Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:23:42 -0500
From: inabelljar@gmail.com
Subject: Hot Palms (Part One)

There's an unsolvable dead stillness to the small towns of South Carolina,
slowly stagnating under clumps of leaning palm trees, exhaust clouds and
the smell of cooking oil overpowering the ocean smell. The residents of
road-trip stops like Aiken and Gaffney don't smell anything but the faraway
beach. Still the classic down-home, they say, only suitable place to raise
a child, only suitable place to nest, only place you'd want to die. So the
last names never change, and become the names of elementaries and
restaurants and tire garages, soft pretty families with polished offspring,
trained to preserve themselves like steel rifles and mellow feminine wine
for the reward of recreating their parents' Southern sheen as closely as
they can, defying the crudeness of city streets and MTV to become museum
pieces.

Among the charming twangs of debutantes in the halls, Jeri's hard walk and
coarse-pavement skin tone gave away that she had not, for one, been the
fragile subject of male handlings at Miller Regional High School, and that
her decidedly dark gaze and worker's muscles were not the product of white
parenting, two good disqualifiers for involvement in the concrete social
circles of bouncy volleyball virgins and sweet-sixteen princesses that
controlled the campus tides. Between Jeri and they lay the thick chalk
playground line, somewhere between the death of indifference and the
sickness of hate, dividing untouchables from those shunned for wanting to
touch. Despite the expectations of shame and inferiority in a market of
bridled young belles, Jeri managed to carve out a comfortable niche for
herself, if tinged with resentment and angst; drifting between the
Cobain-wannabes, the fan-ficcers, the scowling liberty spikes and the
neighborhood soccer stud pals who tried and failed to drink her under the
table, she stapled herself confidently into her own untouchable paths
around campus, silently daring anyone to counter her.

It had been an unforgivable August, and September offered no release from
the dirty humidity that kept air conditioners buzzing daily, ice-cold keg
parties raging nightly; every year is someone's senior year, but this
go-round, the drinking seemed ever more frequent and the girls ever more
willing, looking to go out with a bang before leaving for university, the
beginning of the end of free life.

By 4:30 PM, the school had long emptied, buses departed for rich
Charleston-style neighborhoods and a few less-fortunate ranch-house
developments on the outskirts. The day of the janitor had just begun, and
most of Miller's janitorial staff took the town bus; Jeri's was the only
car in the lot most days at this hour, a Jeep with an irritating hum,
halfheartedly decorated with a few stickers, Riotgrrrls, Sonic Youth,
Shop-At-Kay's-Alternative-Book-Box. With her tanned arm slung out the
window, permanently twirling a cigarette, Jeri propped her knobby knees
against the steering wheel, closed her eyes, exhaled and leaned back. She
extracted a lighter from her shirt pocket, lit, then reclined, lazily
playing with her ear gauges, her silent everyday ritual of lonely
meditation with the E-brake up. Turning the volume up on Placebo, she used
her time as she always did, losing herself in more thoughts than anyone
expected to exist behind her taut face. Recounting the week; a solitary
one, excepting an afternoon jam session at goalie Kirk's apartment and a
snarling confrontation with a cheerleader whose name she didn't know. These
kinds of altercations she mostly managed to avoid and rarely provoked in
any way, but for the more territorial of the Miller Manatee squad,
proximity to the manicured practice field was provocation enough. Two
lunchtime cigarettes behind the dumpster instead of the usual one meant
Jeri was late for Calculus, which hardly perturbed her, but meant her usual
quiet walk by the football field would become an untimely creep through a
minefield of pep ralliers.

"I'm sorry, but you're a little late for tryouts. The anarchist society
meeting is across the street, I think.."  "And we don't train cattle, so
until that nose ring is out of the way.."

Two peach-flesh redheads combusted into giggles, the first helping the
second into a backbend on the green. Nearby squad members, stretching like
cats against the grass, chuckled and demeaningly stared down Jeri, waiting
for a response to their infallible criticism. BB, captain, tan and
luxuriously breasty, seemingly Chinese but determined to pretend otherwise
under her straw-dyed Rapunzel strands. Monika, Rachael, skinny freckled
arms. Taylor and Justine, the towheads.

"It's really not bad being a girl, you know. You should try it sometime,"
Justine piped up, prompting obnoxiously quick squeals of laughter from
Taylor. Moon-white Tess, more legs than she had height, milky shoulders
slathered in sunscreen. Daryl, petite country biscuit, top of the pyramid.
Curly-haired Genna and Agnes, identical twins, one strangely more
attractive than the other. Jeri had been staring, lips slightly parted, for
possibly thirty seconds before she caught herself evaluating this flock of
bending innocents, seeming innocents, crueler than little boys with pellet
guns.

Tess snorted. "She's got enough tits for three girls." Sensitivity turned
to fiery disgust, and Jeri was glad she was already walking away in her
cloud of armored defeat. The group was in an uproar, wigglng their hips and
high-fiving gleefully at their guaranteed success until the rodeo round-up
for stunt practice was begrudgingly called into session.

Remembering their painted faces, their flirtatious Starbucks-geisha
prancing, all eighteen dewy edge-of-the-ass-cheeks teasingly rolling
left-right-left at the edge of polyester skirts, Jeri came to and wondered
how long her jaw had been clenched. The habits that our conscious doesn't
know, built from long-standing hate and long-standing need. She watched her
car thermometer click up two degrees, not doubting even her faulty Jeep's
prediction--it felt like 97, hotter after her bitter reverie. On days like
this, other girls longed to unbutton their frilly Abercrombie blouses and
fight the humid air. Jeri muscled herself backwards in the seat, gave the
vacant lot a quick glance, then wearily yanked her white tank top around
her neck, around the militant espresso ponytail, onto the seat. Certain
concessions she made, others passed her threshold of caring or conceding;
behind bony elbows her armpits were smooth and young, her breasts larger
than she felt she had use for, smooth and pert though she'd never owned a
bra.