Molly, pt. 5
“Molly’s voice was like the creak of an old door.”
First, Molly, pt. 1: “Just paint, guys, this is a Fun Day. Just paint.” Previously, Molly, pt. 4: “Earlobes flapping against her neck and making a faint sound, a minor tapping…”
Two arduous mouthfuls. Oral sex was antidote to boredom, reciprocated with loud dutiful sighs: in either of their bedrooms, or in either backseat, in whichever parking lot they stalled…
For a couple months, Corey and Caprice gave it a shot.
The sex was mortifying; the anxiety mutual.
By the end of March the whole Corey-Caprice pairing wasn’t working out so well. Already as friends they fought all the time, but usually about silly shit, and anyway they were just joking. As a couple, though, even in their earliest throes, it was all, Why you gotta cough so damn loud? Shoot, and, Why I always gotta buy the condoms though?
Silly shit, still. But silly shit that stung, and sometimes lingered.
Worst off was Tyler, who had to play go-between whenever Corey and Caprice didn’t feel like talking to each other for whatever reason. From the start Tyler was skeptical about the whole arrangement. To be clear, Tyler was not jealous of Corey fucking Caprice, he was just jealous of Corey fucking anyone. Corey was fat. Tyler had muscles and a neat head of cornrows. But Tyler was quiet and none of the girls ever really noticed him, not amidst all the varsity stars that packed most of his classes.
“I’m just saying, why don’t y’all just be friends? Y’all fight all the damn time now,” Tyler pleaded over Traveling Nachos at lunch one day when it was just him and Corey, “Y’all like my damn parents, almost.”
Corey was really not trying to be like Mr. and Mrs. Norton, who could find shit to yell at each other about even during halftime in the bleachers.
Maybe boys and girls just fight, that’s just how it is, Corey thought.
Tyler suspected what Corey wouldn’t say: that Corey and Caprice breaking up on rough terms would upend everybody’s shit. Lunch would become shuttle diplomacy between warring tables, with Tyler stuck running up and down the aisles and having to front like he’d just been off to the bathroom. So long as even that might last. Corey and Caprice would split from each other, and then as if by some hard law of physics, they’d split from Tyler.
Tyler was gonna try leaving the two of them alone for a while.
Tyler was smoking a lot of weed these days with some dumpy ex-football dudes who’d opted for GEDs so they could linger outside one of the auto repair shops around his way, just shooting the shit out back all morning / afternoon / evening / night / morning. Brothers who would never in their lives set foot out of Franklin County. One of them, Jo-Jo, was a tall hood lout who’d slammed Corey up against a locker back in the day, the first week of high school, on the count of Corey’s looking at him funny that morning from his neighboring locker, newly-assigned.
“Man, that’s water under the bridge, nahmsayin,” Jo-Jo grunted as he passed a steaming blunt back across the picnic table to Tyler. Water under the bridge.
And so Tyler drifted.
Molly was learning guitar now, from some creepy college boy over on Gleason who was in to hanging out with seventeen year-old girls, apparently.
Whatever.
Molly didn’t quit band. First chair of the altos still, but you could tell she was over it. Always blowing flat on chipped reeds that she couldn’t bother to replace. Every day, as soon as the bell rang, she hustled quick to the band closet to dump her loaner sax (she kept the new one posted by the desk in her bedroom) and then out into the hallway, beaming in whichever direction.
Molly wanted to be in a band. A real band. Molly wanted to be famous. Adored, rather. Loved massively, and wholesale. Singing lead.
Molly’s voice was like the creak of an old door.
One day before the lunch bell, Molly hovered next the percussion pit at the back of the room, staring up at the clock and waiting for someone. Corey was curious. Took everyone else filtering out into the hallway and Molly turning toward him for Corey to realize that she was waiting for him.
Corey walked over, “What’s up, Molly?”
“Show you something.”
Molly propped her sneaker to the edge of a chair and rolled up her pant leg.
A tattoo? Christ, Molly, for real? Shit, let my mom ever find out I…
Just above the hem of her ankle sock was, amidst a red patch of raw weeping skin, a tattoo scrolled like a princess bangle hugging the taper of her calf, in black / blue cursive:
I’D TELL ALL MY FRIENDS BUT THEY’D NEVER BELIEVE ME
Corey squinted, scrutinized for typos: zero.
Sincerely Corey wondered whether Molly had any real friends.
Corey winced a few seconds too long at the awful sick sweat of her wound, which looked like a virus, like it might give him red eye or Ebola or something if he looked at it too hard. Now he didn’t even feel like asking her about the tattoo, why she got it, what it meant, why she was showing him. Oh, wow, cool, just nodded, looking up to Molly’s proud eyes staring back at him. Then she dropped her foot to the floor and looked off, her face spoiling sour.
“I feel bad.”
“Why?”
“Everyone thinks I’m a brat or something. Since forever. Everyone thinks I’m a bitch.”
“No,” Corey inched toward, and after hesitation, for good measure, “I don’t think you’re a—I don’t think you’re a bitch.”
“What do you think, then?”
“I think you’re—dangerous. No—”
“What does that—”
“It’s like,” Corey swelled soft and slow, “You’re free, and most kids aren’t, is all. You know what I mean. Motherfuckers are just bitter. So they just wish you’d just sit the fuck down sometimes, you know?”
“Do you wish I’d sit the fuck down?”
Both her eyes and the question struck Corey callow. His voice wavered, and he threw up his hands, answering honest as his nerves commanded.
“I don’t know.”
