Special thanks to blackrandi for the invitation to participate in "The Magical Mystery Tour," and allowing me to throw in two stories. I wrote one story for the invitational -- "Mausefalle," a historical posted in Romance. I was quite happy with that, but a country song, "Hell on Heels," left me with an itch to write this particular story. It wouldn't leave me alone until it was finished, so I asked blackrandi if it was acceptable to submit two. I've included other "Thanks" at the end.
*
I'm no hero, at least not now.
The last time I did anything brave was a long time ago. Fourth grade, actually. There was a girl in my grade named Cindy Van Dyke. Not popular, not well dressed and not well off. She'd probably never be pretty. Her red hair was dark and, dull, hardly ever washed. She had freckles; not the cute dusting across the nose some girls had. They were stark blotchy ugly things on a pallid smooshed mean-looking face.
It was on one of those blustery fall days where the damp wind came up extra cold, the kind where nobody's parents had them jacketed quite heavily enough, so we clung close to the school during recess to stay out of the harshest part of the wind. That kind of concentration of fourth graders reaches critical mass quickly.
For whatever reason, Cindy Van Dyke somehow became the focus of a random rush of grade school cruelty.
I don't really remember the exact nature of the Cindy Contagion, but I do remember that if you wanted to remain uncontaminated, you had to stay off whatever 8 x 6 block of broad playground concrete she was on. The effect was like a reverse magnet, hordes of fourth graders rushing to evacuate to safe places, leaving a miserable Cindy surrounded by a bubble of loneliness. I have no idea what possessed me to stand my ground as she trudged toward me, a cloud of misery hovering around her. Maybe at first I was playing the game, too, and by staying in place I was showing I wasn't afraid of our newly-minted Typhoid Mary. If so, it didn't last past a single look at her downcast eyes.
I had been singled out just a couple months before for the crime of wearing a t-shirt with the Butterfinger candy bar logo on it. I'd suffered my sentence of carrying "Butterfingers" as my nickname for a month. As if life isn't tough enough at that age when you are already named Calvin Pickmann. I'd shaken those chains off and gone back to my given name just a week ago.
So as she stepped onto my block, when I was supposed to jump clear, I just stood there and said, "Hey."
She watched me warily for some clever trick; she knew how the game was played, too. She couldn't believe anyone would defy the will of the Horde. After a minute, she nodded, and I went back to rearranging pebbles for some mystic fourth grade reason.
I could feel the communal outrage build as the Horde realized in its dim emotional collective conscience that I was refusing to play along. There was a slow but certain realization that I'd have to be punished, at the very least ostracized, along with her. I was, as they say, well and truly fucked. I'd even done it fully knowing the consequences.
My salvation came in the form of another redhead: Laura, a skinny fearless copper-wire-haired bucktoothed fury in slightly ragged clothes. She'd never been a friend before, barely had two words for me in our five years as classmates. Maybe she really stepped in as a member of the Secret Redhead Mutual Aid Society. Regardless of the reason, the equation changed as soon as she stepped onto that forlorn block of concrete desert with us. Laura was nobody to trifle with. She had an explosive redhead temper and long sharp nails that she wouldn't hesitate to bring into play. Many of our classmates had felt her wrath.
She glared around with blazing forest-green eyes at the suddenly cowed mob, daring them to do or say one goddamned thing.
The nasty energy of the mob evaporated in the inferno heat of her stare. Kids were suddenly drifting away, finding other things to do, leaving the three of us standing uncomfortably on our stronghold. Cindy glanced around, not quite sure what to make of her rescue and hastily retreated to the safety of the space near the classroom door, where there was real teacher overwatch. She would disappear after the end of the school year. Moved to Ohio, I think someone said. I don't remember for certain. I remember hoping she fared better there. I really did.
Laura and I just stood ignoring each other for a long while. She finally gave me a curt nod and headed toward the foursquare area where her friends were waiting. Later that year, Laura would mark my arm with her nails in a rather one-way discussion over the use of a jungle gym, but compared to the usual way she dealt with interlopers into her chosen domain, it was rather mild.
We weren't friends, not really, but we nodded to each other in passing.
Absolutely unable to suppress her, the popular girls brought her into their fold; although she never seemed as cruel and heartless as the rest of the Amy-Angie popular-girl crew tended to be. For my part, I trudged along in my hand-me-down clothes with my nose buried in whatever book I'd dug out of the school library.
Laura didn't go through puberty, she exploded through it in epic style. By the end of 8
th
Grade, her frizzled carrot mop had turned to exquisite red-gold silk, buck teeth turned into a brilliant 1000-watt smile, and her figure... well suffice to say it looked like the boob fairy had decided there was no such thing as too much of a good thing. Somewhere along the way, she changed her ragged clothes for the fashionable kind. She'd immediately been swept into the Cheerleader-and-Jock world of the beautiful, while I had slogged into the lower end "Brains" category as we felt our way into, and then through, high school.
I actually managed not to completely screw up High School. I passed with pretty good, though not great, grades, and I'd had a for-real, all-the-way girlfriend, named Keri, until her parents packed up and took her to Colorado with them right after my Senior Prom.
By the time we graduated High School, my fourth grade heroics were long forgotten, and I'd probably said two sentences to Laura in the last three years. Partly because no sane girlfriend would want her boyfriend talking to the most beautiful girl anyone could imagine, and partly because Laura moved in different circles. Once in a while, passing each other in the hallway, we'd say "Cal" and "Laura" to each other, but nothing more. Sometimes I would look at her and it was like we caught each other looking, both hastily looking away. Even thinking about her was probably dangerous. She had a college boyfriend with a black Trans Am, for God's sake. I think the boyfriend actually changed out occasionally, but they were hard to tell apart. For all I knew it was the same car.
I'd decided to skip college, mostly due to a distinct lack of money for such things, and had continued working at the auto parts store where I'd been for the last two years. Six months of that, though, and when the Army recruiter told me about how I could finagle college out of a four-year enlistment, I decided to give them a shot. I'd be getting on the bus to basic training on the 2
nd
of January. I had no great dreams, but I scored big on the test for learning languages, and I'd asked to be a Chinese linguist. I'd heard it translated to a lot of college credits.
For my last hurrah, I decided to attend Joe Pedone's New Year's Eve party. He was a year older than me and had "the cool parents" who, since the year he turned sixteen, simply disappeared for about three days before and a week after New Year's, giving him plenty of time to plan, execute and clean up. Needless to say, this time was not wasted. He had the craziest parties, or so I'd heard. Having a full-time girlfriend whose idea of celebrating New Years was much more intimate had prevented me from joining the festivities, before.
Of course, I'd run into problems. My cousin needed help moving to his new house and I'd been roped in, under the pretext of him seeing me one last time before basic training, of course. So, after an 18-hour day, I made it to the party after it'd been in full swing for a couple of hours, and I was completely wiped out. I managed one rum and coke, then asked him if I could lie down for a half hour in one of the guest rooms. He gave me a solemn promise to send someone in to get me in 30 minutes.
I basically missed the whole damn party. As raw morning light filtered in through my eyelids, I shifted and someone spoke in a hushed tone.
"Where's your shirt?"
