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".
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