Flash Fiction: Junior High

Sometimes I whip out a little flash fiction either to warm up before I start my two hours' morning work on a novel (currently I have this fun one going about a girl who goes to a mysterious village in the French Alps and uncovers werewolf-y goings on) or else as a break right afterward. I thought I was in a pretty good mood this morning but clearly there was some bah humbug lurking around in there somewhere. Here's the dark little number I came up with (feedback welcome, as always):

Junior High

Because, you see, they turned on her. Marti had a few friends, three, keeping her from the bottom of the heap, but they turned. Maybe the day one of their fathers called her Townhouse Trash when he thought she couldn’t hear. Her parents had moved to the suburbs because the schools were better. They lived in the same complex as all the newly divorced moms and everybody else’s maid. Lisa and Caitlin and Ashley all had their own houses. With breakfast nooks.

Marti was walking across the overpass above Green Bay Road. To home. Where they couldn’t see her.

“Hey!” they called. Lisa was on a bike and Caitlin and Ashley walked along next to her. “We want to talk to you.”

They got her with her back against the railing. The cars whizzed by below her, on their way to Ravinia, the outdoor theater, to classical concerts outside in the warm autumn and music school for gifted children.

“Okay.” Marti was defiant. “Talk.”

Ashley stuck out her upper lip to parody Marti’s overbite and Caitlin mimed the soccer shot Marti missed in gym class that afternoon. Lisa called out, prancing over her bike, “Ooh! Ooh! I’m so cool! I only wash my hair once a week and wear a rugby shirt every day!”

Marti’s two striped rugby shirts were bought with her baby-sitting money. Her parents didn’t understand about how that was all anyone at school wore. She was saving for a pair of Levis, too, so they couldn’t make fun of her Sears Toughskins anymore. The real down jacket was way out of reach, and there wasn’t anything she could do about her oily hair. She didn’t wash it very often, it was true. It was like she was afraid she would fall apart in the shower.

Marti leaned over. Lisa’s hair was long and dark and smooth and neat on either side of a white middle part. The cars whizzed by below her.

Just ignore them, her parents always said. Ignore them.

She grabbed a fistful of Lisa’s hair from either side of the part. How soft it was, how silky. how straight. Like all the really popular girls’ hair. She pulled. She pulled as hard as she could. Some of it broke off in her hand. Lisa screamed. The cars whizzed by. Ashley and Caitlin tried to get her off Lisa but they couldn’t. She hung on. She leaned back over the railing like she would take Lisa over by the hair. The cars whizzed by below, far below.

She pulled hard. So hard. The tears pulsed down Lisa’s face, the screams echoed, bloodcurdling, throat-cutting, satisfying. Marti let go, grinning. They turned. They ran.

It was the best thing she ever did.

She never regretted it. Never. When she was fifty, married, with children, full of love, she was still glad. And while she idly watched the news, getting breakfast ready for a family, her curls coifed and perfectly highlighted swinging across her back, she saw the jocks and beauty queens, saw even the banal nobodies who only watched, pouring out of the high school cafeteria. Saw the SWAT teams. Heard the rapid-fire of the boys’ sub-automatics.

Oh! Good for you, she thought, her jaw tight, her hands still around the straight silky hair while the cars whizzed by below. Good for you.