Photo by Alireza heidarpour on Unsplash
by Lina Lau
We forge our parents’ signatures and place fistfuls of change on the counter in exchange for Du Maurier Lights, and the storeowner raises an eyebrow but lets us get away with it. In the ravine after school, we chain smoke and practice puckering our lips and blowing rings, the dank soil dampening our thin shorts so we tie sweatshirts around our waists and spritz ourselves with cheap drugstore perfume to cover the smell once we emerge. We steal overproof rum from our parents’ cabinets and lie about sleeping over at each other’s houses so Bryan can take us to Wasaga beach for a house party in his jeep with the top down, while we gag on gulps straight from the bottle, laughing and spluttering because we don’t know any better, and we chokehold beer bottles, waking up with sand chafing our skin, but we don’t care. We line our eyes in black pencil and change into short skirts after we leave our houses to ride in the backs of boys’ cars, letting them take us out, letting them roll their tongues in our mouths, letting their hands run up our shirts, letting them think we’re older than we actually are. Grounded, we fill our diaries with the injustice, scribble pages of letters to each other that we fold and press small and pass to each other between classes, vowing NEVER to end up like them, there’s no WAY we’ll be this mean to our kids and we’ll always do what we want and never be SO BORING. We ignore instructions and leave plum hair dye in too long and under the bathroom light our near-black hair looks the same but out in the sunlight, our purple halos shine, we glow, and even though our mothers get mad that we snuck behind their backs when they told us not to, they know something we don’t, that with time, all that brightness and vibrancy will fade.
Lina Lau is a green tea drinker and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, Hippocampus, The Citron Review, XRAY Literary, and elsewhere. She writes mostly flash in the margins of work and parenting.
