Photo by X.A. Medina (http://lepoet.tumblr.com)
During the days Dani would disappear with Victor. I never asked where they were going. I figured Dani would tell me when she was ready. I also liked the mystery. I liked that I knew very little about her. I didn’t know her last name or much about her family or friends. I knew she lived in Brooklyn like me. We liked to name favorite bars and wonder if we were ever at the same bar at the same time. I liked to think about us having stood next to each other in the bathroom line at the Levee, her holding the door for me as she left and I entered the dirty stickered bar bathroom. A slight smile on her face, a quiet “thanks” from me, nothing more.
I knew she was from Iowa. She grew up on a farm with her parents and her older sister. She told me once about how in the summers her father would pay her and her sister a nickel for each rock they would pick up from the field. She would fill a bucket and take it to the creek nearby her father’s farm. Her sister just dumped the rocks into the creek and got back to work. But Dani took her time and threw each rock into the creek individually. Her sister always made a couple bucks more than Dani, but Dani didn’t care. On Sundays Dani and her sister would ride their bikes a mile to the closest gas station. Her sister bought teen pop magazines like Tiger Beat, Super Teen, and Star Tracks. Dani would buy snap bracelets and candy cigarettes.
I pictured her sitting on the top of a jungle gym slide, the sun setting behind her parents barn, the wind softly blowing through the long green grass, her ripping pictures of Joey Mcintyre out of her sisters teen magazines while puffing on a candy cigarette. Even when she was a kid she was a badass. Or that’s the way I remembered it.
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