forthcoming in The Hawaii Review
When it was time to shut down, I went out back and found Joan pacing slowly back and forth. She wore her empty pack of cigarettes like a paper tiara on top of her head.
“I’m not going back to school this fall,” she said, walking and spinning on her invisible tightrope.
“Why not?” I asked. I was shocked. I had pictured us cruising around the halls together, stopping at our lockers to laugh at teachers and gossip about boys.
“School’s not for me,” she said. “It sucks there. Besides, Eli’s eighteen and he’s starting at Fisher in the Fall. He says there’s a whole rat race out there that he’s made for. And he can be the breadwinner, you know? That’s muy perfect with me.”
I leaned against the back of the Rock ‘N’ Roller, next to an ugly thread of cords that twisted like intestines from the machine’s gut. “I think this job is pretty neat,” I said casually, hoping to keep the conversation light. “I had fun working with you today.”
Joan stopped pacing the tightrope and tilted her chin so that the empty cigarette pack swooped to the ground. “Do you think those girls are pretty?” she asked.
“Alison and them?” I said.
She nodded.
“Yeah, I do.” She frowned in disappointment. I added quickly, “I used to be good friends with Alison, when we were little.”
Joan ignored this. “What about me. Do you think I’m pretty?”
“I think you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Way prettier than any of them.”
And I really believed it. Especially when she smiled, as she did now, and the dimples appeared next to her mouth like tiny pools of light. Her hair was supremely blonde, the sort of albino-blonde usually reserved for small children, and her eyes were wide and almost crossed, giving her a sort of candid innocence. She slouched like an older woman, comfortable with the body she was given, and although you could see that she was not particularly coordinated, there was a sort of curvy grace to her that the other girls lacked.
“It’d be neat to look like you,” I said.
I suppose the word I was groping for was sexy, but even if I had thought of it, I would never have uttered it aloud.
—sharma shields, excerpt from Sunshine and The Predator
To be published this winter in the hawaii review
