Heart - Bonnie Smetts

My heart’s had enough battering from Roy for this whole week. I’d rather go to school to see what that might be like, and so I do. I go when I feel like it and last year that wasn’t too much. I hate school.

First of all, I walk. No girl my age waits out here in the woods for a bus, and I got no friends with cars. So I walk, away from my momma’s trailer toward the school. Nothing worse than the first days of school when the front of the place is jammed up and everybody’s hugging and saying how good it is to be back. Never for me. Being with Roy’s made it better, just knowing what most of these people don’t know. Making love with Roy in the summer heat. I got that to carry with me, right past these girls, right past the boys that have always said things about me that even me, in most spitting mood, would say about another person. And I got nobody here at school.

I pass the bathroom and decide to go in, having miscalculated how late I should be. And there she is. Randy. Now me and Randy haven’t had too many words since that time in the shed with Pauley when we were kids. Not that we don’t like each other, we say hi and whatever. It’s just something about that time put a silence between us. But here she is.

“Hey,” I say. And of course she says that back, we’re a kind of friend, at least compared to everyone else.

“I didn’t think you’d be back this year at all,” she says. We both laugh. It’s a crazy miracle that either of us is back this year.

“Thought I’d come in for a while,” I say. “How about you?”

And there we were, friends again. Nothing about that conversation to say why that stole the break between us, but it did. And so I meet her at lunch, we sneak away from school and she smokes.

“I can’t believe you’re smoking,” I say. “You were the goodie one.” She was always the one that thought up things for us to do, but she was the one who’d chicken out too.

“I know, I shouldn’t do it. It’s bad for your skin,” she says, blowing the smoke up through those curls around her big eyes. “But hey, I like it, and it gives me something to do when I can’t think of doing anything else.” We laugh at that and I consider smoking for just a tiny moment. But I got too many reasons not to, doing anything even close to my momma or the boyfriends is beyond thinking for me.