Wednesday, June 9, 2010

MMH - Chapter 1:Part 3

Or maybe it was just Holly that these sorts of humiliating things happened to.  She was never really good with speaking her mind out loud.  So Holly would jot it down instead.  She felt she expressed herself better in written words.  What she probably meant to say is that it was easier for her to spew a bunch of crap through pen on a piece of paper than out of her mouth.  So, rather than telling Mike that she thought he was a smoking hot babe, she wrote him a note.  Take that one step further?  An anonymous little love note from a "secret admirer".  She kept this up for a few weeks before she garnered enough courage to ask for "the meeting".

Well, he knew it was her all along, apparently.  And he wasn't interested.  And he didn't show up.  And - he sort of tormented her for the rest of junior high.  But, we're getting ahead of the story a bit. 

It made Holly a little gun-shy around boys.

Still - at the moment, she really wished he had come to the party anyways.  The group gathered in some of the first few rows in the theater - loud, full of pop and popcorn, heels kicked up on the seats in front of them and laughing out loud.  They settled a bit when the movie started, but Holly was restless.  Amy and Hill couldn't seem to sit still either, despite Corey's on-screen appeal.

"Cherry, we'll be right back," Holly whispered to her friend.

The strange boy, Chuck, was on Cherry's left and he seemed to be tickling her side.  Cherry giggled and non-chalantly shooed Holly and the other two girls away.

"Worried about missing the movie?" Amy asked.

"Nah.  We can always come back next weekend or something."

The theater lobby was pretty deserted, except for a girl or a boy here and there entering and exiting the restrooms.  Even the concession stand was closed.

"I kind of just want to walk," Holly said. 

"Around the lobby?" Hill asked.

"Outside.  Just for a second.  What do you think?"

But, "just for a second", wasn't a possibility once the girls were on the outside and the doors clicked locked behind them.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Molly-Mo Holly - Chapter 1: Part 2

Yes, Holly was a pretty good girl, by most standards.

And most of her friends were pretty "good", too.  Any parties they ever had or invited eachother to featured root beer and licorice and truth-or-dare.  Or trips to the mall, which was where Holly was headed tonight.  Her friend Cherry was having a birthday party at the theater in the Newgate Mall.  The movie?  License to Drive.  Corey Haim was so cute!  Holly was totally psyched.

She picked her curly hair into a full-bodied bob and lined her eyes in black.  She brushed on seafoam green eyeshadow to match her top and paired the look with her favorite pair of light blue denim cutoff shorts.  Modest cutoffs, of course.  They had to be just an inch above the knee.  White sandals and a pink gloss to her lips finished the look off just right.

Her mom drove, picking up one of Holly's best friends along the way.  Amy Callahan was the kind of girl that made up for her chubby figure with an infectious personality.  She was possibly even a little over the top at times.  But Holly loved it.  Amy was so fun and full of life and you couldn't help laughing when she laughed, which was pretty much all the time.  She was adorable - Holly wouldn't think otherwise.  But, she was a big girl and boys were petty.  Not to mention she had reddish hair, braces and freckles to boot.

"Corey Haim will totally be my boyfriend," Amy predicted, her head snaked back and forth as she said this with a click, click of her fingers.  "You know he wants him a little of this."

Holly smiled over the terrible thought in her head - "I don't even have a boyfriend.  What chance has she got, really?"

Holly hid her hands behind her back and dug her nails into her palm.  She didn't enjoy the judgemental, rude, and thoroughly uncalled for thoughts that would pop up in her brain sometimes.  Who was she to judge, anyhow?  It didn't matter if her friend Milly had vomit breath or that Jeni had a big butt.  They were her friends.  "Bad Holly," she thought.

"You girls have fun.  Be good," her mom said as she dropped them off.

"Always," the two of them said in unison and giggled.

The movie didn't start until after 9pm so the group of girls gathered in the food court for big soft pretzels and diet coke.  Holly met Cherry Lerner when they were lumped together as locker partners in 7th grade.  Cherry, bless her soul, wasn't a very cute girl.  The meaner boys at school would say that she kind of looked like a man.  She always kept her hair neatly short and never wore one ounce of makeup.  And she always wore baggy jeans and big, boyish t-shirts or polos.  But, she was a nice girl.  A bit clingy, perhaps, but she made you feel like you were her bestest friend in the whole wide world.  It was kind of endearing.

None of the girls at Cherry's party were part of the "upper class".  They weren't popular.  But, they weren't unpopular, either.  They were sort of in the middle.  Aside from Cherry, Amy and Holly - Hillary, Millie and a boy named Chuck were at the mall for Cherry's birthday.  It was a decent gathering.  Holly had hoped that Cherry's cute neighbor and fellow almost 9th grader, Mike, had shown up.  Holly had had a crush on this boy since she first laid eyes on him on the first day of 7th grade French class.

Mike Lentel had to be the cutest boy at North Junior High.  And he knew that Holly had a crush on him.  And how did he find out?  Well, it was one of those epic humiliating moments that inevitably befalls every teenage girl.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Molly-Mo Holly Meets The Mountain Time Mob - Chapter 1

Holly Sinclair was a good girl, by most standards.  She hadn't liked it much when the term "Molly-Mo" was tagged to the front of her name by a jilted 9th-grader Jeno Monolith, whose crush she'd crushed at the end-of-year stomp last spring.  He'd secretly liked Holly for a year or two and had finally worked up the courage to ask her out.  The little love note he'd slipped her in Geometry class had been cute.  He'd drawn heart-shaped balloons on the front of it, with smily faces.  But the words inside the note seemed like they were written by a third-grader with a silly infatuation, more than a out-going 9th grader with a serious crush.  And Holly didn't go for the dumb ones.

Was that rude, she wondered?  And he wasn't that cute.  Although, her mom constantly told her that looks weren't everything.  Was he a nice boy, she'd ask?  Ok.  Well, yes.  He was nice enough, Holly thought.  But, it didn't matter one way or the other if he was nice, or smart, or really cute.  She was only fifteen and she couldn't date until she was sixteen.  Not necessarily couldn't, but certainly wouldn't.  And she let Jeno know this at the dance last year.  And he had deemed her a goody-two-shoe molly mormon girl, or molly-mo for short.  And though he'd be leaving to go to Highschool and she'd just be starting 9th grade at the start of the new school year, the name stuck.  And she hadn't liked it one bit.  Not until she realized that she really was essentially a "molly-mo" and quite proud of it!

She remembered how shocked she was to see the birth-control pills sitting on the top shelf of Kelly Wood's locker - the stuck-up rich girl who'd lockered next to her in seventh grade.  Rumor had it Kelly was even already getting lipo-suction and drinking beer at Matt Parkinson's big bash "folks-out-of-town" parties he seemed to have way too often.  Were his parents ever at home, she wondered?  Of course, Holly was never invited to any of these parties, so she couldn't say for sure what went on there.  But, it was her firm belief that every rumor was based on just a little bit of truth, no matter how far-fetched it seemed to be.  Plus, she really had seen the pills.  And Kelly totally seemed the type.

Try as she might, Holly tried really hard not to think these things about the "upper-class" at North Junior High.  It's not that she didn't fit in.  She was relatively thin and she was pretty cute.  She had nice hair.  At least, that's what her friends told her.  After the "i-looked-like-an-ugly-boy" 7th-grade yearbook picture debauckle of 1986, Holly had let her hair grow long and had it permed in long twisty curls.  And she was always complimented on her blue eyes.  Her grandma  had said they were almond-shaped "bedroom" eyes, and if Holly didn't know what that meant, to ask her mother. 

But, good physical attributes didn't seem to matter as much as good physical location to the students of North Junior High.  And the physical location of the home that Holly grew up in was towards the bottom of the social ladder.  "Wrong side of the tracks", it might have been deemed, if she'd lived by any railroad tracks.  She had her small group of friends and she was good at staying "under the social radar" at school.  But, there were no parties.  No invites to the crazy spring break trips that the upper class went on.  It kept her good, though - she'd convinced herself.  She'd much rather be a "Molly-Mo" than a "Holly-Ho".