marie story

As a little girl, Marie held many boys in the palm of her hand. One was John, who lived two houses away, with the Brigmans stuck between the two households. The Brigmans would later divorce and their only daughter, Michelle, would walk down the church aisle, beautiful in white and vibrant in pregnancy. At the reception, Marie’s mother whispered to her now fifteen-year-old daughter, pointing at the bride with her cocktail straw, “She really shouldn’t be wearing white.” Three years later, Marie’s father sits at the kitchen table; it’s the last family dinner before Marie leaves for college. It’s also the last time Marie can call the house home, for she loses her room to her baby sister a month later. Then, her childhood dog, Libby, is put to sleep. She and her mother cry to Elvis Presley on the drive home. At the dinner table, there are rare steaks, edged in fat that is discreetly spit into napkins; no one wants to hurt Dad’s feelings. The father tells Marie, “Guys are scum. Don’t have sex until you’re married.” Threadbare advice for a topic so messy. Marie doesn’t recall having the talk with her parents, and strangely her parents don’t remember giving the talk. The talk was never spoken of; it was a subject that just laid there tucked away, like those fatty edges, folded neatly in a napkin.
John, the little girl Marie’s best friend, kissed her once while she slept on the floor beside his bed. Because of their young age and close friendship, Marie’s parents permitted her to sleep over at John’s house. On this particular night, John watched Marie, with her blue eyes shut and dreaming about collecting bugs or finding frogs, when leaned down from his bed and floated over her sweet face. He listened to her living there, breathing as he breathed, dreaming those beautiful girl-dreams. You wonderful, incredible, sleeping thing, he thought. He had loved her for a long time. A year ago, from across Hearne’s Creek, John had shouted to her, as she stood on the opposite side, “Will you be my girlfriennnd?” Marie laughed and yelled back, “No way!”
Now, as John floated over her sleeping form, he lowered his chestnut eyes and smoothed down his bed head, and said softly, “Hold on, Sugar! Daddy’s got a sweet tooth tonight!” It was line from The Mask, one of his favorite movies.