The Weird Kid

I had three polaroids of teenage girls posing sexy. I didn't throw them away with the birthday cards and the letters from people I don't like anymore. I set them aside for Sean. I am the best wife ever, is why.

"Here, naked underage girls."

I don't remember who the girl with the punk shaved side-burns grinding the rose stem in her teeth was, she only went to the Academy for a couple months. But the girl clutching the leopard print pillow in front of her was Steph. She looked a little like Jodi Foster back then.

"So, what is she wearing under the pillow?" Sean asked.
"Underpants."
"Oh." He was disappointed.
"No, I'm sorry. Not underpants. Actually I couldn't describe what is was because it was vibrating too fast to see clearly." Best wife ever.

Steph was a junior my Freshman year. That was the year I had spent reading Drew Barrymore's autobiography, "Little Girl Lost" until the binding broke. At 14 I had never been inside a 7-11. So I was amazed by Steph, and her stories of life in the underworld.

She had told me that she, before coming to the arms of Christ, had been a member of The Tong.
"What's the Tong?" I asked
It was if I'd asked how to wipe myself.
"You don't know The Tong? The Japanese Mafia? They are an extremely deadly organization. Serious shit. I was with them for awhile. They were my family when I really needed one."

I thought that was weird because the Girl's Dean, Mrs. Lemon, had just recently shown me the kitty that Steph's mom had knitted for her couch, as a gift. Kitty-knitting moms didn't seem the sort to hand off the their daughters to crime syndicates.

But I believed it anyway. Steph was hardcore. She'd done sex and drugs and crime and given it all up to go to boarding school in a Nebraskan beet field and love Jesus. Oh, but Jesus couldn't contain her.

It was her idea to try and replicate Calvin Klein ads with my polaroid, she who immediatly stripped off her bra and bunched herself up in the closet. "No, wait. Wait, there's a shoe in my ass, goddammit. Wait. Let me hold it like it's part of the picture. Just dangling on a finger. Like 'wouldn't you like to know what I'm thinking about this shoe?'."

She didn't make it through her Junior year. Around January she started talking with a British accent.

"I've spent sew much time with my Anglish friends I just cahn't shake this dahm accent!" She bailed by March, back to a life of glamor and danger. Glanger.

I only saw her once more, the following fall, when she came to visit with her "fiance," an older blond man who appeared to be entirely composed of grease drippings and anger. They rode a Honda. She waited until I was watching and then French kissed him with pornographic gusto. "Ha ha!" she said, her accent now taking on a more Brooklyn lilt, "You don't get to do that!"

But by then I'd stop reading my Drew Barrymore autobiography and had gotten very involved with Anne of Green Gables. So I didn't really want to kiss him, anyway. What I really wanted at the time was a petticoat.

Sean chopped up the photos of Steph before throwing them away, that same night, less the garbage man get the wrong idea. I wish I'd kept them. Wherever Steph is now, I am sure her life isn't as good as it was then, when she was pretty and 17 and scrunched up in that closet with a shoe gouging her butt. But I've been wrong before.