{"id":8073,"date":"2019-04-25T15:23:40","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T21:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8073"},"modified":"2019-04-25T15:23:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T21:23:40","slug":"adolescent","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8073","title":{"rendered":"Adolescent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ashley Roth<\/strong><\/p>\n

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We glue bindis between our eyes and sing off-key to Tragic Kingdom. <\/em>We dance on dirty laundry and change into the clothes our parents won\u2019t let us wear — slips that want to be dresses, short plaid skirts, the dog collar and leash my dad found tangled in my socks.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know what this means?\u201d he had asked before grabbing my shoulders and pressing my head into the wall. I shut my eyes and said I thought it was punk and goth and all the things he called adolescent and strange. He shook his head and yanked my paintings off the living room wall.<\/p>\n

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We start a band. We call it Delirium Star. My dad gives me a guitar for Christmas and signs me up for lessons with a man who looks like Andrew McCarthy and quizzes me on chords I never practice. He won\u2019t let me learn \u201cCherub Rock\u201d until we practice \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d and the theme song from Hawaii Five-0. <\/em>Dad shows me how to play \u201cSmoke on the Water.\u201d He says my rhythm is off. She plays her dad\u2019s forgotten bass. We lean our instruments on the wall and will them to work. I can smell the watery rust on her bass\u2019s thick strings. One night her dad comes home singing \u201cHome on the Range\u201d and waves wiggly, bloody pieces of meat at me — says, \u201cIt\u2019s venison, it\u2019s Bambi.\u201d He pushes us out of the way and cradles the bass like he cradles the deer he kills, the way he probably once held her. We hold hands while he strums something melodic and sad we\u2019ve never heard before.<\/p>\n

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We conduct interviews with my dad\u2019s old tape recorder. We make fun of boys with yellow bleached hair and pretend to marry the ones who look like Ethan Hawke. We invent elaborate, sensational divorces and fantasize about becoming junkies who only wear sequins, fishnets, and boots from Wild Pair. She\u2019ll wear the silver ones with the glowing rubbery sole; I\u2019ll wear black ones with chunky, serrated heels.<\/p>\n

We record ourselves singing the songs we write in Sharpie on our bedroom walls, lyrics that don\u2019t rhyme on purpose. Lyrics about things like patricide and love we know nothing about. We interview each other with dramatic syrupy voices; we ask about masturbation and orgasms we\u2019ve never experienced. We turn off the lights and try it ourselves from opposite sides of the room with rumbling handheld massagers we muffle with blankets her great-grandma crocheted. The blankets smell like rotting flowers and wet vitamins.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you done?\u201d she asks. I hear the tape recorder click before I tell her I\u2019m finished. I worry about being famous one day.<\/p>\n

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When Kurt Cobain died, we came to school with our cut out articles from the Oregonian. We cried and the newspaper ink smeared into our fingerprint ridges. We carried the folded scraps, lodging them in the plastic pocket of our decorated binders. The other kids tease us. They say our leather jackets smell funny and our flannel is frayed. They don\u2019t understand why we bring our lunch in metal toolboxes or why we shop at Value Village on purpose. They don\u2019t understand why we sew patches on our backpacks, over the holes in our jeans. They don\u2019t understand why we still mourn Kurt. They like Amy Grant and Boyz II Men. They like that our teacher brings a shiny acoustic guitar and sings to us about fractions and brain parts and the meaning of irony. She and I hate his guitar. We hate the way his hair swoops like Jason Priestley. We hate how tan his skin is and imagine he\u2019s from somewhere like Florida and probably hates how much it rains here. When Kurt Cobain died, he didn’t play his guitar, but didn’t stop smiling either. We don\u2019t eat our lunch, we just sit in the quiet hallway kicking the bottoms of our Converse on the slippery stairs.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow would you do it?\u201d she asks, her hands little balls nestled between her denim legs.<\/p>\n

I think I might jump off the Hollywood Sign when I visit my mom in the summer. An old actress did that in the 30s when they told her she was washed up, that there was someone better. My mom and her husband live within walking distance of the sign. They would never hear me walking up the dry sandy road. They wouldn’t hear the metallic ring of chain-linked fence when I jump over it and crawl up the letters I imagine feel like plastic, like the handles of spoons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell?\u201d she asks again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn’t want it to be messy,\u201d I tell her, \u201cso maybe I\u2019d swallow pills. That always seems like a fancy way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what about the ones that puke all over themselves? That\u2019s messy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d turn on the oven and stick my head in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNope. That\u2019s taken. It wouldn’t even be right to do it that way\u2014it\u2019s like she owns it. Pick another.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d stuff silk stockings into the pipe of a car and park it in a garage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have a garage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy aunt does.\u201d<\/p>\n

She smiles, but her eyes fill with tears. Her irises and pupils look like they\u2019re floating on an oceanic horizon. I wonder if she\u2019s even seen that\u2014the sun dipping into a blackened strip of water, painting the tips orange and pink and yellow.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way I\u2019d do it would be messy,\u201d she tucks her chin into her chest and her shoulders shake. \u201cI\u2019d take that gun my dad uses to kill deer that didn’t do anything to him and I\u2019d blow my brain all over his living room. Maybe all over his baseball cards he keeps in that glass cabinet.\u201d<\/p>\n

She looks at me again and wipes her eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d be like Kurt,\u201d she smiles.<\/p>\n

The bell rings and we stand up. We walk back to class and talk about how we want to get silver pants and want to make jewelry from old bottle caps.<\/p>\n

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ASHLEY N. ROTH<\/strong> writes from Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has previously appeared in decomP, Literary Orphans, Moonsick Magazine,<\/em> and others. You may find her anywhere there are historic buildings, stray cats, vegan sweets — or at www.ashleynroth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ashley Roth     We glue bindis between our eyes and sing off-key to Tragic Kingdom. We dance on dirty laundry and change into the clothes our parents won\u2019t let us wear — slips that want to be dresses, short … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":8067,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8073","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-26d","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8073"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8090,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8073\/revisions\/8090"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}