Silent

Listen up, chum, here's how it goes. The percolator goes every single morning before anybody's dressed, and that sound is what "everything is still fine" sounds like in my house. I notice, more than I'd ever let on, whether it's going.

My mother turns me around slow in front of the hall mirror before church and delivers her verdict without a word wasted. I never win that argument, not once, so my face agrees before my mouth has to, and my stomach can do whatever fool thing it likes underneath. Somebody’s handed me a whole crowd to translate for, one I don’t speak two words of, and I intend to do it anyway, and do it so well nobody in the room notices how hard I’m working at it.

Ginny's the only one who gets the straight version of anything I say, on account of there's a whole business from the record hop I have promised her, on my life, never to explain to one living soul, and I intend to keep that promise straight into old age, so don't ask. Everybody else gets the version fit for the party line, where half the street's listening in whether you asked them to or not.

I keep a running tally of small things without ever calling it counting — who’s got a nickel, who’s wearing what to the dance, who walked home with who. That’s the whole skill this job wants, and I know it, thank you very much. No sense making a fuss about the arrangement.

Some nights I lie there and do the arithmetic honestly: same skirt as three other girls, same face arranged the same careful way, and I could go clean out of a room and nobody would feel the draft. That one doesn't get smoothed over so easy, not even by me.

Now I ain't no sap. Truth told, half of what I want is just some trouble worth having. I'd rather be caught in a full-blown scandal than be forgettable, and I'd very much like, just the once, to be a little bit talked about. The good kind. Well. Imagine that, coming from me.

Alright then. Let's get to it before somebody checks the clock.