Darcey Steinke - Sister Golden Hair

Besides Sheila and Dwayne — a sullen older boy in tight bell-bottoms and a Skynyrd T-shirt — the only other kid at the bus stop was Jill Bamburg. She lived in the duplex next to ours. She looked exhausted, with gray pouches under her eyes. During her mom’s parties, I’d watched Jill and her little sister, Beth, in white nightgowns, and her older brother, Ronnie, use homemade wands to make bubbles the size of small dogs. After the liquid soap ran out, they dropped objects from their second-story window and timed how long it took them to fall.

I moved closer to Sheila. She smelled like musk oil and Eve shampoo. She jumped away as if she might catch geekiness from me, so I sunk back to where Jill stood. I spoke to her, hoping, idiotically, that it might make Sheila jealous.

“What a drag school’s starting,” I said.

Jill looked at me with her flat brown eyes.

“I guess so,” she said, looking past me up the road to see if the bus was coming.

Finally the bus pulled up and the double doors swung out with a loud metal click. I got on last and saw Sheila sitting next to a red-haired girl wearing a Tweety Bird T-shirt. Dwayne sat with the boys in the back who were singing a Doobie Brothers’ song. Junior high went from sixth to ninth grade, but Dwayne looked much older; he must have flunked and been held back. Jill sat with a friend in the middle of the bus. Only one girl was alone. She sat by the window, her white-blonde hair long in the front to hide a port-wine birthmark that stained her cheek. She looked up at me hopefully but I decided that sitting beside her was too big a risk.

I took an empty seat near the front instead. I knew that proximity to the driver offered a certain amount of protection. This period of grace lasted only for the first few days, though. After that, being close to the driver became a liability.

In school Sheila moved among a flock of shiny-haired girls in colored corduroys, cheesecloth shirts, and Earth shoes. They were like jewels dropped in the muddy hallway waters, with their bright fingernails, glittering eye shadow, and peacock-feather earrings. At lunch they sat together and talked about lip gloss flavors and whether patchouli oil smelled better then musk. They looked so alike it was hard to tell one from another.

I knew, with my short haircut and knobby knees, that I would never join their group. If I were a boy I would have escaped into a football obsession, comic books, or Star Trek reruns by now, but girls, girls had no such escape hatches.

I hadn’t always been like this. Before we moved from the rectory I rode my bike everywhere and all the neighborhood kids loved me, because I was the best at making up games. We often enacted scenes from the Bible. My favorite was the raising of Lazarus, where I’d make my brother rub dirt on his face and lie down on the grass. I’d stare at him with my glowing eyes as I commanded Rise!

But that period was over. In Roanoke nobody cared if you had a good imagination, if you knew everything about mummification rites or had acted out every detail of the burial rituals of the natives in Timbuktu. The teachers at Low Valley Junior High were mostly female, with thick Southern accents, heavy makeup, and carefully teased-up hair. At lunch I saw my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Remsly, eating deviled eggs out of a Tupperware container. The only men were the grim-faced janitor, the young AV guy wearing bell-bottoms as he rolled his overhead projector down the hallway, and the principal, whom so far I knew only as a deep baritone coming over the intercom, leading the Pledge of Allegiance and asking us not to throw food in the cafeteria. I darted from class to class like a small stunned fish. Nobody was particularly unfriendly, but nobody was nice to me either.

I needed a guide to help me negotiate the local customs, and that guide had to be Sheila. She had the power. At lunch, I saw the birthmark girl, whose name was Pam, sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. Pam had a Holly Hobbie lunch box and thermos and she ate while she read, not caring if she had milk on her upper lip or a smear of mustard on her chin. She invited me to sit with her, but I pretended I didn’t hear. Instead I sat alone and stole glances at Sheila, who sat with a bunch of girls, laughing and nibbling her sandwich.

After lunch I watched how expertly Sheila rolled her combination, swung open her locker, glanced at herself in the little mirror she’d taped inside, then pulled out her math textbook. When I walked behind her I wanted to place my finger on her delicate collarbone. I wanted to ingest her like one of my father’s communion wafers and let her instruct me, like Jesus, from the inside.

One afternoon when I got off the bus, I walked behind Sheila. It was still hot. A warm breeze blew through my hair and in front of 3B I saw the leaves of the ratty sunflowers dropping, the dirt around them dry and red. I’d been rehearsing what to say to her. Saying I liked the braids in her hair sounded too intimate, but complimenting her clogs didn’t seem personal enough. All day I’d weighed which part of her perfect body to concentrate on. Finally I decided to tell her I liked the birds stamped into her leather belt. It showed my eye for detail without being creepy. But before I could say anything, Sheila swung around.

“Are you following me?”

“No!”

“Why are you walking so close to me then?”

“I’m not,” I insisted.

“And why did you touch my hair in health class?”

It was true. During the menstruation movie, while the soap opera music blared and the egg made its way down the fallopian tube toward the uterus, the projector light had been so silver on Sheila’s head that she had not looked real. That’s when I reached out beyond the edge of my desk and set the pad of my index finger gently against the back of her head.

“I was brushing away a spider.” It sounded lame even to me.

Sheila looked at me. She had her hands on her hips and her head tilted sideways.

“Yeah. Right,” she said. “You should just admit that you’re a lezzbo.”

Jill ran up behind us.

“Leave her alone,” she said. “She’s just trying to be nice.”

Sheila looked from me to Jill.

“Freaks,” she said. “Go off to freakland and do your freakazoid things!” She hurried down toward her duplex, her clogs sounding on the asphalt.

“Don’t mind her,” Jill said. “She’s a double-dutch bitch.”

I felt as if my brain had been scooped out with an iced-tea spoon. As Jill talked about Sheila her words moved around the empty space inside my head. True, I was walking up the incline, but I had no sense of my legs moving, just a floating feeling, like a dust mote careening around in an angle of light. I watched Jill’s mouth move.

She had a painfully long, pale face and hair that fell limply around her cheekbones. At her mother’s parties, men with mustaches drank beers. Along with watching Jill and her sister make bubbles, I’d also watched them play badminton, hitting the birdie back and forth. As the night wore on, their games got more surreal. I’d seen them volley both an ice cube and a banana.

While her mother didn’t allow after-school visitors, Jill said if I agreed to hide in her bedroom I could sneak inside 11B. But we’d have to be quiet. We slipped through the screen door into the living room and I was confronted by a number of smells: sandalwood, beer, and some third thing I’d never smelled before. The couch sagged and the coffee table was covered with puddles of dried wax. An Indian-print bedspread hung behind the TV and there was ivy dangling from a macramé holder in front of the window. It was identical to the hippie crash pads I’d seen on TV and in movies, but different because instead of grown-ups in tie-dye shirts and macramé belts, it was filled with children. Beth, Jill’s third-grade sister, sat on the floor surrounded by math books. Ronnie, her older brother, was slumped on the couch watching General Hospital .