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Cold.
Conniving.
Cruel.
That’s what they start to call you when you cry more at missing pet posters than at your own boyfriend's funeral. And yeah it’s easier to call him my boyfriend than to go into every breakup and every fight. It’s really easier to not refer to him at all. But then that makes you the same cheap and plastic bitch that dated him in the first place.
The same things whispered behind my back as I stood over his grave in the longest dress that I owned. Ivy green and down to my knees. A gift from my mother. I didn’t cry at her funeral either.
I walked back over to her gravestone when I was done being laughed at over Dallas’. Looked at like I didn’t belong. Like I didn’t even deserve to say goodbye. So at least when I stand over my mom's grave I don’t feel out of place. Well, I do. But in a different way. No girl should have two places to visit in the same graveyard.
My mom died when I was six. Cancer. Some kind that not even the most fancy of doctors could find a name of, let alone a cure for. So I watched and I understood and it all started to crumble. My mom was my best friend, my dad too. It gets that way when you’re an only child. Perfection on the first try is what my mom always said.
My dad was some hot shot writer. Or a lawyer. Something that involved a lot of writing, constant tapping on that old blue grey typewriter of his. I didn’t really know. All I knew is that everyday when he came home from work and I offered to carry his briefcase inside, it nearly toppled me over. But that’s pretty much all the good I remember about my dad. The life had left his heart when it left my mama's eyes.
He lost his job. We lost our house. We had already lost my mama and now everything else seemed to be gone too. When the best my dad could do was a small trailer in the middle of an even smaller park. One that he didn’t even manage to make it home to that often. And when he did, you couldn’t even recognize him.
So after that I spent most of my nights at my friends houses. Leeching off them like some kind of pest, but they still swore up and down that they didn’t mind. I stayed doing that until I was fourteen and met Dallas for the first time.
He was new in Tulsa, god knows I always pity the new kid. Looking like the pets on those missing posters I always hated so much. I wanted to invite him over, but I didn’t want his first impression of the town to be in some shitty trailer park on the very edge of it. So I asked him out instead. I didn’t really know it was a date, it wasn’t supposed to be. But the crude smile on his face once he realized it was, had nearly scared me half to death.
It was his eyes. Well it was all of him really. But especially his eyes. Like they were void of any kind of actual human emotion. Any decency or empathy or anything like that. That’s what I thought until I met Johnny Cade and realized that maybe it was just me. Because I’d never seen a boy smile so hard in his life.
I suppose I didn’t mind. I didn’t like him anyway. He was more like a pastime for when I got bored. And we’d go on like that for almost three years. On and off again like a faulty traffic light. And if there was anything I could count on, it was the fact that I could never count on Dallas. The fact that our routine was not even having one at all.
But I hate the way his fathers ring hung around my neck. Like a passed down reminder of owned property and branded skin in ways that couldn’t be covered up with makeup because they didn’t really even exist at all. So he took back the necklace, most times I ended up giving it back. Throwing it at his head and screaming at him for whatever had happened to me that day. And I guess he took it, cause he did the same thing to me too I guess.
Nobodies perfect. I’d rather die than claim to be. Maybe my mama wasn’t even perfect, but I didn’t get a chance to see if she could be. But being a walking imperfection is harder than it seems to be. Still it wasn’t like I was like some of the other girls that Dallas hung around with. The ones that drank till they wouldn’t remember the next morning, which I guess is the best way to be around Dallas. Yet the smell of alcohol made my stomach churn.
That’s why I hated when Dallas would wrap his crappy brown leather jacket, that smelt of cigarettes and cheap beer, around me in another attempt to claim me as his. Like I was some prize to be won. Me. And maybe if I had something to drink myself, I’d be flattered by it. But I wanted so much more to just be Dallas’ girl. Cruel way of getting my wish.
So I don’t know why I got so pissed off when Dally got hauled away and I saw the Cade boy wearing his jacket. A good three sizes away, making me laugh. I went over to him that day and asked about the fading black ring around his eye. Asked if Dallas did it before he was gone. Johnny looked shocked and almost crazed, shaking his head and insisting Dallas would never hit him. So I guessed Johnny knew a very different Dallas than the one me and Tim Shepard knew.
I didn’t even mean to hit on the guy. I just wanted the jacket back. Rubbing up on his arm, trying to get him to take it off without telling him it was mine. Because it wasn’t mine and I knew that if I said that out loud I’d hate myself ten times more than I already did. So that’s probably why the kid took it as flirting. I mean I get why, he looked like shit and probably didn’t even weigh as much as me soaking wet, but he didn’t need to go and get everyone else involved too.
It was bad enough when Tim laughed his ass off and teased me about it for the next week, almost made me want to crash there anymore, but I nearly lost it all when Steve Randle of all people started to point a finger in my face and act like I was the one that was gonna ruin Johnny Cade. I told him exactly where he could shove it and exactly why because a kid like Johnny isn’t gonna be a kid much longer as long as he is hanging around Dallas.
And I was right. Matching tombstones and everything.
I so badly wanted to say some sort of ‘I told you so’, but I knew it wasn’t the time. There would never really ‘be a time’ where you can go up to your ex’s best friends and tell them you saw this coming all along. You saw it coming from the first second you met Dallas. The first time you kissed him and the first time you slept with him and he didn’t even bother to learn your name.
That’s when I noticed her. The redhead wiping off the dirt from her fresh clean white tights. Her eyes looked awful sad, like she had just lost someone too. I nearly had to remind myself that I was in a graveyard of all places. Everyone had lost someone.
So I walked up behind her real slow like so I didn’t interrupt. My mom raised me better than to do dumb stuff like that. I’m not that without manners. But something about that while entire week, my whole life really, just made me not want to give a fuck anymore.
“Bob Sheldon?” I asked her, “that the other guy from the papers?”
She looked at me like some sort of monster with two heads. Like she knew exactly who down to the very last detail I was but I had no clue of her first name.
“I saw you at Dallas’ funeral” she said coldly and turned back to the grave, tucking her hands in her coat pockets to avoid the chill. It was a real nice coat.
“You know Dallas?” I questioned, shocked that a girl that looked like her would know Dallas beyond his name. She seemed different. Nothing like me.
“Only briefly. Wish I hadn’t.”
I nodded. Dallas had that effect on a lot of people. I couldn’t really blame her. Not when I almost wished the same thing myself too many times to count.
“What about him?” I gestured to the grave in front of her.
“My boyfriend” she stated.
“Oh” I nodded softly, “Dallas was kinda my boyfriend too.”
“Your boyfriend was a horrible person” the redhead said simply, making me burst out laughing. The kind of laughing that gets you the stares you should get when you’re doing it in the middle of a graveyard.
“I know.”
“You don’t seem horrible.”
“Neither do you” I smile and the girl finally looked over at her to meet my eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I read about your boyfriend in the papers, too, he didn’t sound like he’d be like next guy of the year either.”
“You didn’t know him.”
“And you said you didn’t know Dally.”
For a second the girl looked back down at her feet, biting her lip until it was as Cherry red as her cheeks and hair. She was really pretty if she wasn’t standing on top of a grave. And her eyes were a beautiful green aside from the red tiredness of them. She didn’t look like a girl who belonged at a funeral at all.
“What’s your name? I’m Sylvia” I sighed and extended out my hand. And for the first time in our whole interaction she looked back at me like I wasn’t poisonous. Some evil bitch from the wrong side of the tracks that dated the likes of Dallas Winston. And she shook my hand.
“I’m Cherry.”
“I would say nice to meet you. But, you know” I gestured at the hundreds of graves in front of us. And she laughed. Barely audible, but it was there. As light as the wind and as short as it could blow by.
“You wanna get something to eat with me, Cherry?” I asked her. I don’t really know why I asked her. I didn’t expect her to say yes. She really had no reason to say yes. It just came out.
The girl frowned, “I’m sorry, I promised my friend I would see her.”
I nodded but didn’t respond. I figured it was an excuse. It was a dumb question, I expected an excuse. I knew better than to go around asking grieving girls out for lunch. I knew better than to have shown up here in the first place.
“Maybe some other day?” Cherry suggested and I nearly had to ask her to repeat herself. She didn’t look like the kinda girl to string you along just for the fun of it. She didn’t look like a girl to string you along at all.
“Sure” I smiled, “you got a number?”
Cherry nodded and quickly dug around in her purse, pulling out what looked like the little paper from the center of a fortune cookie, using her other hand to carefully write down each digit on the back of the small paper and handing it to me.
“You can call me tonight or something, if you want, I won't be busy” Cherry told me, the most tired smile in the world pushing itself onto her face. It didn’t look like it belonged there in that moment at all, it made me wonder what her real smile looked like. And if maybe one day I could cause it.
She walked away and got into a car I didn’t recognize, a car that was far too nice to belong to anyone I recognized. But once she was gone I looked back down at the small scrap of paper in my hands.
There it was. Her number, that and a small black heart next to it.