Laine Perry
I had become the teacher’s pet by default. The rest of the kids were idiots. A few may have had unrecognized potential. Could be there was a mayor or stock car driver in the bunch. In 1976, they were a group of vicious fifth graders. They took to me like a bee to soft flesh. Our house wasn’t even in the district.
On my first day, the teacher decides we are going to make applesauce. He chooses me to assist him. For my part, I get to decide who gets how much, and what, and in what order. The next day I walk in and every kid in class lifts his feet off the floor. They will not touch the same floor I walk on. The girls roll flavored lip gloss over their pretty nubile lips, watching me.
Combing my hair was a gift I sometimes allowed my mom on holidays. I didn’t do it. I owned a blue Soul Train T-shirt and brown corduroys with orange piping on the pockets. I had a pair of dark jeans and a tank top that said Keep on Trucking. I switched these around a lot. I delivered papers after class, usually on my skateboard. The girls at school rode horses in the afternoon. Sometimes I saw the tops of their heads moving along the iron fences.
My mom wore complicated jewelry, much of it made from forks and spoons. Some afternoons, I took stuff out of her jewelry box and wore it around the neighborhood. I wasn’t sure what it was going to take to get those girls off my back.
My only friend was nineteen. Kim was the girlfriend of my mother’s boyfriend’s little brother. On the weekend, Kim paid me a dollar to rip a leaf off a plant in a neighbor’s backyard. I figured if a leaf was worth a buck, then the whole plant could be worth thousands. I took my skateboard around the block and ran back to the patch of garden.
I pulled the plant out, roots and all. The roots were like little claws still grasping earth. The plants and I navigated the turns like two Mambo dancers. The plant was leading, of course. It was larger than I was and stunk. This was my first experience of intimacy.
Did the plant know I planned to cook it in my mother’s oven? Did the plant feel squeamish as I shoved it stem and leaves, roots and clinging bits of dirt, into my mother’s antique coffee grinder?
I ripped off squares of tinfoil and placed a good mound of plant matter on each square. I rolled each square into a ball. It was Sunday, so I knew people would be around. I knocked on a few doors in the neighborhood and in one hour I had made thirty-seven dollars. I sold each package for $3.70, the price of the lunch I wanted to eat at Taco Bell. I sold ten packages and quit.
I went to Kim’s and told her the news of my good fortune. She rubbed her eyes, laughing so hard she farted and pulled me inside by the belt loop of my jeans. She offered me a Peach and disappeared for twenty minutes. She emerged with blurred eyes and a bright mouth.
Kim would answer any questions I had about sex, or how one goes about finding an apartment—that kind of thing. She had luxurious blonde hair and the devil in her eyes. Later, Kim had me practice fellatio on a big scabrous carrot. She would come in and out of the room, allowing me some privacy, until I could get the hang of it. When enough time had gone by and she came to give me the final grade, she sort of grimaced toward the effort I was making. Kim took the carrot away, peeled it, and handed it back to me. I went at it again, but her look hadn’t changed. She raised her plucked, arched brows toward me as I took a bite off the top and offered it to her. We both laughed. She told me never to do that in the real situation. Kim recommended I wear stilts to class. I did and had to transfer out of that school the next week.
Laine Perry grew up on the road with her mom, and younger sister- existing on green olives, & pimento-cheese sandwiches, and singing far into the night. She has seen Elvis in concert and has lived in most of the United States with the exception of Indiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. She studied playwriting at Bennington College in Vermont. Laine currently writes to the sound of rain in the Pacific Northwest, where she is working on her first novel, titled Learning to Drink.
Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash
