Laughter on the Wind
Brianna Thompson
Taken off guard. Still. Her chestnut hair shiny, eyes wide as when she said she was pregnant in tenth grade. No contact for eighteen years, since high school. Now, she has seven children. If having children is a kill count, your total is zero. So shiny her hair, thick as her charm back then. Everyone loved her, even teachers whose classes she’d skip. She was the only one who was kind, ever, in a sea of relentless pimples and varsity jackets and parties everyone else was invited to. She was also the only one who had boyfriends. Plural.
Read the coffee menu while your hands fumble a credit card. So wide, her blue eyes. Became best friends in eighth grade. First it was homework and notes passed. Then: makeup, glitter polish, burping contests, slumber parties, Eminem posters stolen from Walmart.
Camcorder sitcoms: Sex in the City but it was rural besties moving to the Big Apple. Best friends living in a NYC studio apartment. Her fake name was Dallas; she was at fashion school on a scholarship and we bought our first pair of Jimmy Choos.
In ninth grade she whispered to you with wide eyes so serious, explaining how he fingered her. Then later, when a different, older, he asked is this ok in the back of his car after prom, she thought he meant fingering but he did it to her and she didn’t say no.
She shrugged. I was just taken off guard.
Held her secrets, made mixtapes, laughed in the windy fields behind school, banked the accumulating currency of a spiteful stepmother. Thought we shared something immutable, perfect if brief, before her first pregnancy. Then she only spoke of him, then only to him. The desert was hot and boring and escape was imperative. Off to college, to keep your kill count at zero, to have a career, become cosmopolitan etc etc. She stayed local, swelling her kill count to two after graduation.
Want to thank her, want to ask, in a hometown coffee shop decades after the fact. Her kindness got to the tender bits hidden from junior high, from lockers slammed in faces. Did she too feel fractals of love, recursive tenderness big enough for BFF love, romance, devotion, some sort of platonic ideal? Spirals tighten but never disappear.
When you meant so much to- slips from your mouth, she swats it out of the air, sipping house roast. Oh we had our little phase she says, hair shining.
Taken off guard. Could have dropped your tea if your stomach hadn’t fallen out first. A fly, a dust mote. Nothing. No you. No spirals, only fleeting laughter on the wind.