i never feel guilty until i get caught

i am spending the night at kim's house whose family are jehovah's witnesses like mine. we are a clique of weird outsiders in high school: no birthday celebrations, no holidays, no unchaperoned dating and no "worldliness" (my dad even gets mad at my mom for reading cosmopolitan magazine because "it literally means 'worldly'"). we are somehow in this world but not of it and i am kind of afraid of dying in armageddon.


i am poorish and share a room with my sister. my mom secretly drinks and takes a lot of pills while my dad is devoutly religious. he is very skinny and short and she is either heavy and depressed (alcohol) or skinny, gaunt and bug-eyed (pills). i don't bring friends home since the time she went on a bender and peed herself on the couch. our house is a cluttered mess and our living room has a purple shag carpet that smells faintly of cat piss. i accept invitations and never extend them.

kim is two years older and studying cosmetology so i let her cut my hair. she is inexperienced with the thinning shears and my mom is horrified by the results. i don't necessarily like my new haircut, but i love kim. she is beautiful - tall, perky nose, straight teeth, boobs. i am stumpy and chubby, flat-chested with pretty eyes, i guess - she prefers my bluish green to her brown. kim has two little sisters, a stepdad, a car and an inground pool. her house is spotless and her mom makes great meals and i love to escape there. maybe her mom makes her be nice to me because she knows or maybe kim's intrigued by the fact that i used to be catholic. i don't care why she likes me.

kim and i hole up in her den late on a sunday. i am allowed to stay over on a school night because 1) they are an exemplary witness family and can move my dad up in the congregation and 2) we go to the same school. we order pizza and watch attack of the killer tomatoes for a joke and she plays with my thinned hair while we lay next to each other on the floor. her touch is comforting like mother-child but it is also something else. she tells me about john who likes her, and how she barely stroked his arm and he was totally aroused. i wonder if she was lying next to him just like this. i wonder if we're even allowed.

let's cut school tomorrow.

really?

yeah, let's cut school. ferris bueller? sometimes you gotta say fuck it.

okay.

we get ready for school the next morning which we drive past and eventually into dutch country, avoiding horse and buggies and joking about the amish hookers on the corner. we go to the rickety old amusement park but it is closed so we drive on to a corner market where kim eats an entire slice of fudge in this new, temporary world. someone will see us and tell on us and her mom will call my dad, who will act upset on the phone and laugh when he hangs up because i never do anything bad except the time i shoplifted.


photo by piperaudrey