No More Dead Kids by Thomas Marshall

Author:Thomas Marshall [Marshall, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2016-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

. . . . .

The seniors and their dates all took pictures together at Balboa Park before the dance, which was being held in downtown at the House of Blues. I can’t describe how beautiful Lila looked in her dress. I also can’t tell you how ludicrously incongruous it was seeing so many parents taking pictures and sending their freshly made up daughters off to get fucked. But hey, that’s high school.

The dance was a lot of fun, it was really a night for the seniors, and I really felt like a whole unified class, and I loved everyone there, I really did. Especially Lila, who I clutched and kissed as we swayed to “Same Love,” the slow dance of the night.

At the after party, the first I’d really ever been to, what should have been the whole senior class (everyone was invited to this one very generous senior’s giant Mt. Soledad house), was really just most of the populars and their dates to start with. But then more people came, and soon enough I saw the whole grade come together in this way too. I just wish it hadn’t taken until the end of senior year for it to happen.

I shared a joint and a bottle of some flavor of Bacardi with Lila and a circle of the cool kids, passing each around. One of those cool kids, Chris, used to bully me when I first came to Twain, but he wasn’t a bad guy, and he certainly wasn’t now. We all talked about memories and the future. He was going off to USC, others of them to TCU or SMU, and the like; all going to that kind of school for that kind of person. Chris passed around some cheap cigars to roll blunts with, I pocketed mine.

I remembered a morning on a school bus to a field trip, I had to sit next to him, Chris Justo-Serpa, sitting in alphabetical order. He had been nothing but mean or unkind to me since I’d first gotten to Twin; he and his friends would tease, pick on me, call me names like fag and retard, or just ignore me in the locker room, or at lunch, or just around, as you’d expect him and his group to do. On that bus ride, trapped next to each other for presumably an hour, I listened to music through dollar store earbuds on an old iPod nano, first gen. Sometime into the silent trip, as I changed songs on the small device, Chris tapped me on the shoulder and showed me the screen of his iPod, a new one, with the same song displayed on the screen, as a gesture; he smiled at me, I smiled back. We still went our separate ways though, through the years in high school.

In that circle at prom, he took a pull from the bottle and handed it across to me, and I did the same. We shared a

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