Bitter in the Mouth Read Online Free PDF Page A

which was taking me up and into the music. “I’ve never felt closer to DP’s voice,” I wrote to Kelly later that night. What I meant was that I have never felt closer to Kelly’s.
    Our letter-writing habit would serve us well in high school, as open displays of cross-clique interactions weren’t understood or condoned among the 162 students of Boiling Springs High School. Like most other high schools in America, BSHS was a Byzantine court ruled by a football player and a cheerleader, but because of its diminutive size, its social machination was even more rarefied. There were limited spaces within the top ranks, and a fall from grace could happen at any moment with the speed and force of a knife in the dark. As Kelly soared into the stratosphere of towheaded popularity, she was careful to court the upper-class girls in the inner circle, while their boyfriends circled her like she was a wounded animal. Beth Anne, amazed by her daughter’s relocation from the bottom to the top of the heap, rewarded Kelly with the uniform of popular high school girls circa 1982. Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, Izod polo shirts, and Bass penny loafers—ubiquitously available “designer” labels, more aspiring than elite, form-fitting but never tight, and expensive but affordable at 25 percent off. This was middle-class America’s version of bon chic bon genre , and Kelly wore it well.
    I smoked my way into an attention span that matched my academic potential. For most of my freshman year at BSHS, I hid in the girls’ bathroom with my packet of Winston Reds until one day I realized that I was behaving like my mother, DeAnne. I then smoked brazenly and with great skill out by the back entrance of the gym—French inhaling, releasing the occasional smoke rings, all with a studied indifference, as though the cigarette were just another finger on my hand. My appearance in the school’s designated “Smoking Area” muddled my social classification. Heretofore I wasn’t just a smart girl, but the Smartest Girl, which meant I wasn’t a girl at all. The walls of my pigeonhole were further weakened by my easy acquaintanceship with three other students who called the Smoking Area their home base. The two guys, both sophomores, and the one girl, a two-time junior, looked me over and nodded at one another. Look at what the nicotine dragged here, was what that gesture meant. I liked them immediately because they made no effort to talk to me. I recognized them as Chris Johnson, Tommy Miller, and Susan Taylor, three kids who had decided to remove themselves from the ass kissing, shameless power grabbing, and half-hidden hypocrisies that walked the halls of BSHS like special-ed students whom everyone saw but no one acknowledged. The stoners, as they were called (though I never saw them smoking anything but cigarettes), wore black concert T-shirts (Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC), Wrangler jeans, and Converse high-tops. They were the closest things to a counterculture that BSHS had to offer.
    “I know you think you’re happy,” I wrote to Kelly in letter #742, at the end of our freshman year. “But as your best friend I must tell you that you’re not. There are times in the lunchroom when I want to get up and slap you. I hear you laughing, and I know those guys you sit with aren’t funny. Not even close. You know what’s worse? When I hear you laugh, it makes me feel lonely.”
    Our friendship was by then the fourth secret that I had to keep inside of me. Kelly was the only person whom I had shared my secret sense with, and that was secret number one. Secrets two and three (and Bobby, the name of the winged monster who had brought them into our lives) were already so deep within us that Kelly never even counted them. Only I did. When Kelly got pregnant during our junior year in high school, that would be the fifth secret.
    Kelly went to live with her aunt in Rock Hill, South Carolina. A year and eight months later, Kelly returned to Boiling Springs with