It was rumored that after they jumped her for her Doc Martins outside the 7-Eleven on Colorado Boulevard, Abby became animal, too vicious for birthday parties or sundresses. I knew different. Now too paranoid for boots, afraid a pack of skinheads would come for them again, which they would, eventually—me—after a night of vodka and a local band whose name was knocked out of memory at a punk club near the tracks.
Those shaved girls with their goofy blonde bangs lingered in the bathroom, checking shoes from under each stall. Funny, what made me most paranoid was a mosh pit without boots, a sure trip to emergency for a blown-out arch or crushed toe. So the girls in Chucks or pointy gothic witch flats were spared, but chicks, me, with steel toes were cornered, so I took mine that night, kicking and swinging; they said I was ferocious. Wolverine, they said. The skinheads left without my boots, which is to say I won, I guess. A little battered.
They rumored us wild. We were just average white girls from questionable families, poor, public-schooled, always outclassed. Sleek, whose real name was Martha, lived in a car with her mom. Abby’s mom was a recovering alcoholic, closeted lesbian which is only to say Abby hated the way bourbon always came home when her mother found and left a new girlfriend. My mom had a thing for Bacardi and unavailable men, a fevered backhand. Dads were scarce back then.
Rumors grew into legend: at least one of us had stolen our jacket or boots or books, at least one had been pregnant (at least once), one of us went down on some jock in the stairwell between classes. Maybe all of it was true, in distorted shapes. Rumors that we beat the boy who lost our acid money and traded a can of Scotch Guard, which we huffed in the park during class until Sleek passed out, rolled into a ditch. Rumors Matt dyed his pubic hair and Conn fathered countless kids and Ehron kept a stash of ball-gags and Tink had HIV and Tracy was a meth head. Rumors Jay sank so deep into acid and whiskey he eventually fell out the other side a heroin addict and then, died. How his father beat him so badly, his arm healed crooked and he left town and came back straightedge, tried to enlist the skater boys, but couldn’t stay clean, how his father buried him without a funeral.
Rumored one of us even took up with a Nazi, fully sure she’d change him, only to wind up with a swollen face, cracked temple, a court order, on the run. Only to be stalked for decades, in and out of homes and cities and husbands. And maybe that girl was me, while Abby married well and became mother/teacher/wife, spared of lore. How Sleek kept her name, buried her mother, drove off in that old car and was never heard from again.
Jeanann Verlee’s work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Rattle and Failbetter, among others. She is the author of Racing Hummingbirds (Write Bloody Publishing), which earned the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal for Poetry. She has been awarded the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for poetry and served as poetry editor for Union Station Magazine.
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