninety-foot tall girder-beam legs made the Cloverdale
public works structure look like one of the monster-sized alien machines from the
War of The Worlds movie. Someone had
climbed the dizzying ladder, probably the night before, and had written Class of 70 with red spray paint in letters
above the walkway railing that had to be seven foot tall. Christy shook her
head, scaling that tower was about the most dangerous and scary thing she could
think of doing … then she looked again.
-------5-------
Douglas Bond was
working behind the counter when Christy walked into the drug store. He was bent
over talking to Nancy and Susan. They were all laughing. None of them looked up
as she sat on one of the revolving stools at the far end. The laughter stopped
and Doug was walking toward her wiping his hands on a white-cloth towel. Her
voice sounded mousey even to her own ears. “I’ll have an Iron-port and Cherr…”
Christy reached inside her coat pocket … and the quarter was gone. She tried
the other pocket … then she searched her after-school jeans. Nothing! Embarrassment
was spreading across her face like a grass fire on a windy day.
“I’m sorry,” she
stammered “I don’t know where my money went.”
She got up slowly from the stool, determined not to
run. Her eyes scanned the rows of penny-candy placed opposite the long counter;
afraid to look at the faces she used to know. Just as she opened the door she
heard the sounds of contained laughter bursting like party balloons. Her feet
flew down the sidewalk and across Townsend Avenue without looking … hoping to
hear a screech of tires and that final thump from a speeding car or large-truck
anything with the power to kill. A shadow moved just beyond her line of sight.
The normally busy street was empty … her bad luck!
-------5-------
The house was empty too when she got home. Just as
well! Christy didn’t think she could stand listening to another fight from her
parents. She looked at a photograph of her real father which she kept on her
dresser top. He was wearing hip-waders and holding a pole in one hand and a
string of trout caught from the Cottonmouth River in the other. The smile on
his face made Christy cry. It had been two years since she had heard from him.
South America she thought … working for an oil company. Just as well. He wouldn’t
recognize her now … she had become a stranger … even to herself.
She
set the alarm for three AM. Cloverdale’s only on–duty police officer would be
snoozing by that time in the used car lot next to the VFW building. His idling
patrol car would be hidden among those for sale, waiting to catch that one
illusive, legendary and ever convenient for napping - midnight speeder.
Christy
didn’t need the alarm. She lay awake until it was time … praying. Not for a
change in circumstances, God always drove past her wretched life on the way to
a better one, but for the strength to end it all.
At
one minute to three she shut off the alarm so it wouldn’t buzz and grabbed her
coat. Mom and Dave still were not home? Where could they have gone? It didn’t
matter. Nothing did anymore. There was a can of yellow spray paint in the
garage … half full. It would be … enough she only had to write a few letters.
Let people know she was there … that she had once lived.
-------6-------
The ladder began about fifteen feet off the ground
but someone, a city-worker obviously, had parked a garbage truck directly
beneath it. By standing on top of the cab Christy was able to reach the bottom
rung.
The
first ten feet were the worst. Several times she stopped and almost started
down. Her hands were bone white and numb from gripping the rungs so tightly. Only
the memory of the door in the drugstore opening and the burst of laughter
behind her made her go on. Those girls had been her closest friends once. Where
did everything go? Was she really changed? What about her real father? He hadn’t
even been around. How did he know to avoid her even from thousands of miles
away? Each breath was a cry that no one could hear. Soon everything would be
over. The can of spray-paint in her coat pocket banged against her leg. It felt
lighter. A leak? No, everything was getting lighter. This had to look like an
accident a mistake in judgment. She climbed.
Another
twenty feet and strangely she began to feel better. Domed rays from streetlights
streaming downward made her think of dandelions gone to seed … in a dark and
mysterious garden. Distant car lights … fireflies dancing above leafy bushes. She
cried … and she climbed.
The
stars were somehow closer, rivets on an infinitely large, celestial-net spread
wide and ready to catch her and sweep her all the way up to heaven if she should … when she fell. The last twenty feet she was racing up the metal ladder
becoming a child once more … laughing … climbing an apple tree to get a kite
caught in the branches during her fifth birthday party. This was right … this
was the way her world unfolded!
The
walkway wrapped around the center of the huge metal ball … a giant’s belt with
railings that came almost to her waist. Don’t look down! A spinning sickness
worse than the flu. The wind rippled her red-hair out behind her … a flag in a
storm.
Christine shook the can of spray paint. She would
have to move to the rear side to escape the wind. A shadow moved just beyond her line of sight. Else it would foul
the letters. Anyway that’s where Class of
70 was written.
She’d
laid awake thinking of what to write … something that let everyone know she was
here even though they’d shut her out of
their world. Christine finally decided an and me in tiny yellow letters next
to the large red ones would suffice. A person would have to look closely from
the street to even see them. It somehow fit and was appropriate. No person had
looked close enough to see her … not
for years!
She
thought her hands would be shaking … but they didn’t. The letters were
carefully constructed and seemed to become part of the Class of 70 logo … like well-made graffiti. Christine was oddly
proud … it had been years since she’d done anything right. She dropped the can
on the metal floor and kicked it toward the edge. It might appear to an
investigator that she was reaching for it and lost her balance … went over the low
railing.
She put one foot on the railing and then quick
without thinking the other. Vertigo! Her arms wind-milled for a moment as she
caught her balance. Her heart was pounding like at the seventh grade dance. Christine
closed her eyes and lifted one foot … she was a child again … smiling …there
were presents to be opened … singing … friends … and she jumped.
TO BE CONTINUED … ???
