She couldn't remember the last
time that she had smiled. She woke up mad, went to school mad, helped stock the
store mad, did her homework mad, and went to bed mad. She'd even go to her
boyfriend's house with a scowl on her face, and left hardly less pleased. She
felt irrelevant. She'd never say it like that and indeed she may not even have
expressed it at all, but in the pit of her heart she felt as though she did not
matter. At home, her mother had stopped asking her to cook dinner for the
household, something she had done since she was in the seventh grade. Her
mother claimed that she wanted her to focus on her studies, but the girl felt
offended, and assumed it was because she had burned the corn bread twice in the
last two weeks.
On the job, her boss had given
her the title of manager, which meant she made $9.85 an hour, a full dollar per
hour raise. Still, she was not asked to close the store, and rarely was made to
handle the cash. The title was merely to appease her, as she had worked there
for 3 years, but it only made her bitter. Her schoolwork at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College was decent. She had recently taken a speech class
where her professor had smiled at her and said she had promise. She had still
only gotten a C+, as the teacher indicated that she needed better citation, and
more “actual facts." In bed, her boyfriend was all right, but not anything
special. He never asked her what was pleasing to her, what she needed to be
fulfilled, or even if she was genuinely happy. He seemed content that he was
content and that was frustrating, even though she did love him. When she tried
to talk to him about it, he only seemed to laugh. He was always laughing.
While walking home from her night
class at BMCC, one blisteringly cold night in November, she got the crazy idea
to stop by a bar. Usually she raced to the train at City Hall, so that she
could get to the Bronx, but she had had a fight with her mother earlier in the
day where she had been called “child ” because she hadn't made up her bed once
that week. Mother must have been particularly anal that afternoon, because she
had launched into campaign about the girl’s “mope mouth expression.”
Mother had emphatically closed with the words,“Ain't nobody tryin' to see all that gloom," before settling in front
of the television for what would be a day's worth of viewing. The
girl had been incensed. Had she
the courage, she would have asked her mother if children routinely brought in a
healthy portion of the money that helped pay for the rent and utilities. Even her father, who had been home in
between his first and second shift as a city sanitation employee, had given her a sympathetic look.
He had long given up trying to motivate his wife to work…she hadn’t the will to
hold down a job anyway…
The girl stepped into the bar as
the opening strains of Fun’s anthem “Some Nights” blasted onto the speakers.
The place was hardly packed, but all of the patrons belted the song together
in a bawdy unison overwhelming her with the words “What do I stand for, What do
I stand for?” They were bleary eyed, and drunk on their drunkenness. The girl stood apart, and, for a very brief moment, let her anger abate.
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