“A blossoming but otherwise-normal young woman learns some odd lessons – and some not-so-much – about life & love during her Senior year.”

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I’ve got a junkie heart in a cage of bone
I’m a scientific wonder, a sober son
I was born blue-blooded
So I’ve never made a cent on my own
…Will you remember me, after I’m gone?

– “Will You Remember Me” by Jann Arden

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A Prologue

Once upon a time, in a place not unlike that of your own adolescence, there lived a girl. There was nothing particular about this girl that stood out on first glance: just a plain high school Senior. Nothing special, nothing significant. She would blend in to a class of her peers like a chameleon, sharing the faces and features of those in her own circumstance. Her grades were impeccable. She came from a middle-income upbringing, and fate had chosen her to live the quaint, “normal” life of a juvenile from the suburbs.
Having said that, we open the curtain to our story in a frank moment of passion between our heroine and a boy, in his bedroom. She did it because she wanted to. She did it, because no one was watching her. Only him. And there was no judgment in his eyes: only pleasure. Pleasure that she was giving him. For underneath her perennial exterior beat a fiery heart, felicitous for stoking. It made her feel confident & powerful. Older. And as she carried on and his undulations became vulgarer & his complexion reddened, she managed to tune him out – in the same way an extra’s face in one’s dream is distorted – and became solely & absolutely concentrated on the task at hand, no pun intended. Because this was what this was all for, wasn’t it? At the end of it all, wasn’t this really just for him? And plus, she couldn’t stand this old music he had playing in the background, and the sooner she was finished the better. So depressing! What did he say it was? The Smiths? Who they Hell were THEY?
“Oh fuck that’s so good baby, give me more of it like that, yeah… shit…

She had no desire to become pregnant. There was a girl in her grade who everyone watched like a celebrity trial: from those first public cries of fear in the cafeteria, to when her baby bump began to show, to when she returned after a month’s absence only to push her pram around the school’s half-empty corridors to special classes. Our heroine didn’t want to be like that, with strangers scrutinizing her and making assumptions. But that girl was so plain about all of it, like there wasn’t anything else to talk about. No one knew who her baby’s daddy was: that was the only real secret she kept. No, our heroine attracted attention in a different, more obvious way. Because despite being ordinary in an unfussy, homespun way, she was still a girl in the inescapable midst of becoming a woman. In that way, she felt like a part of something: like she always had a community behind her, of girls all going through the same thing. That empathy. She knew she was privileged to be White & attractive so she never felt a need to be more overt than that to anyone.
The boy was close now. His face contorted in that way she saw the boys in the movies do, as he whipped his hands around the back of her head & held it down.
When he was done, she stood up, spat the cum out of her mouth and on to his face, and left. Pig! She was already dressed, and by the time he composed himself she was gone & he was too blind to chase after her. He just rolled around in pain & the fast-crystallizing ooze. The boy’s name, haplessly, was Chance.

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