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Snapshots 1: Seashell
Her fingers dance along the edge of the dress, and it is like spun clouds and cotton candy, smooth, silky fibers beneath
her fingertips, whispering with the froth of dreams. She is a statue, a Goddess carved in beaded white silk that falls from her hips in waves like Aphrodite rising from the ocean.
She is thirteen and she doesn't know why
she's standing here in her mother's room, in this gown like a child playing dress-up. Dark eyes stare back from the mirror at her, and somewhere deep within them is the knowledge that her mother is nearby, passed out on the
kitchen table of their tiny trailer, her drunken snores barely muffled by the thin, cheap wood-paneled walls that separate them. But standing here in this dream of sea-foam white, she can almost ignore the sound. Standing here,
she can hear the beating of her heart, and it is the sound of ocean waves in a world where drunken mothers and abusive, now-absent fathers don't exist.
There is magic here. She doesn't quite understand what it is, but in
the grimy hallway of their mobile home, there is a collection of pictures set into a glass frame, snapshots of memory of a family who was never really a family at all. She has wiped away the dirt on one those pictures from time
to time throughout the years, fingers trailing through thick dust to reveal the young, shining face of her mother as she stood on the church steps in this very dress. She's spent entire afternoons studying the expression on her
mother's face; bright smile, dark eyes laughing, skin glowing. At her mother's side stands her father, but she's only looked at him once, the very first time she discovered the picture. It's her mother's face that is important.
There's something there as ephemeral as the lace that whispers around her body even now, something she's never seen in all the years she's known her mother. Something she doesn't understand or know the words for, but wants to
very badly.
Standing here in this dress, she feels like she almost knows.
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Snapshots 2: Wish
Loser.
Faith craned her neck to get a better look at the boy in the hallway. He was tall, skinny in a way that would have been gangly on anyone else but was strangely graceful on
him; the smooth, sleek contour of wiry muscle against bone. His hair rose upward in spiky waves thick with gel--the kind that held like cement--and as he passed her, he sauntered by with the kind of cool that only rock stars
could pull off. He held a book under one arm like an afterthought, joints loose with the grease of self-confidence and rebellious with bored misanthropy.
Ronnie deVerino. Dark eyes, dark hair, and a way of looking at
people that suggested they'd be better suited to licking the dirt from his motorcycle boots.
Loser. That's what her best friend Marie called him. To Faith, he looked like a hottie.
She detoured down the hallway,
following him at a leisurely pace. He cruised by the cheerleaders and the jocks who had made her life a hell since she'd passed into high school, gliding through them like a shark scattering minnows on its way to bigger and
better prey. Faith knew they talked about him amongst themselves in the kind of hushed whispers they'd once reserved for things like sex and urban legends, but they never said a word to him. They didn't dare. Danger crackled
around him like electricity, and if his mere presence wasn't enough to convince everyone that they'd be best served by staying out of his way, one look in those dark, vengeful eyes was all it took.
He never bothered to
look at the popular kids, or even the misfits of the school, much less speak to them. Guys like Ronnie had their own agenda, and it had nothing to do with the rest of the world. He had friends, of course, other guys like him;
the kind of guys that hung out by the double doors during breaks between classes, smoking cigarettes and trading tough guy stories. They drove muscle cars, wore leather jackets and scowling faces, and did it all with a surplus
of self-righteous anger.
No, Ronnie wasn't like the guys who wrote tragic poetry that she'd so adored in middle school. He was the kind of guy who knew what life was really about.
Faith wanted to know, too.
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Snapshots 3: Leatherette
"You're not going to be able
to play kickball in that," Marie says when Faith gets to the school bus stop, and her face wrinkles in a way that Faith has never seen before.
Faith glances down at the high-heeled shoes that barely fit her
feet--the ones her mom bought her last year when they had to go to some hoity-toity dinner with the one semi-successful boyfriend her mom had managed to date and dump amidst a string of losers--and shrugs inside her skimpy tube
top. "I'm getting too old for kickball anyway," she says, and Marie doesn't say anything else after that.
She walks into school that day feeling like a new girl, almost like a woman, and she can imagine the
look on Ronnie's face when he sees her. The image entertains her all the way to homeroom; dark eyes, normally so unimpressed now wide with surprise as he looks at her, the handsome shape of his lips parting just slightly with
shock. Maybe they'll meet in the hallway, Ronnie sighting her as he struts around the corner, and he'll be stricken so dumb by this hot girl he's failed to notice on all other occasions that he'll forget to keep walking. And
she'll sail by, all cool and confident in her new sexy-skin, and look right in his eyes and give him a slow smile as she breezes by. She's not sure what happens then. Maybe he follows her down the hall, or maybe he puts an arm
out in front of her and lounges lazily against the lockers as he looks her up and down and says something romantically witty...
The dream fades as the day wears on and she doesn't see him, and her heart goes from being
tangled up in her stomach like a storm of hummingbirds to sinking like a ball of lead that sits uncomfortably against her breastbone.
She sees him later as he slides into the front seat of his '68 Mustang with another
girl. Teresa Lopez, a Hispanic girl with dark eyes and dark hair to match Ronnie's, dangerous curves packaged in snakeskin vinyl and skin-tight t-shirts. She's way older than Faith is--a senior like Ronnie--and she's got a
reputation a mile wide for being well acquainted with the backseats of muscle cars all over the school.
That afternoon, Faith buys a beat up leather jacket from the Salvation Army with all the quarters she can scrounge
from her ancient, plastic-pink piggy-bank.
It feels a little awkward on her shoulders--rough leather sliding back and forth, shaped with the shoulders of someone older and larger than she is--and it falls down just a
little too far over her wrists, but it fits well enough. Solid black, broken in, scuffed in all the right places and cut just right to fit like a glove where it ends around her hips.
Beneath the unzipped, worn leather, a
tight black t-shirt caresses the swell of her small, growing breasts, and skin-tight jeans hug the curves of her hips. She's not very good with make-up yet--too much time spent wrestling with the boys in the neighborhood to
learn the value and technique of such girly things--but today she steals a tube of her mother's lipstick and paints her pouting mouth a deep wine color called "Bewitching". She likes the sound of it, exotic and sexy
like the names of her mother's romance novels, and she feels like a bit of a witch in her new clothes and make-up. Maybe a touch of magic is exactly what she needs to get what she wants.
She walks down to the Dairy Queen
parking lot where all the older kids hang out with their souped-up and soon-to-be-souped-up cars, and carefully calculating Ronnie's position and her angle, struts by him toward the front door with a variation of his own
arrogant gait. She's almost there, her hand reaching out to pull the glass door open and her hope sinking like lead again--and then her heart stops along with her feet when he calls her by name.
"Faith?" He's
looking at her like he's never seen her before. But he knows her name. How does he know her name?
Play it cool, she thinks, and shrugs a shoulder inside loose leather as she turns with a smile.
"Depends on who's asking."
She's got a whole repertoire of witty comebacks memorized from movies, and if her heart's thundering in her chest, she's practiced this moment enough not to show it. Their
conversation isn't as romantic as she'd imagined it might be, but she's so swept up by the way his attention is riveted on her that she doesn't even care.
That night, she's riding in the front seat of Ronnie's car.
She is thirteen going on fourteen, and when Ronnie kisses her, she thinks she might explode. It's like all those romance novels and sappy movies explode in her head in a huge jumble of confusion and excitement, and then
it's not like she thought it would be at all. Their mouths slip awkwardly against each other, slick with stolen lipstick, and his chin is prickly with stubble and he tastes like stale smoke, and it's not really sweet at all but
kind of rough. When he slips his hand down her shirt, she trembles and he almost takes it back--but she knows if he leaves now he'll go right back to Dairy Queen and pick up Teresa instead, and so she takes his hand and pushes
it firmly back against her breast, staring straight into his eyes and trying to convince herself that she's only breathing like this because she's turned on.
He tells her she isn't like other girls, that she's special.
Three make-out sessions later, the leather jacket is gone along with the rest of her clothes and her virginity.
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Snapshots 4: Fatale
For the past couple of months, Faith's
spent several hours a week pouring over the fashion magazines in the corner drugstore, listening to Mr. Renaldo give her hell about how she needs to actually pay for those magazines--but somehow it all seems worth it to look at
these women stepping out of their cars, or out of limousines, so beautiful and confident in their bright, glittering cities, bodies encased in flared jeans and designer jackets and make-up that cost more than her mom makes in a
single week waiting tables.
She finds the ad tucked in the middle of an article about some new pop singer. Young, fascinated eyes trace the contour of long dark hair and a sensuous, deeply-shaded mouth, pausing over
glamorous eyes the color of icy skies. A cigarette is held casually between the woman's pursed lips, and she stares out of the pages and into the world of Mr. Renaldo's drugstore with a look of knowing that makes Faith shiver.
Jezebel, her mom would have called the woman.
Faith snatches a look at Mr. Renaldo over her shoulder, and edges her way toward the other end of the aisle. Satisfied that he's sufficiently distracted arguing with
Mr. Reed about the price of his pig's feet, she rounds the corner and slides down to the floor at the end of the aisle; back pressed against the magazine rack, legs folded carefully Indian-style, magazine spread open across her
lap.
The woman sits alone, a glittering barstool queen illuminated as if by a dim spotlight, oblivious to the men around her who stare as if they've never seen such a beauteous, fierce creature. The angle of the woman's
jaw, the jut of her hip, the set of her full, glimmering mouth... every curve of her body promises pleasure and danger. In the background, the men stare and mutter to each other, as if gauging their chances of gaining either
fate, their bodies hemming at the edges of the photo as if they want to surge upon her and ravage her, but don't quite dare.
"Faith?" Mr. Renaldo yells from the front of the store, sounding impatient. "Ya
gonna stare at those magazines all day or are ya gonna give me some money?"
Later that night, after her mom is passed out, she pulls the ripped-out ad from beneath the stack of school books where she stashed it and
stares at it for a long time, gently smoothing out the edges that got crinkled during the hasty trip home. She knows she can't keep it--if her mom found it there'd be a drunken screaming fight and maybe even a brawl. "Do
as I say, not as I do", that's her mother's motto.
So she memorizes it instead, practicing the posture of the woman, making faces in the mirror as she tries to duplicate the air of dead sexy and cool self-possession.
Her mother's cigarettes don't taste very good, but she gets used to them pretty quick.
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Snapshots 5: Ashes
Nearly whispering, Marie hangs on the edge of the bed, eyes riveted on Faith. "So you did it? You had sex? Really?"
Faith smiles, savoring the moment,
and moves to the window, half-sitting on the sill as she pushes it open and breathes in deep, the frigid air of winter filling her lungs. Taking her time, she lights up a cigarette and blows the smoke through the screen.
"Yeah," she finally replies, keeping her voice cool as the air outside.
"Wow," Marie says, dark eyes wide, and Faith can't help but giggle at her. "Okay, okay...but wow! I can't believe..."
Marie trails off, overwhelmed, then her dark eyes flicker up, fixing on Faith with a burning need to know. "Was it romantic? Did he tell you he loved you?"
Faith freezes for a moment, the curl of smoke from the
end of her cigarette the only motion in the room as Marie waits breathlessly for an answer. She remembers the smell of dry-rotted leather, the way it scratched at her bare skin, the awkward angle of Ronnie's body above hers,
the way her clothing crumpled on the floor of the backseat--the only thing she'd dared look at until she couldn't stand it anymore and had to close her eyes. She remembers brief pain like fire, Ronnie's momentary surprise as
she bled, and then there was only continuous rhythm outside closed eyes, the sound of skin on skin and heavy breathing, Kurt Cobain singing faintly in the background.
"Sure," she says. The lie seems to come
easily, but they've been friends for a long time, and she can see the doubt in the lines of Marie's face. She reaches for the ashtray and stubs out her cigarette, avoiding Marie's questioning eyes. "Wanna know how he
kissed me?" she asks, looking up as sudden inspiration strikes her.
Marie's face lights up, and she nods so vigorously that it's all Faith can do not to laugh.
She saunters from the window and sits on the bed
next to Marie, grin playing around the corners of her mouth. "Close your eyes," she says. When Marie regards her with a cautious expression Faith sighs and rolls her eyes. "You said you wanted to know. Just think of it as practice," she says. "And don't be such a dork."
Marie regards her cautiously for a moment more, and then closes her eyes.
Faith stares at her friend, surprised by her compliance. She'd only wanted to provide a distraction, to pull Marie away from the obvious
lie she'd told--she'd never expected Marie to actually go along with it. But now, she finds she's actually kind of curious.
She's not an expert at this yet, and this is definitely uncharted territory, so she leans in
slow, her lips touching Marie's like a gentle question. Mouths open and meet with a gliding swirl of tongue over tongue, a slow trade of give and take that tastes like bubblegum lip gloss and Marlboro's. And she'd expected this
to be weird and awkward--like kissing her sister--but it isn't. It's sweet, and tender, and it's a jumbled mass of confusion that makes her stomach flutter and her mind shake. This is like the movies and novels she'd started to believe were utter crap. This is what Ronnie calls middle-school, girly lovesick bullshit-kissing, and she shouldn't be doing this because it is weird. It's weird because it's not weird, and it should be weird because Marie's been her friend for years and because she's kissing another girl and because she's starting to realize that kissing Marie is different because Marie actually cares about her and she doesn't want to feel like this and know all these things and--
She doesn't want to know this.
Even though there's only a little space between their bodies, and no space at all between their entwined tongues, the space between their hearts grows wider inside Faith.
She mumbles something, rushes out; makes that space between them grow a little wider.
Later that night, before Ronnie can even park the car, Faith kisses him first, fast and hard.
She pushes the memory of Marie's
kiss to the back of her mind and lets it burn in the fire of empty passion.
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Snapshots 6: Poison
The paramedics are scrambling, doing what they do, and Faith watches on with dispassionate eyes as her mother is loaded into the back of an ambulance, her face pale and sallow, a bit of
drooling vomit still trailing from the corner of her mouth.
"Alcohol poisoning," the first paramedic says, voice low.
As if she couldn't have guessed.
"That's the third time in the past year.
If this woman doesn't--" the other paramedic breaks off, his eyes flickering in her direction as he suddenly remembers Faith's presence.
She hates the arrogant pity in his eyes more than she hates her mother right now.
"You got family you can call?" asks the first paramedic, and he's got just as much pity in his eyes, but at least he isn't
looking down his nose at her.
"Sure," she answers. "My aunt lives across town."
"You sure? We can take you with us, if you want." And now he's being kind. She hates that even more.
And she definitely doesn't want to go with them. The last thing she wants is another night in the hospital while they hook her mom up to a dialysis machine and lecture her about how she needs to cut back on her drinking.
"Yeah."
He's reluctant, but he leaves her.
She doesn't have an aunt, of course. There's Ronnie, but she's sick of his stupid party tricks and constantly bumming off her for money, as if she had any,
and like she'd ever call him for something like this. She could call Marie, but they don't talk much lately and anyway, she's not much looking to share this particular chapter in the drama of her life.
The less people know, the better.
She settles for an evening on the couch alone, watching sitcoms and eating microwave popcorn. It's pretty much her standard dinner these days since her dad left home and mom decided a
bottle of vodka was good replacement for everything else in her life.
But it's cool. She likes microwave popcorn. Who needs home-cooked dinners when you can have nights like this, camped out on the couch eating whatever
junk food you want with no parents around to tell you what to do? No annoying boyfriend to bug you, no friends to give you any crap or pretend like they understand what your life's like. No pitying eyes and no fake sentiments.
That's the best, right?
She dries her eyes with angry hands and scoops out another handful of popcorn.
She likes being alone.
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Snapshots 7: Catch
She catches him red-handed.
Windows
steamed, lean body half-naked and stretched awkwardly over the backseat, hands halfway to the goal line, and she only gets a fleeting impression of the girl underneath him, her face white and wide-eyed, pink bow lips shocked
and round in an "o" of surprise.
"Faith!"
He scrambles, and it's almost funny; lithe body, usually so graceful, falling all over itself, tangling and catching on its own limbs as he struggles
to cover himself for some absurd reason she can't imagine.
"Get out," she seethes, and her voice is so hot, so liquid with rage that he obeys.
Out of the corner of her eye she can see the girl cowering
in the backseat, legs tucked up under her body and arms folded across them, shirt held over her like a blanket as she seeks to become part of the upholstery.
Ronnie's head is halfway out the door and he's struggling to
break free, some half-ass apology and explanation strung together like knots of fishing line. Her fist rises of its own accord and flies, catches his mouth in mid-word, connecting with a sharp crack, and he falls back against
the seat, mouth open and gasping like a fish, caught in the tangle of his own lines.
"Fuck you," she says, fists clenching into balls at her side. People are starting to notice now, heads peeking out from
misted windows, doors opening as people slide into their shirts and step out, trying to see what's going on, and Faith gets the hell out of there, afraid she's going to break, that the calm of the moment is going to leave her
and the tears will start to come, and she'd die before she'd ever let any of them see that.
She spends the night dry-eyed in front of the TV, and the next day at school, people cut her a wide berth despite the admiring
and lustful glances being thrown her way. It's all over school at this point. No one is brave enough to talk to her, and she thinks--even though Marie was right--that maybe Ronnie was good for something after all. They're all
afraid of her, and that makes her feel good, makes her forget about the shattered glass that shifts around inside her chest every time she breathes.
After a while, she hardly even notices how lonely she feels.
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Snapshots 8: Grab
The next night, she’s at Johnny’s house,
and Ronnie’s there with Jenny-fucking-Preston, uptight, preppy, vapid girl who’s all boobs and no substance. Faith spends half the evening glaring daggers at them, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes in one corner of the
living room.
Ronnie’s got one arm slung around Jenny’s shoulders as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if last night never happened, as if the whole relationship never happened, and Faith feels rage
build inside her until it threatens to boil over. She throws herself from the corner chair and heads for the door, letting her beer bottle fall into the trashcan with the loud sound of brittle glass breaking.
She turns,
and there’s a guy standing there with a little smile playing around the corners of his thin lips, blue eyes touched with just a hint of amusement.
“You need a ride?”
She stops, folds her arms over her chest and looks the guy up and down. “I can walk.”
“Good, ‘cause I don’t have a car anyway.”
It catches her off-guard, and she can feel herself relax suddenly as
laughter bubbles up from her chest, unbidden.
“What’s your name?”
“Steve.”
She tosses her hair back, using the motion to glance at Ronnie over her shoulder. He’s watching. That alone would be
enough, but this guy’s pretty cute, and kinda funny, to boot.
“Well, Steve, you interested in going to a more private party?”
“Sure you don’t already have a date?” he asks with a speculative glance at Ronnie.
She feels her chest tighten with anger, a dozen emotions spiraling up inside her, and shoves them back down. Collected again, she
gives Steve a cool smile and shrugs. “Looks like I’m free.”
Steve grins and she throws an arm around him and leans in, hamming up her words and laughter as they walk out the door.
She doesn’t bother to look back again.
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Snapshots 9: Disintegration
She stands in the oil-stained, trash-strewn driveway in the aftermath of the whirlwind of sirens and flashing lights and scurrying medics and stares down at the concrete. The world is silence and distant wind in her
ears, her neighbors tucked back into their beds, and for that, she is grateful. She pokes a toe at a disheveled weed that lilts up at a weak angle from a crack in the once-white cement, and shivers as an errant icy wind reminds
her that she's clad in nothing but her thin oversized sleep-shirt.
She turns, feeling lost and waif-like as she folds her arms around her body in a vain attempt to warm herself-and stops short. He's tall, about 25 or so,
and under normal circumstances, she'd have found him exceedingly hot. But tonight all she notices are his eyes, deep brown beneath the midnight-blue of his cap, and staring at her as if she were the one who'd been swept away in
the--
No. She won't think about that. She can't. Just like she can't meet his eyes for more than a second before her gaze falls back to studying the cracked concrete under her bare, dirty feet.
She'd thought
they'd forgotten about her in all the craziness earlier. But it doesn't matter. She's so used to telling the story about her aunt by now that it leaps to her lips, unbidden--and dies stillborn as the radio on his hip crackles
with sudden static.
He lifts the radio to his mouth to respond, and she goes back to poking at the reedy grass with one toe. Just a minute, and then the questions will start. And she'll go down the list like she always
does, her answers prepared and steadily measured by years of experience. He'll nod and then go on his way, just like they all do, not caring a whit about her except for that instant of momentary pity, forgotten, and then it's
back to coffee and donuts and writing speeding--
He's looking at her again, she can feel it. And so she raises her eyes to his and--
There are tears in his eyes.
That isn't right. Something isn't right. All
they'd said over the radio was some sort of code. What did that have to do with her?
And suddenly she knows.
There won't be any stories about her aunt. There won't be any more ambulances pulling in and out of her
dirty driveway in the middle of the night. There won't be any more anything anymore.
She bows her head and the tears come like she always knew they would, no matter how hard she tries to hold them back. Her knees scrape
against cold concrete and her arms tremble around her too-thin ribs, and all she can think is--
She's dead. My mother is dead.
The cop looks at her with his sad, brown eyes, and she can see the platitudes
poised on his lips, about to spill over, and she can't have that, just can't possibly deal with that; some stranger offering her comfort in the cold, cracked driveway of her dead mother's dilapidated trailer.
Not when her only response is "I'm glad."
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