Kill

An experimental prose piece I wrote in graduate school, this depicts painfully true events from junior high school
(with the names changed to protect the guilty), the place that The Simpsons creator Matt Groening rightfully calls
“the deepest pit in hell.”

I’m’a kill that bitch.

 Evangelyn picked up a piece of broken glass from the concrete schoolyard and ran after Lovey, whom she spotted leaning against the chain-link fence that ringed the yard. As Evangelyn sped toward Lovey, she saw the other girl notice her and quickly react by jumping from the fence and sprinting away. The chase between the two girls weaved its way through the lunch recess crowds. Boys playing basketball in the corner of the lot, girls standing around gossiping.

Fuckin bitch. I’m sick of her ass. I hate her. I hate her!

*

Evangelyn stumbled into the school office and waited by the counter for the secretary to notice her.

“Evangelyn? Not you again!” said Mrs. Wilson as she got up from her desk and walked to the counter to face the girl. “Let me get out this stuff.” Mrs. Wilson reached under the counter and brought out a ledger and a printed note pad. She opened up the ledger and traced her finger down a column until she found Evangelyn’s name. The name led Mrs. Wilson’s finger to a row of boxes, one for each day of the month of March. Three boxes in a row were marked with red slashes; Mrs. Wilson picked up a red pen and added a slash to a fourth box.

“One more tardy and you’re going to be suspended, Evangelyn,” Mrs. Wilson wrote quickly on the “Unexcused Tardiness” pad and tore off a sheet for Evangelyn.

Evangelyn took the sheet and walked out of the office. She ambled sluggishly down the grey hallways to her locker, where she opened the combination lock and threw in her books and her dull brown coat. Crossing her chest from her left shoulder to her right hip was the thin tan strap that held her small red purse. She pulled the strap over her head with her right hand and hung the purse on a hook. After closing her locker, she walked slowly to her class. Phys. Ed. was first hour; she was in no hurry to get there.

When she walked into the gym, the class was through with the beginning exercises and was setting up a volleyball game. The Phys. Ed. teacher, Coach Harris, was a gruff, fat, red-faced white woman in dark shorts and a polo shirt. She barked out orders to the students: “No, that’s your position over there, so move it!”

Evangelyn walked to the volleyball net that stretched the width of the gym and held out the note.  Coach Harris snatched it from her hand, peered at it like a dead bug, and thrust it back in Evangelyn’s hand. “Go over to the corner. You’re serving!” Coach Harris ordered.

Evangelyn walked to the right side of the net to the right corner, where a ball sat. “All right, let’s get ready to play. Evangelyn, serve the ball!” Coach Harris called out. Evangelyn picked up the ball and posed her body for the serve: left foot forward, left arm outstretched and holding the ball, right arm pulled back, right hand curled into a fist. She looked around at the other kids staring back at her, some who rolled their eyes at her, others who crossed their arms, knowing what to expect.

 Evangelyn brought her fist up and under the ball hard. The ball shot straight up to the ceiling, then landed on her side of the net. “Foul!” cried out Coach Harris as Evangelyn went to pick up the ball. The ball was on the opposite corner from the server’s position, but no one threw her the ball. Evangelyn retrieved the ball and walked back to her position, looking at the dull hard floor to avoid the faces of the kids she passed by, though she heard clicking tongues, snorts and huffs. As she readied herself for another serve, her face felt hot and her insides jittery. She tried to aim the ball, moving her left hand around it. After taking a quick breath, she hit the ball.

 Shooting out barely over her teammates’ heads, the ball quickly hit the net and dropped to the floor. “Their ball!” Coach Harris barked as she walked over to the ball, picked it up and tossed it to the server on the other team. A girl who stood in the position to the left of Evangelyn hissed at her “You gon’t make us lose, retard!” It was Lovey Sweet: tall and bony, with a pinched, zit-covered face and long, off-black hair, shiny with pressing oil and pulled back into a slick ponytail.

Evangelyn looked away and stared ahead at nothing. For the rest of the game, she would continue to fumble before the angry eyes of Lovey and the other kids.

*

Two more boring classes later, it was fourth hour lunch time. Evangelyn got in line quickly at the cafeteria, received her tray of food, and walked past the long tables of chattering cliques that filled the room with a loud ringing of voices and found a seat at an empty table end. Two girls sat at the other end of the table; when Evangelyn sat down, they glanced at her for a moment, and then went back to eating and talking. Evangelyn thought she heard a snort come out of one of the girls’ mouths.

After gobbling down a dry hamburger and a tiny carton of juice, Evangelyn abandoned the tray and left the cafeteria. She walked out into the hallway, where crowds of students stood against locker and hung out in locked classroom doorways killing their lunch hour time.

Finding an unoccupied doorway recess, Evangelyn leaned against the door and sunk down to the floor, pulling her knees against her chest. Her purse was sashed around her again, having retrieved it from her locker after Phys. Ed. With the exception of that class, the purse was attached to her from the moment she walked out of her house every morning to when she left school in the afternoon, walked home, stepped into her house and stomped up the stairs to the bedroom she shared with her sister, where she dropped the purse on the floor next to her side of the bed.

Pulling the purse away from her hip to where it sat between her knees and her belly, Evangelyn unzipped one of its two compartments and removed a tiny memo pad, wire-bound on its left side, with a red cover marked “PRIVATE!” in dark-inked letters. She opened up the memo pad, took out a red-ink pen from her purse, and started writing:

Here I am again. Today is 3-10-81. This has been a very yucky week. I’m not going to bother to tell you about it. I’m a really gloomy person these days. I wish I had something to look forward to that comes sooner than summer vacation. I hate life sometimes. It’s a real bitch occasionally.

 Evangelyn closed the memo pad and put it and her pen in her purse. She got up from the floor and walked down the hall and through the mass of students to the girls’ restroom. She opened the door and saw that the restroom was empty; she then went into the last stall and closed the door. Inside, she pulled down her jeans and panties and sat down to indulge in one of her fantasies: She was Pat Benatar, tough and bad in a tight catsuit, strutting across the stage shrieking defiance:

You want me to leave, you tell me to stay;
You ask me to come back, you turn and walk away!
You want to be lovers, you want to be friends,
I’m losing my patience, you’re nearing the end!
Treat me right! Treat me ri-eght!
Open your eyes, maybe you’ll see the light …

“Hey retard! You doin’ the number two in there?”

Evangelyn’s body jerked with shock at the voice that broke her daydream. She bent over and looked under the door for feet; she saw none. When she pulled her head up, she saw Lovey’s head, sitting at the top of the partition to the left of the stall. Lovey’s hands were wrapped around the partition’s edge. Staring from top of the other partition was another girl; both Lovey and the other girl were standing on the toilets of the stalls that bracketed Evangelyn’s.

“You need to hurry up, retard! Other people gotta dukey too!” Lovey snapped.

Evangelyn reached for her coat, which was hanging on a hook on the stall door, to try to cover herself with it. Lovey grabbed one of the coat’s sleeves, lifting it from the hook. Her laughter howled throughout the restroom as Evangelyn caught the hem of the coat and pulled its edge over her bare thighs. Suddenly, an arm reached under the stall door and grabbed at the coat’s edge. The other girl had left the stall to help Lovey snatch Evangelyn’s coat away.

“Damn yooooouuu!” Evangelyn jumped off the toilet and threw the stall door open with a bang. “Damn yoooouuu!” She fell on the cold floor, her legs bound by the pants around her ankles. Two other girls entered the restroom and then backed up at the sight of her, pointing and snickering.

Lovey and her friend were gone.

*

Where is she? I’ma kill her ass. That bitch! That fuckin’ bitch!

Evangelyn ran into a big man, twice her size. He grabbed the hand that held the glass shard with his left fist and then pried her fingers open with his right hand. The glass shard fell to the concrete.

Let me go, damnit!

The big man wrestled her to the ground. Her arms swung, her mouth hollered. A ring of students gathered around the struggle.

I hate her, I hate her, I hate you! Fuck everybody in this damn school! Y’all hate me, I hate you!

As someone shouted from the crowd, “There goes crazy girl!” the big man dragged Evangelyn into the building, heading for the principal’s office.