Blonde Firework

Daddy’s so clueless, sometimes I feel bad.  Just tonight I smoked pot, had sex, and stole a BMW and an ipod, but Daddy thinks I’m still asleep under my Winnie the Pooh sheets.  I’m still his little angel, but really I’m a glass bottle of corked secrets, and one day I’m just gonna explode.

He doesn’t even understand I’m never coming back.  Even if I totally bomb my audition at the Conservatory tomorrow, I’m staying in NYC forever.  So this is my last night on Jarvis Island, and it’s a jazz-colored night, cool midnight blue with starlight dancing over Brigham Lake like a ballet of fireflies, and I’m huddled here under my favorite willow tree, dragging stolen weed, jamming to stolen tunes, and crying icicle tears for this place I haven’t even left.

Tonight, Bucky and I swam the lake to Dunkard Island, the wealthy island, and crashed a “camper” beach party, smoking their weed and drinking their beer.  We call them campers, because they're only on the island in the summers.  Anyway, we slammed a red Beamer, which was parked on the beach, into neutral and pushed it into the lake.  Then we ran, scaling picket fences, leaping hedges, rousing guard dogs awake on our way through watered-green lawns and stone driveways with marble fountains. 

The campers chased us about a mile until we ducked into an unlocked greenhouse, hiding under the hydrangeas, heaving for breath on the dirt floor.  Bucky ripped off my hip-huggers, and we screwed like monkeys while an angry rabble of spoiled, strung-out high schoolers rushed by.  Bucky looked strange, his face all twisted and glistening with sweat from the chase.  I started to laugh, but he shoved his fingers in my mouth to quiet me, because the campers were still just outside.  I felt suddenly like we were on the lake in Daddy’s boat, the stars bearing down brighter and brighter on the glass ceiling above us.  They were the city lights a thousand miles away.  I closed my eyes.  Even in that blackness, I could see a distant, silent flash of lightning that spread out over the whole sky like a blanket, and I could feel it in my fingertips -- static on a newly laundered shirt. 

Then we swam back to our island, and Bucky went home, because he’s gotta go to work tomorrow.  He works at the arcade on the boardwalk back on the mainland.  He takes the ferry every morning.  I came up here to write and think about my audition tomorrow.  From here, I can see the remnants of the bonfire those campers had burning about a football field from where we pushed their Beamer into the lake, an offering to the Beast of the Brigham. 

My hair is finally drying in the breeze.  It’s all frizzed-out and haywire like the snapshot of a blonde firework – like my own, personal Independence Day.  It’s nights like tonight that show the beauty of the whole world, and it just makes me want to explore the whole rest of it.  If there’s this much beauty right here on our little, god-forsaken island, then how much more beauty did God breathe on the rest of His Creation?  I don’t know – pretty friggin’ cool.