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Angela doesn’t want to be an ‘s’ word. Not a stereotype or a statistic.
Not a slut nor shallow.
Hell, half the time, she doesn’t even want to be smart.
She just wants to be.
Being a stereotype proves them right and so does being a statistic.
Most people see her as a slut anyway, Angela Shepard: The slut with a mean streak.
She doesn’t want to be smart because being smart makes it so much harder to ignore what’s happening. She doesn’t want the sharp eyes she has anyway, because now she can see.
She knows how most people view her. She gets it, really. If she was sitting up in a big house with two parents and a couple scholarships she doesn’t need, she’d look down on someone like her too.
She didn’t want to be a sadistic bitch or a sneaky cunt.
She doesn’t want to be any of those things because she doesn’t want to grow up and be another east side girl lost to the lifestyle.
Short marriages once they get her pregnant that end in a messy divorce. Two or three kids she can’t afford. An affinity for drinking, doing dangerous shit for a rush of enjoyment, leaving her kids at home.
She doesn’t want to be that.
She doesn’t want to be her mother.
But what is she supposed to do when she grew up with Sylvia as a role model? Stealing, drinking, two-timing, crashing and burning, hurting, and drinking some more. She’d known how to do makeup since she’d been a child. She’d learned how to be a greaser girl and now she was associated with too many ‘s’ words.
Tim would ruffle her hair with an empty reassurance. “Don’t listen to them. They don’t understand us.”
Curly would scoff at her and seem to fall into a angry mood. “That’s jus’ a part of the life, Angel.”
The only ‘s’ word she could ever imagine liking being used on her is the most shameful one she keeps up in her mind.
The one she spits with venom, teeth bared and claws out.
She knows it’s a common enough sentiment on the east side of town. No one wants to be a grease.
But if she ever said it out loud, she doesn’t want to know what would happen.
Until it does.
She’s crying after this dude she’d been seeing hit her. Obviously, she’d screamed at him, gone full on her-mother-type-of-crazy. Obviously, she’d hit him back. Obviously she’s going to go home and set Curly on the guy.
But it had still hurt. More than the slap.
That had stung but faded in a couple seconds.
Sylvia is driving her home, her eyes trained on the road. She doesn’t have her signature heavy makeup on, and Angela is almost sure that the stuff she’d had when Sylvia picked her up had melted off. She must’ve looked a mess.
“He’s just a man, Ang.” Sylvia says, and the words sound dismissive but the tone is sincere. “It’s just what we gotta deal with.”
Angela opens her mouth to respond. She’s so fucking tired. But all that comes out is a sob.
“I don’t want this to happen, Sylvia. I don’t wanna deal with it.”
Sylvia smiles ruefully and takes one hand off the wheel, tucking a lock of curly hair behind Angela’s hair. “Couldn’t name you a girl who does.”
Angela can feel her angry streak rising up but she pushes it down, like she always does. Like she always has to.
“Why do we?” she says instead of just screaming her feelings out, it’s still a little too loud for the enclosed space. “Why the fuck do we?”
Sylvia takes a breath and Angela can tell what the answer will be before the words hit the air. “Because that’s what we have to do to survive on this side of town.”
She’d heard it a million times and she’d had the same response each time. Now, though, she isn’t holding it back.
“I wanna be a Soc!”
Sylvia’s eyes don’t widen. Her hands don’t shake. She doesn’t glance over or admonish Angela. Her eyes just seem set in a deep kind of sadness.
“I know, hun.” She says, a resignation that just makes more tears well up in Angela’s throat. “We all do.”
Angela thinks on her brothers who seems fine with their lives. Happy with it, even, and she thinks that might not be true.
But at least Sylvia does, so she continues.
“At least when their man hits them, they can wipe their tears with money!” She says and she can’t stop crying. It’s not about the guy anymore. “They don’t gotta worry about food or money or any of it! It ain’t fuckin’ fair!”
Sylvia places a hand on Angela’s thigh, always the wise, older greaser girl sage. “That’s life, babe. Ain’t a thing in the fuckin’ world you can do to stop it.”
Angela knows it’s true. But she’d been hoping for some kind of answer. She’d been hoping for soft words and comfort, not the brutally honest way of Sylvia.
She’d known it wouldn’t happen but she’d still hoped.
Angela takes a couple breaths so she’ll stop crying.
Sylvia turns onto Angela’s street and she reaches down, gripping the strap of her bag and pulling it into her lap.
She pulls out the rag she keeps there, wiping off as much makeup as she can. It makes her face look bare and she knows Curly will be able to tell she’d been crying.
But he’d be able to tell when her breath hitches.
She doesn’t want to advertise it to everyone on her street.
So she wipes off as much makeup as possible, tucking the cloth back in her bag as Sylvia pulls onto their front yard.
She hops out of the car, turning to Sylvia. “Thanks, Sylv.” She says, and both of them know it’s for more than the ride.
“Don’t mention it, hun.”
Angela nods and makes her way into the house where her mother is passed out in her bedroom, with three kids she can’t afford, leaving them at home as she does dangerous shit for a thrill before coming home and crashing.
“Curly!” she calls, and he responds with a vaguely question-like sound. He’d probably just woken up.
She stops in the doorway of his room.
“Tommy hit me.”
She sees him wake up immediately, clearly looking for a fight. “Where is he?”
She shrugs, a facade of nonchalance hiding the hurt. “Last I checked he was still at his house.”
Curly gains a dangerous quality about him and Angela knows he wont’t be coming home that night. Whether because he gets picked up by the cops or he goes on a crime spree.
She watches her brother leave the house on his way to fight her boyfriend who’d just hit her and she understands who she is.
Angela Shepard: The stereotypical greaser girl. The slut with a mean streak. The shallow one who cares about how perfect her makeup is before leaving the house. The one who’d eventually die there, never being anything other than that.
A statistic.