Sally

Note : This story was originally published in Pathos Magazine under the pseudonym Michael Saul Brannon. I haven’t decided whether or not I will keep writing under that name.

Sally

Last year I fell in love with a girl named Sally Crenshaw. She had short black hair and always wore jangly earrings and bracelets, so that when she walked, you could always hear her coming. The way she walked was so impressive; she had this swagger like she knew something really important, but no way in hell was she going to let us in on the big secret. She was always chewing gum too, and blowing big bubbles and popping them all over her face. I swear to god I never saw something more beautiful than her sitting there licking gum off of her lips.

We were both sophomores, so we had a few classes together, and I always tried to sit by her, although most of the time we had to sit in assigned seats, which put us across the room from each other. The assigned seating always went alphabetically according to last names, and my last name is Ward, which is about as far away from Crenshaw as you can get. I always kind of wished that they would go by first names, because mine is Shane, so we would have been able to sit closer then. It always felt really uncomfortable around roll call because I’d be day-dreaming about Sally or something, and I would never hear the teacher call my name, so they’d have to say it a couple of times.

In class, I always wrote notes to her that said really immature things like “you are cute,” or “I like you a lot,” and then I’d just crumple them up and throw them in the wastebasket, or leave them under the desk. It was a pretty lame thing to do, I realize now, but when you are just a sophomore you don’t really think about things like that.

I really hated school. Everybody seemed so fake; it was like everybody was out to please somebody, but I never really knew who we were supposed to be pleasing. Everybody was always going on about what people were wearing, or who they were hanging out with after school. I wore what I had to because my family was pretty poor, and any way I didn’t give a crap what anybody thought about what I wore. I got a lot of shit for it too. I guess that’s why everyone thought I was weird. My mom always said that I wasn’t weird, I just had eccentricities. Funny, because I never looked for them.

Sally was different though. I mean she dressed all nice like everyone else, but she looked different somehow. Like she’d roll up her jeans just a little higher, or she’d wear a bow in her hair when no one else was really wearing bows, and sometimes I felt like everyone else was dressing for her. One time she wore a t-shirt that said “class of ’92” real big on it. A bunch of the sophomores had made up those shirts, but everyone looked ridiculous in them except for her. The shirts were white, and the writing was bright pink and green. But Sally went and tore the arms off of it, and tied it at the bottom so you could almost see her bellybutton, and I almost died when I saw her in it. She used to wear pins too, all kinds of different pins that she’d collected from somewhere, and they always had little slogans on them, or pictures of animals. One of my favorites simply said “cute and sassy” in this weird font. I honestly have no idea why I liked it, except that to me, it pretty much described her perfectly.

I didn’t really have any friends, partly because I was so scared of everybody, and partly because I felt that for the most part, they were all pretty stupid. I just didn’t think anyone got me because of some of the things I did. One thing I did, I used to sit in gym class, and while everyone else was playing kick ball, I’d write on my arms with a sharpie pen that I hid in my left sock. I carried that pen everywhere, because I figured I would never know when I might get the urge to write something. I’d write about silly things, about how everyone is the same and we all try to be so very different, and about how one day I’d get out of this hell hole and make something of myself. I got a lot of crap for that and actually got in a fist fight over it. It was because of this dumb kid Lionel, I don’t even remember his last name, but he used to always end up next to me when we were in line doing our exercise routine. Well one day as we were coming out of gym class, he looked at me all weird and then punched me right in the arm. Then he chuckled and pointed at my arm where I had written some stuff. He just stood there laughing like a big idiot, and I was embarrassed at first because everyone was looking at us, and then I got really mad. Then I went at him, but I didn’t punch him or anything, I just grabbed him by the throat and forced him against the wall, which was pretty amazing seeing as how I was so much smaller than him. I remember the look of terror and surprise in his eyes, and I figured that he probably never expected something like that from me. Some of the other kids finally broke it up and he never messed with me after that.

Anyway it was the little things I did like that, my eccentricities I guess, that made me shy away from other kids, and I think made them not like me very much. But really I never cared.

One day after school I was walking home and decided to stop at the corner store to get a soda. Sally Crenshaw was outside, smoking cigarettes with Holly Blanchard and Jessica Landrieu. Holly and Jessica were both a year ahead of Sally and me, and they always looked perfect. They wore matching outfits a lot of the time, but not matching exactly alike, just enough so that everybody knew that they had talked about what they were going to wear. Both of them had blonde, shoulder-length hair, and perfectly painted fingernails. They were always hanging out together, smoking cigarettes and looking so damn cool. Sally saw me coming up the lot and I swear I think that was the first time she had ever noticed me, even though we’d had a few classes together.

“Hey! Why do you write on your arms like that?” Jessica Landrieu was the loudest bitch you ever met. She never could keep her goddamned mouth shut. I ignored her and went inside, and I could hear them giggling and I imagined that they were planning on cutting my arms off, and burning them up in a fire. I also cursed myself for wearing short sleeves after school, not because I cared so much, just because I didn’t like getting messed with.

I got my soda and went to checkout. The store was run by Ole’ Ricky Butter. He was an old war veteran, and had bought the store from some Vietnamese people with inheritance money or something. He never hired anybody, it was always just him working at that damn store; I think he probably slept there. He was missing most of his teeth, and wore an eye patch over his left eye. I never understood why the hell he didn’t take that inheritance money and fix himself up nice, or why he’d want to buy some run down corner store anyway. He looked pretty harmless to me, but most of the kids in the neighborhood were damn scared of him.

As he was ringing me up, Sally came into the store and walked right up to me. I couldn’t gather the nerve to look at her, I just kept digging for change in my pocket, trying to ignore her and Ole’ Ricky Butter’s right eye, which was focused on my forehead. It was funny the way he looked at you sometimes. He never made eye contact, he just looked at your forehead. Anyway, Sally came right up to me and stood so close to me that I could smell her perfume, mixed with a little bit of sweat. I was so nervous I thought I was going to die right there.

“Hey don’t mind Jessica. She’s a big goof. Really.” She stood there for a second and waited for me to say something. I could feel the sweat building up under my armpits and remembered that I’d forgotten to wear deodorant.

“No biggie.” That’s all I could think to say. No biggie. I felt like the biggest loser in the whole world.

She stood there for a second and then walked off. I stared at the floor for what seemed like about four hours. Ole’ Ricky Butter finally made a grunting noise at me and I fished out the change and handed it to him. He had this big shit eating grin on his face and I knew that my face and ears were red as beets, and I was sweating through my shirt.

After that I never spoke to Sally Crenshaw again. I couldn’t handle the pressure. It’s pretty weird, but after that day I couldn’t tell you anything about the pins she wore, and I could no longer hear her jangle down the halls. I stopped writing those stupid notes, mostly because I knew I’d never have the guts to actually give them to her anyways. I stopped writing on my arms too, partly because I was so embarrassed, and partly because I just realized it was a damn stupid thing to do.