Bambi

Bambi wasn’t nervous. She was static and unaffected, wishing she was anywhere but there. Her friend Donna placed a sweaty palm on her shoulder and soothed, “Sorry they’re late. Clay’s dad had to drop his brother off at a school thing before taking him here.”

Bambi had hardly spoken the whole time they waited in the restaurant for Donna’s boyfriend and his friend.

She was spending the whole weekend at Donna’s house and Donna spending time with her boyfriend was on the weekend itinerary so it was decided they would make an event out of it. Bambi wasn’t given much of a choice in the matter since her mom was out of town and thought Bambi was too young to stay at the house on her own. Donna claimed that coupling Bambi with an eighth grader from Clay’s soccer team was just what was needed to make the weekend complete.

However, Bambi couldn’t sleep last night. They spent hours playing with Legos, building a town around the intimate lives of Spider-Man and a plastic citizen they named ‘Chloe.’

Donna chuckled, “I can’t believe we just spent four hours playing with Legos. We’re almost in high school. If Clay found out, he’d dump my ass.”

After the word “ass” was dropped casually into the conversation, Bambi shut down. Once the lights went out and Donna had fallen asleep, Bambi spent the whole night staring blankly at the black ceiling, with glow-in-the-dark stars dimly lit.

She remembered that morning when they were getting dressed and Donna clipped on a padded bra while Bambi just threw on a sweatshirt. She remembered Donna brushing delicate strokes of shadow on her eyelids while Bambi tied her hair in a french braid.

Before they left for the double date that night, Donna told Bambi to close her eyes. Once Bambi opened them, she felt her bones weaken with every scan in the mirror. Her face was made a canvas, the shimmer on her cheeks and the colors on her eyes and the thick feeling on her lashes. Bambi was gone.

Soon enough the boys arrived. Adam smiled at Bambi, “Hi, I’m Adam.”

Bambi brought upon herself a dimple, showing just enough friendliness that she didn’t appear as though she was planning his murder. After they seated themselves Adam immediately questioned, “Is your real name Bambi?”

Bambi was slow to respond. So slow that she didn’t respond at all, actually. Donna cut in, “Her full name is Bambina.”

Bambi was unaffected by the conversation, just taking in every detail about Adam, from the whiskers above his lip to the dainty fingers attached to his hands. He exuded the aura of manhood with all of the physical qualities of adolescence.

Adam kept peeking glances at Bambi while she glared at the entrance door of the restaurant full of resent that it had opened for them. She fantasized that they would have been dropped off at the door and it would be locked. Or that the hostess would see them and turn them away for being too young. Instead, the hostess gleamed,

“Follow me to your table,” in which Bambi’s wishful response would have been, “I prefer not to.” But she followed.

If she had felt like it would have been socially acceptable, she would have responded to everything that night with “I prefer not to.” She did the next best thing, however, and decided to respond with nothing.

She stayed quiet the whole night and when Adam would try to ask her something, she would take a sip of water and suddenly Donna was answering for her. Once questions were asked, they were up for conversation. Everything was discussed, from junior varsity to where they wanted to live and what they wanted to do when they were older. Bambi’s heart should have been pounding, she should have been excited that she was having that experience. The first date. She was in the raft of adulthood but instead of wading down the lazy river, she was gripping to the side, struggling against the current.

When the conversation died down and the laughter subsided, the silence comforted Bambi. It didn’t seem to comfort Donna, however, when she soon asked, “Bambi, are you going to say anything this whole night?”

Bambi was quick to reply, “I prefer not to.”

The others, with no idea how to reply, simply filled the void with a forced laughter. Clay was gawking, as if the view of Bambi was one that he had never seen before.

Without anything else to do, Bambi slid out of her chair and took out her phone, “I have to make a call.”

She waited no longer than a millisecond for a reaction from those at the table before scurrying off to the back of the restaurant and into the secluded bathroom. Her fingers fluttered over the screen of her phone as she dialed her mom.

Her mother answered promptly and opened with, “Bambi, is everything okay?”

Bambi hadn’t realized how much the night had affected her until she answered, “Clay has a mustache, can you come pick me up?”

Her mom told her she’d be there in half an hour but that was thirty minutes that she was to spend at that table. Nothing about going back there with those stories of hookups and high school and the future appealed to Bambi. She couldn’t go back out there.

Her brain felt like it was blistering, rubbing against the bone of her skull and swirling a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She kept catching glimpses of herself in the mirror and realizing that her own reflection was one of the culprits of her nausea. She couldn’t go back out there, not with every part of her telling her not to.

Leaning against the sink, she contemplated her next move. It only took two seconds for her to look up and see her answer. The window.

She crouched to the floor, noticing a chunk of hair stuck in the grout between the tiles. It didn’t affect her when she stretched her body out and prepared for her escape by doing ten pushups. After which she took a bold step onto the toilet and messed with the small, rectangular window until it was jimmied open.

Bambi used all of the upper body strength she had just practiced on the bathroom floor to push herself up onto the windowsill and slide through the opening. She splatted onto the sidewalk outside of the restaurant without a single scratch.

Bambi hid the evidence of her escape by kicking the window closed, only to turn around and find a couple gawking at her. One of them asked, “Is everything okay?”

Bambi rubbed her fingers across her eyelids, bringing with them a shimmery white and lustrous deep brown, and felt a pressure against her whole body being lifted. She answered, “Bad date,” and flashed her teeth.

The woman observed, “You seem a little young to be going on a date.”

Bambi simply replied, “Yes.”

Edited by Maryam Elahi