Ten Big Ones

*Contains mature themes and sensitive content involving a teenager.

August 1985. Summer was ending. The Alabama heat wasn’t about to give out.

All that month, she came home from majorette practice, sweated clean through her PHS t-shirt.

Her hair stuck flat to the back of her neck, damp and matted like one of those newborn kittens they’d found in the backyard shed.

Her legs had that deep, tired ache from marching the practice field over and over. One, two, three, four. Pivot left. Toss. Kick. Catch. Mr. Watkins yelling, “Watch your spacing, trombones!”

School started at the end of the month. Then football. Then she'd be back up under those Friday night lights in her shiny uniform, marching out onto the field while the band played the fight song and the whole town sat there in the bleachers like church.

Because that's what it was, really. Church with a scoreboard. Everybody's business got aired out one way or another. Mamas whispering behind their hands, daddies leaned up on the chain link fence, girls all up and down the stadium smiling like nothing in this world was wrong with them.

She was good at that smile. Had been for a while now. But that August, smiling was not the problem. Time was.

Being the oldest girl meant she was supposed to already know things she didn't know how to do. Her little sisters still got to move through that house like children were supposed to, no secrets weighing them down, just squabbling over which cartoon to watch, leaving their mess in every room, careless as anything.

Her boyfriend had been gone most of the summer, off at basic training, at Fort Something-another, and they'd lived the whole thing on handwritten letters.

And the phone.

Lord, the phone.

One line in that house and people always drifting through, picking up extensions, ears everywhere. You didn't say anything on that phone you didn’t want repeated at the supper table.

So they'd learned to talk around it. Talked about timing. Talked about money. Talked about what they'd say when he got home, going over it and over it till the story sounded natural.

They were going to the beach before school started. That would be the story. Far enough off to explain a day gone missing, ordinary enough nobody'd blink twice. Teenagers went to the beach in August, came home sunburnt and sandy and nobody asked a single question. She was fixing to give them the same nothing to ask about.

On her birthday, she pulled up the driveway still smelling like the dirt practice field, and her daddy was standing there waiting on her, grinning like he had a secret.

"Here," he said.

He handed her a card in a blue envelope, and she opened it right there in the driveway. George Washington on the front. Here are ten big ones for your 16th birthday.

Her daddy was already laughing before she got it half open.

Ten big ones.

She smiled on account of him smiling. Ten dollars. That's what she figured he meant. One ten dollar bill. Ten dollars was fine. Ten dollars was more than nothing. Might cover gas, might cover lunch, might cover whatever piece of the story needed covering.

But ten dollars wasn't going to be enough. Not near.

Then she got the card open all the way.

Ten ten-dollar bills fanned out in her hand.

A hundred dollars.

"Gotcha," her daddy said, tickled with himself.

That was him all over. Loved a good trick, a little theater out of a birthday card. She laughed right along with him, but underneath it, that laugh wasn't really about the joke.

Money didn't just float around in that house. A hundred dollars was groceries. A hundred dollars was school shoes and the light bill sitting in its envelope on the counter. It wasn't something you could want out loud, not without a reason. And she didn't have a reason she could say without cracking the whole thing open.

It was relief. Plain old relief, sliding down through her like warm water.

A hundred dollars would carry the beach trip a long way. Not all the way, but between what they had already scraped together and what she held in her hand, it was enough to go.

He came home from basic training with only a few days of summer left. They'd both been counting toward this trip, though not the way anybody watching would've guessed.

They left town wearing that beach story like it was luggage, with directions written out on a piece of notebook paper. No screen telling them where to turn. Just road signs, and the paper, and a whole lot of quiet sitting between them in the front seat.

Everybody probably pictured windows down, bare feet on the dash, the radio turned up loud.

The lie worked because it sounded exactly like something two teenagers would do. Sounded young. Sounded like nothing.

But they weren't headed to the beach.

They were headed to Montgomery.

The farther they got from home, the quieter the car got, till it was nearly silent. She had thought having him with her would make her feel less alone. It didn’t. She watched the cows in the pastures go by and made herself not think too far down the road. In a town her size, being seen was as good as being known by everybody at once. The checkout girl at Piggly Wiggly, the preacher's wife, somebody's cousin. Montgomery was big enough, she figured, to swallow a person whole for a day.

She was praying on that, anyway.

They found the building. He parked. Neither one of them moved right off. Just sat there a minute with that folded paper still lying on the hot pleather seat between them.

“You ready?” he asked.

“I guess,” she said, because ready had nothing to do with it.

Then they got out and walked up the sidewalk side by side, not touching hands. Two people stood out front holding up poster-board signs.

She kept her eyes locked straight ahead, chin down, the way you do when walking into English class late. Didn’t read one word on those signs.

She pushed the door open and went on in.

Cooler air inside. The room smelled sharp and clean, like the tile floor had just been mopped with Lysol. Everyone sat in chairs with purses in their laps, pretending not to look at each other.

The woman behind the glass looked up.

"I have a ten o'clock," she said, and was a little surprised her own voice came out steady.

A clipboard slid across the counter.

"That'll be two hundred dollars. And I need you to fill this out."

She looked down at the form and saw the word she had not let herself say all summer.

She scribbled her name on the line the same way she'd sign it on a school form.

The ride home was filled with a silence that felt wrong for two people carrying the same secret. He kept his eyes dead on the road the whole way. She leaned her head against the window and watched her reflection flicker in and out. By the time they hit the town limits, the beach story was back in place, worn smooth from all that practicing.

“How was the beach?”

“Good.”

Nobody asked one question more than they had to. No one looked at her and said, “You didn’t get any sun.” Her parents took what they were told and let it lie there. Maybe that was just how things went back then. They'd feed you, buy your school clothes, hand you a birthday card with a joke inside it, and drive you to band practice. But the serious things didn't get spoken out loud in that house. A girl learned early what not to say to keep her secrets, and she'd learned it better than most.

Then school started, same as it did every single year.

Halls filling up loud. Lockers banging shut. Girls comparing class schedules in the hallway like it was the only thing that mattered in the world. Teachers handing out their rules. Band practicing out in the ninety-degree heat. Football season rolling in with its uniforms and its concession-stand popcorn smell and those lights bright enough to make everybody believe in whatever picture they were looking at from the bleachers.

She put her sequined uniform on.

She marched out onto that field at half-time.

She smiled exactly when she was supposed to smile.

From up in the stands, she probably looked like any other girl out there counting beats, catching her baton every time, not a thing in the world wrong with her.

Not one soul in those bleachers ever knew where she'd really gone before that summer ran out.