The Southside of Paradise- Chapter 8

Chapter 8 - There's a World Where I Can Go and Tell My Secrets To

     Jill watched Danny walk away down the sidewalk and then shut the door softly.  With any luck, she thought, the parents would be in their room already. It would be unusual for Clark to have put on his pajamas while Danny was still in the house, but she knew he was half way in the cups before Danny had even shown up. If it had been Mickey, she thought, Clark would have probably came in and dimmed the lights in the room where they sat.    
      
     Like she had figured, the family room was dark, so she walked into the lighted kitchen to make herself a sandwich. There was ham leftover from dinner, and that would taste great she reasoned. When she opened the refrigerator door, she thought she heard a scream outside. She listened for a bit and thought she heard some laughter and so deduced that it was probably Joe and Fish, the kids the next door playing one of their stupid pranks.

     She got the bread out of the antique wooden breadbox that was one of her mother's pride and joys. Mama said it had been in the family for over a hundred and fifty years and had survived the family's travels from Tennessee across Arkansas into Texas and finally showed up in Concord, California where it sat, in privileged position, on a blue tiled countertop.

      Jill reached into the back of the fridge and pulled out the mayonnaise jar, sat it on the table, and then grabbed the blue Tupperware container where her mother had stored the leftover ham.

    She heard some tires squeal from the street outside, but as there was an intersection across the street and one house down, it wasn't that rare to hear people peeling out from the stop sign, stupid, drunken boys for the most part. Many of whom were trying to get her attention.

   She made the sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk, replaced everything, and walked down the hall to her room.  Her mom's light was still on; she could still see the light leaking through the bottom of the door. She tapped on the door lightly and said, "Good night, Mom. Good night, Clark." The good night to Clark was for her mom's sake, as she could already hear his snoring coming through the closed door.

     After putting a Chicago album on the stereo, turned down low,  she sat crosslegged on her flowered bed cover and began nibbling on the sandwich. She absentmindedly tucked a stray golden strand behind her left ear and thought of Danny. He had touched her tonight in a way that most of the boys she knew had never touched her. Watching him recite a passage from a poem from memory was not something she hadn't seen very often.

     There was something powerful in how it happened. Maybe it was the look in Danny's eyes. His eyes were nice to look at anyway, but they filled with light as he spoke. He was also calm and confident beneath Clark's drunken gaze. The only other boy who could make that claim was Mickey. 

     Mickey could not recite poetry because he knew no poetry; he had no poetry about him, He was exactly what you saw, an Adonis, a teen age heart throb with no publicist. He said the stupidest things at the worse times and people loved him for it. She loved him for it.

     His boyish face and cocky grin still haunted her dreams. But she couldn't keep her self respect and stay with him. He had to be made to understand that going out with Lisa Langley was crossing the line. She couldn't love him out in the open, at least, not for a while.

   Then there was Danny. He wasn't like those other boys she had been dating, muscle bound idiots from the Southside mostly. They were all overconfident and just begging to be hurt. She didn't go out with guys from the north side of Whitman Avenue, or from her own social strata. That would cause too many problems afterwards, after she made up with Mickey. Besides, she knew that Mickey seeing her with guys he felt to be his social inferiors, her social inferiors, drove him wild. He was a bad, bad boy who needed to know what jealousy was like.

   But Danny Wilson was going to make things hard. He wasn't over confident to begin with; she always noticed the trace of doubt in his eyes. Even when he smiled, it was a shy smile and always ready to be ruined. He said funny things all of the time. Mickey's sense of humor was hardly more than what you would expect from a thirteen year old kid. Danny often used words that she had to look up later and in ways that meant something. Mickey was happiest when talking about himself.

      She felt funny things happening as she sat in Lit Class reading Cyrano's words to Roxanne, words that he couldn't voice to her himself. Danny had those words memorized and speak them on command. Did he know how they made girls like Roxanne feel?

     Jill wondered if was he able to look beyond her own beauty and see flaws, the fact that she still loved a narcissist, or the fact that she was more than capable of using other boys most cruelly and tossing them away like tissues?

    Who was this strange boy? Who was he trying to fool with his longhaired, scruffy looking self? Jill looked out her window at the moon in the sky and knew she didn't want to have to hurt him and would prefer to keep him as a good friend, someone to talk to when Mickey and her were on the outs.

     When Mickey and his pals had beat the crap out of Mikie Rogers, she had been there and secretly gloated as she thought, "That's serves you right for the way you tried to force yourself upon me." But she understood this night, sitting on her bed with a half eaten sandwich in the plate upon her lap,  that she would take no joy in hurting Danny Wilson.

         What she didn't know was that Danny was already bleeding.
        

  

           
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