The Carnival Papers

Learning to Fly

(From the short story collection The Carnival Papers available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback!)

Robin Beckman lay on top of the pink bedspread—strands of mocha hair splayed on the pillow and limbs cocked at extreme angles—and willed herself to disappear.  She focused on Brad Pitt’s uncaring blue eyes hovering over her bed and tried to vanish into the poster with him to avoid slogging through another day of serving greasy food to equally greasy patrons at the Freepoint Café.  When nothing happened, she sighed and hopped off the bed.  She would have to rely on a less magical way to effect her escape.

“Robin, come get breakfast,” her mother said through the door.

“In a minute,” she said and unearthed her backpack from the mound of clothes that had accumulated over the first month of summer.  She emptied it of papers, folders, and notebooks, none of which she would need again.  The deflated pink backpack swelled again as Robin stuffed it with clothes, shoes, CDs, and her Walkman, all of which she would need for her summer on the road.  After locating purloined library copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Bridget Jones’s Diary to wedge into the backpack’s front pockets, she turned to the mirror and began the metamorphosis from sleep-addled girl to confident young woman.

Through the first month of summer, she would take a minute to pull back her hair into a ponytail, throw on her uniform of a dingy T-shirt and blue jeans speckled with bits of cream paint from the renovation, and then shuffle out the door as though still asleep, but today’s adventure called for more effort.  She winced as she coaxed the tangles from her hair, puckered as she applied a fresh coat of pink lipstick, and frowned as she slipped on a salmon-colored tank top over her boyish chest. 

The stubborn refusal of her breasts to mature had prompted her to seek an unnatural solution.  On a shelf over the mirror, opposite the porcelain dolls her mother continued to give Robin despite her insistence that she’d outgrown dolls, sat a grinning Hello Kitty cookie jar.  She took the cookie jar from the shelf and inside found the pair of gel-filled bags her friend Ariel had bought from a website last winter.  They had completed the transaction at Robin’s locker, looking over their shoulders as though exchanging secrets of national security.  The silicon inserts had lain in the bottom of the cookie jar ever since, awaiting the call to action.

Robin settled the bags into the cups of her bra and adjusted each one until they looked natural.  Her breasts, while enhanced, still didn’t have the volume of her friend Stacey’s, but at least they didn’t look prepubescent anymore.  After a last glance at the mirror, she smiled and snatched a red hooded sweatshirt from the heap of discarded clothes on the floor.  She zipped the sweatshirt all the way to eclipse the sudden growth spurt of her bosom.

“Robin, hurry up,” her mother called from the kitchen.

“I’m coming,” Robin said and struggled like a new recruit to shoulder her backpack.

“I thought school was over,” her mother said as Robin sat down at the Formica table salvaged from her father’s restaurant after its renovation.  Her father had repainted the table white, but as Robin poured her cereal, she read the sea of nicks that comprised the initials of the table’s former occupants, whose spirits could not be obliterated by paint alone. 

“I’ve got orientation today,” Robin said.

“I don’t remember you saying anything about that,” her father said from behind The Freepoint Daily News.

“I told you a couple weeks ago,” she said.

Her father put down the paper and raised one black, Neanderthal eyebrow.  “You did?”