Eleven Bravo

It all began with a simple restlessness. Huddling behind the chemistry building with fat Temple Roberts, the Baptist preacher’s daughter would been sneaking snack cakes in to Sunday service since primary school. Cutting the filters off Marlboros with a pair of cuticle scissors so the butts littered the freshly cut grass, subtle markers of our disrespect. I had a permanent case of whooping cough that year from inhaling for too long and letting acrid smoke burn at the back of my throat. If I just pulled hard enough I could take some of that fire into me.

I always did stupid things like that.

Temple spent a month the previous summer with her grandmother in Morocco where she ate hashish every day for two weeks straight and snuck out to smoke opium with the maid’s son Rahim on his nights off. We contented ourselves with mutilated gas station cigarettes until Temple managed to get her hands on the sexy French Gauloise Rahim smoked out of a gold case that he picked off a careless sheikh. In France they don’t smoke like pussies.

Before Rahim the Fallen African Prince, Temple had been happy with Ultra Lights.

It was September of senior year and I was regularly skipping class in favor of what I fondly recall as a period of intense self-study. (read: Meditating over a joint and morning cartoons in my neighbor’s basement with a little recreational masturbation thrown in for color. Both of Dave’s parents worked and he was way to straight-edged to ever skip but he did keep the basement window above the couch propped open so I wouldn’t set off the alarm.)

I always made it back to school for lunch. School officials never caught on to truancy if a student’s name appeared on the roll at least once in the morning and directly after lunch. So every day I could be found in the same chair at the same table shoveling powdered mashed potatoes and country-fried steak cooked by heat lamp. I hadn’t played any sports since my father’s aborted attempts at catch in the second grade so the jocks wanted nothing to do with me. Chronic stage fright kept me away from the musicians and artists and perpetual apathy from everyone else. Yet somehow I’d managed to find a place.

I sat between the “E” twins, Ashlee Murray and Britnee Parker, who’ve been best friends since the moment they discovered their names had the same ridiculous alter-spelling. The two were easily confused and just as easily dismissed. I’d been referring to them as Clairol #34 and #28 since freshman year.

Next to them was Assima Holloway, who lounged across half the table in a light sleep, perpetually recovering from a late night with her Latin lover. (read: her parents Cuban pool boy.)Her father, Channing Holloway, was a cheerfully lecherous septuagenarian who’d made his money on the backs of hajiis during the 60’s oil-boom. He made up for it twenty years later by marrying an Arabic-speaking Ethiopian half his age and giving her his first child at a still spry 62. Assima was lovely in a way that beauty ceases to be a consideration. The boys here were flies buzzing at the ears of a champion stallion.

There was one more.

Cecille Diconsera. The girl who ate my soul.