The Lavender Silk Shirt

Any minute now, I’d see her round, freckled face, and wavy, messy red hair, as she’d descend the steps. She would skip over to me wearing an oversized Guns N’ Roses t-shirt and ripped jeans, smelling like canned peaches and nicotine. We did it out in the open—never huddled discreetly under bleachers, and certainly not in the blind-darkened, cramped confines of a bedroom, hot and sticky before the parents got home from work: that was unimaginable at thirteen.

I was standing at our spot near the flagpole behind the Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton junior high school, which was just across the street from the apartment I shared with Mom and Lacey. Sarah was running a little later than usual. If she kept this up, I’d miss the start of Animaniacs. After a while, her best friend Misti emerged without Sarah and marched straight over to me. I scrunched my nose to inch my smeared glasses back up. She looked at my shoes, then wordlessly handing me a note, turned to walk away. I unfolded the page:

Hey Josh, it’s been fun, but we both know this isn’t working. Have a good life. xo Sarah.

I read it again. 

And again. 

I felt like I was riding the Gravitron at the Cass County Fair; centrifugal force pulling my guts into my spine. My eyes clouded with tears as I crossed the street towards home. Breathing hard, I climbed the steps to our cramped second-floor apartment and opened the door, dropped my bookbag onto the floor, sat on the corner of my waterbed and wept, reading the breakup note over and over as tears dripped onto the page, smearing, but not blunting Sarah’s sharp words. It wasn’t even four o’clock when I changed into my green and gold tiger-striped Zubaz and assumed a fetal position under the covers. I slid the note under my pillow and just lay there sobbing.

Mom got home from her undergrad classes at Moorhead State and was making the rounds. I heard her voice out in the living room, “Is your brother in his room?”

Lacey was munching Old Dutch sour cream and onion potato chips and watching Hey Dude on Nickelodeon. “I dunno,” crunch crunch.

Mom paused outside my bedroom, which was just across the hall from the one she shared with Lacey, and rapped softly on my door. “Buddy—?” She turned the knob and slowly pressed it open. “It’s so dang dark in here. Are you in bed already?” My back was to her as I tried to stifle my sobs. “Josh—honey, are you not feeling good?” I had no words, only anguish. Sorrow, like I’d never known before, had choked the voice out of me. Mom sat on the corner of the bed and touched my bony shoulder. “Are you gonna talk to me? Joshua Alan, what is wrong? Did somebody pick on you at school again?” I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Tears soaked my pillowcase as my body shook.

Lacey appeared at my door, cradling the chips in one arm and our five-month-old black and white short-haired kitten in the other. “Zeuser wants to say hi.” She placed him onto the bed, which made little splash sounds as he walked across it.

“Ha-uh, Lacey, that cat should not be on the waterbed. He’s gonna cut a hole in the mattress and then we’ll have a real mess on our hands.” Mom grabbed him and set him, mewling onto the floor. “Ok, well, I’m gonna go get dinner started.” She got up and lingered at my door for a few moments before closing it.

I cried myself to sleep…a knock at my door woke me. “Buddy, I’ve been calling for you, dinner is ready. Get up.”

“I’m not hungry Ma.” My voice was a rusted swing set.

“Well you gotta eat somethin’. You haven’t eaten all day.”

I closed my eyes again and tried to sleep but couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah. What had I done wrong? There was no sign that she was unhappy, just that horrible note.

We met a few months earlier at one of the monthly school dances. The weekend before that dance, Mom took me to Herberger’s at the Moorhead Center Mall to buy me what she called a decent shirt. I wanted to wear my heather grey DGF Rebels tee with my flannel, but she told me I needed to dress up for the dance. I didn’t know what that meant, but as we wandered around the boys’ clearance rack, I was drawn to a silk, lavender-colored, long-sleeve button down. I had never touched material so soft before. The fabric blossomed around the cuffs and the purple buttons gleamed with a mother-of-pearl sheen. Mom crossed her arms in front of her chest when she looked at the price tag, but she let me try it on. I emerged from the dressing room beaming in my huge round-framed glasses. Mom’s heart must have melted to see me smile, because she agreed to pay the exorbitant $29.99 plus tax (marked down from $50).

On the first Friday of the month, the DGF PTA turned the junior high gymnasium into a dance floor, decorated with black and silver balloons and streamers. I stood on the perimeter of the gym, my new lavender silk shirt tucked into my Lee jeans, bobbing my head to “Insane in the Brain”, the bass booming and echoing in the gym. When the DJ played “Epic” by Faith No More, the slow-dancing couples moved out of the way as a small group of headbanging long-haired kids—in torn denim and flannel—overtook the floor. My eye was immediately drawn to a petite girl with the longest red hair who was banging with the best of them. When the song ended, she looked over at me and smiled.

A few songs later, I grabbed a dixie cup of ginger ale and a handful of chips from the refreshment table and was on my way to take a seat on the bleachers, when I got shoved from behind. My chips and ginger ale spilled onto the floor. “Nice silk shirt, puss.” I turned around and looked up to see Travis Motschenbacher, who was wearing a Big Johnson t-shirt tucked into his Girbaud jeans. Travis was in my PE class. He had a build like Superman and a massive tuft of chest hair, which was the envy of all the seventh-grade boys. When I bent over to pick up the mess I made on the floor, he pulled the shirt-tail out of the back of my pants. “Does your mama know you’re wearin’ her blouse?”

Just as I was about to tell Travis to take a long walk off a short pier, the redhead emerged from the crowd and grabbed my hand: “Hey, you wanna dance?”

My heart sprang. “Mmhmm” I nodded as Travis strode off to pick on some other poor sap.

She smiled at me again, tucking a wavy red curl behind her ear, and led me out to the floor. Disco lights skittered across the waxed hardwood as I felt the heat and smelled the BO of my pimpled classmates, pressing up against one another. She wrapped her arms around the back of my neck and I grabbed her narrow hips as we swayed side to side. She took my wrists with her hands, and encircling them around her low back, pulled me closer. She gazed up at me and smiled. Her teeth were lovely: the two top incisors were pushed back just a hint from her eye-teeth, giving her a steamy vampiric glow. My teeth were crooked and yellow, so I smiled with my lips only. I had no clue how to dance. Had no sense of rhythm. She led. Her back was strong and slender and she moved with purpose, with direction. Whitney Houston was singing “Iiiiiiii—will always, love you…” and during the sax solo, Sarah pressed her lips to mine. I could feel the tip of her tongue entering my mouth — almost apologetically at first, but then, as if she was standing on the principal’s desk in muddy Doc Martens, screaming “welcome to the jungle!” I had never given a thought to how a first kiss should feel or when it would happen, but suddenly, Sarah was kissing me. Little sparks started to swirl and blister behind the backs of my eyelids. Our lips locked until the song ended, and then she was waving goodbye as she grabbed her coat and got into her mom’s truck.

Monday morning, passing her in the hallway, she handed me a folded piece of notebook paper, Josh ❤️ scrawled on the front. I opened it: I can’t stop thinking about that kiss. Meet me by the flagpole after school. xoxo Sarah

She came outside, strolled right over to me, wrapped her arms around my neck like she did on the dance floor, and we kissed—long and hard.

That was our whole relationship. Dancing during slow songs. Kissing until the chaperones split us up. Passing little love notes in the hallways whenever we saw each other, and kissing after school. Now it was over though, and so was my life.

When I woke up the next day, I was still in a fetal position. Hoping it was all a nightmare, I reached under my pillow and found the note. I read it and started crying again. Mom swung open the door, “You’re not dressed! Are you planning to play hooky?” I rolled over to look at her before rolling back onto my side and closing my eyes. She slammed the door and I heard her on the phone, telling the school secretary that I was out sick. As soon as I heard the door close, I tuned my clock radio to Y94. “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men was playing through the static, which made me cry harder.

I lay there most of the day, slow jams simmering on the radio in the background. Crying until I had no tears left to spill.

I kept turning over reasons Sarah would do this. Maybe this was like that time with Anthony.

A few months before I met Sarah, Anthony from Social Studies invited me over to his place to look at his stepdad’s Hustlers. I didn’t really know Anthony, and didn’t want to go, but none of my other classmates had ever invited me to their homes, so I figured I’d make a friend. We sat on his couch and listened to his Wreckx-n-Effect tape, and then he told me to grab the Hustler, which his dad kept under the cushion of his Lay-Z-Boy. When I turned back around—without a magazine, because there wasn’t one—Anthony was pointing a .357 at my forehead and screaming “Get on the fucking floor! Give me your money, motherfucker!” 

I nearly shat myself and got onto his crusty carpeting as quickly as I could, fingers interlaced behind my head, like I’d seen the perps do on COPS. I started crying, “I don’t have any allowance, please Anthony, I’ve only got some change in my pocket, please, please, don’t do it!”

Anthony started laughing maniacally. “Get up, man. Get up. I was fucking joking, man. I wasn’t going to rob you, bro, haha. It was a joke.” He buried his stepdad’s gun in the cushions of the couch and patted me on the chest. We watched an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos and then I walked home, never breathing a word of that joke to mom. 

Maybe Sarah’s note was just a joke.

Mid-afternoon, Lace got home from school, singing “Joshy! I’ve got your homework.” She came into my room, munching Cheetos, and tossed my assignments onto the bed, then skipped back to the living room to watch TV. I took a peek at the pile of homework, then swiped it onto the floor with the back of a forearm. Go to hell, Mrs. Anderson: what can a dissected pig brain teach me about loss? Give me a break, Mr. Vossler; unless your dovetail joint can mend a broken heart, I have no use for it.

I got out of bed to retrieve the cordless phone, squinting as the streaming sunlight stabbed my eyes. I locked the bathroom door behind me and sat on the toilet, pressing Sarah’s digits into the phone—for the first time, I realized. “Hello?” an adult woman’s voice answered. Her mom? An older sister? I didn’t know anything about her family.

I had no idea what I was going to say to Sarah. “Take me back?” “I’m drowning on tears?” Maybe she was waiting for me by the flagpole right now, and it was all just a misunderstanding. “Hi, is Sarah there?”

“Who’s calling?”

“This is Joshua.”

“Sasha?”

“No, Joshua—”

Sarah’s mom/sister placed her hand over the receiver and shouted “Sarah, do you know a little girl named Sasha?…” Silence, then a dial tone.

I re-dialed the number. The same voice answered. “Hello? Uh Sasha, yes, she’s…not home from school yet, but I’ll let her know you called.” Dial tone.

Sarah had cracked open my ribcage with her painted black fingernails, and like the metalhead she was, devoured my entrails over a nasty, wailing, Slash guitar solo. 

Mom got home from class and marched straight to my room. “Still in bed?” silence “Maybe I’ll just call your father and tell him that you won’t talk to me.” I couldn’t look at her. She wouldn’t understand. I just pulled the comforter over my head. “Have you eaten today?” silence “You better pick up that homework or Zeus is going to use it for a litter box.” silence 

The second night was a carbon copy of the first. I continued rotting in my bed, rooting around in stale pajamas, re-reading the note.

The following morning, Mom tried to pry me out of bed again, but I still refused to move, refused to speak. She popped her head into my room on her way to classes. “I’m calling you out sick one more day, but this is really it. If you’re not out of that bed by the time I get home, I’m gonna take you to the emergency room, buster. Is that what you want? Get the doctors to poke and prod you? Eat something and clean the litter box as long as you’re not doing anything constructive.”

I wondered what Sarah would think of me missing school two days in a row. Did she care? Did she even notice? My ears burned as I imagined her and her headbanger friends roasting me over lunch, laughing so hard that Jolt cola sprayed out of their noses. Sarah would probably be making out with some other boy after school today. Maybe Ted Mars: he was not only taller and better looking than me, but he played drums in Doomslayer and was, like Sarah, a grade older than me. They’d be graduating middle school in a few weeks and going off to DGF High School, which was miles away in Glyndon. Happily ever after.

I leaped out of bed, flung open my closet door and pulled my lavender silk shirt so hard that it snapped the cheap plastic hanger. I sniffed the front of the shirt, hoping I could catch a whiff of Sarah, from the last time she pressed her cheek to me. Nothing. It smelled like me, like my clothes. I sat back on the edge of my bed and buried my tears in the shirt. I felt like a vase—that once held a fragrant bouquet of wildflowers—now empty, cracked, and tossed into a dumpster. My thread to Sarah was a tenuous one, to be sure, but now nothing remained, save a wrinkled, tear-smudged break-up note. I pulled the note from under my pillow one last time, re-read the words which had been indelibly etched into memory and tore the page into funeral confetti.

I didn’t even notice Mom standing in the doorframe of my bedroom, her shoulder slouching under the weight of her bookbag.

“Mom—” I dried my eyes with the back of my hand, “how long have you been standing there?”

“You’re gonna stain that shirt.” I tossed it onto the floor and expelled a tear-shattered shudder. She joined me on the padded railing of my waterbed. “Buddy, you know you can talk to me about anything dontcha?” She angled her head to make eye contact with me, put her hand under my quivering chin. “I’m your mother.” I nodded my head and sniffled. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight, gently patting my back like she would have done countless times when I was an infant. “What’s her name?”

I stiffened.

“This little redheaded gal I saw you kissing across the street; did she do this to you?”

“…Sarah.” I was gobsmacked. How long had she known?

“Ta heck with this Sarah. It’s her loss. Joshua, I know you don’t wanna hear this now, and you prob’ly won’t believe me, but there will be other Sarahs down the road. You are gonna meet so many girls, boys, whatever, in your life and some are gonna hurt ya, and some you might hurt.”

She was right. I didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to. I shook my head.

“It’s true. But they’ll all become a piece of you: the good and the not-so-good. Though they may never meet in real life, they’ll live side-by-side in your heart.” She interlaced her arthritic fingers to show me.

I turned my head to see Zeus curled up and purring on my lavender silk shirt.

Mom held onto my narrow shoulders and looked at me through my smeared glasses. “But ya can’t give up. We’ve just gotta keep going. Ta heck with this Sarah. It’s her loss. Now, let’s get you some mac n cheese, huh? You’re about to blow away in a stiff breeze.” 

I nodded and followed Mom to the kitchen.

RUTH