Song(non)fic

[resonant]

I started to work on llamajoy's survey, but I only got as far as "What song reminds you of an ex-friend?" before wandering off in memory.



It was 1982, and I had two best friends.

Sunshine was the first girl I ever wanted to kiss, when we were thirteen and went to the beach together and hid under the boardwalk to keep out of sight of her obnoxious brother. Red was the first girl I really did kiss, a chaste three-way experiment with her boyfriend, about which all I remember is that three noses are, logistically speaking, way too many.

It was summer, and we were eighteen. Blonde, brunette, redhead, each one secretly convinced that she herself was ugly but knowing that the other two were beautiful.

And we went nightclubbing in our baggies and our studded belts and our sleeveless black T-shirts, giggling in the corner of an unfashionable bar that we never went back to.

There was a guy. "You girls dance?"

Red, giddy with three-quarters of a beer, said, "I dunno." Turned to me. "Do we dance?"

"I dance," I said. "I dunno if you dance, but I definitely dance." I turned to Sunshine. "You dance?"

"If y'all dance," she said. "then I dance."

"You girls from around here?" said the guy, obviously feeling that we were ambivalent about the concept of dancing.

"Are we?"

"I am. Are you?"

"Am I from anywhere, really?"

"But 'from' is such a relative term, isn't it?"

The guy's head went left, right, left, like he was watching a ping-pong match. His eyes got bigger and bigger.

"We're from earth, that's for sure."

"Speak for yourself. I'm from outer space."

"Yeah? I'm from Greensboro, myself."

Red turned a big grin on the guy. "Sure," she said. "We'll dance with you."

Red could shake the house down, but I wasn't much of a dancer and neither was Sunshine. But those few minutes of conversation-as-juggling-act had made me feel that if the others could keep it up, I could be somebody else for a few minutes. I danced. Did I ever dance.

The song was Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue." We took the words "up," "down," and "higher" quite literally whenever they occurred. Sunshine and I had long hair, and we flipped it forward and shook it back like that guy from Poison. Red's hips were connected to her body by forces unknown on this earth. The guy may very well have thought he was in the opening reels of his own personal porn film.

We twirled. We bumped. Red grabbed my hands and we did five or six steps of the shag before I forgot what move came next and backed into Sunshine, who hauled me into a waltz turn. Eddie Grant said, "Oh, no," and we raised our hands to heaven.

Then the song ended, and something happened to the guy so that he didn't follow us home or anything, and something happened to Red to put her in a mental hospital for a while, and something happened to Sunshine to make her include Operation Rescue pamplets in her Christmas cards.
And something happened to me. And here I am.

Comments

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Wow. :-) Dialogue by Aaron Sorkin!

What a lovely little piece. Write more of them. I'll read them. :-)