Glamour

It's not all snappy lines and dramatic exits. She's finding that out, lately.

--

She's sitting on a post-

It's pretty cool, because she used to watch cartoons where the superheroes and the ninjas and the antiheroes could all perch on the edge of a roof like whoa, no problem, and she always wanted to do it too. Used to try all that stuff they do in cartoons, all that stuff your parents tell you not to imitate because the little warning at the bottom says "DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME".

Well fuck that.

So she's sitting on a post, one boot swinging in the air, and she's thinking sometimes you just have sit back and think about where you are. How you got there. And she's thinking that sometimes you really do get what you want, and sometimes old clichés turn out to be true.

Be careful what you wish for.

Because nobody really knows what they want. Nobody really knows what they need. You can figure one for the other, you can work it all out on paper, nice and neat, but you never really know what you're getting into.

So she wanted recognition.

She wanted a reputation.

She wanted fear.

She wanted to do something nobody could laugh at, something her parents couldn't screw up, something that could make her as dangerous as she'd always wanted to be, punching other kid's teeth out on the playground. Some little girls want to be princesses. Some little girls want to be doctors.

Some little girls want to beat the shit out of the boys.

She's got a gun at her hip and a tear in her tights. There's a handful of pills and pennies in her pocket, because you never know when you'll need a fast jack out the pain. She's got a number in her cell phone, the only number she's ever asked for, and there's a boy on the other end waiting to see if she'll be coming back at the end of the day.

And she thinks that if she were anyone else, she'd be getting ready for her senior year.

Where the romance went, she's not sure—there's action and danger and glamour in the idea, bright lights lit up like Hollywood with explosions and hip shots and mile-a-minute banter. It was so bright at first. It was smooth and quick and full of glory.

Glory like soldiers used to go looking for.

But battlefields are gritty and long and thorny, and soldiers come back with scars across their chests and scars across their hearts, and they never do find that glory they went out looking for.

She thinks maybe there's no such thing.

Somewhere along the way, somewhere between the fag boy with the stupid, simple dream and the man with the empty black eyes—somewhere in the middle of all that, she woke up from the dream and found herself here. The magic's gone. The blood is just iron and hemoglobin. The bullets are just gun powder and pellets. The men are just murderers. And she's a murderer too.

She wonders where the magic went.

And she knows that her thoughts are spinning out of control, because she's been up way too long and she needs something in her stomach badly, but she's still got a job to complete and she's still got this reputation to live up to—this reputation she built for herself when she was bright and shiny and confidant, when she was so sure of everything and so sure of herself.

And there's a boy waiting to see if she'll make it back tonight.

She loads the gun—her old revolver that's so inadequate, that she chose two years ago when fashion was so much more important than function—and she knows that she has that number on speed-dial, and she knows that she will make it home, at the end of the day, because tonight isn't the night. Not yet.

Better not keep him waiting.