Free The Drifter by Alexandra del Lago

The Blue Girl
     
    Blue Girl stood at the bedroom window tapping her foot while she smoked a cigarette. The night had a fresh young wildness about it that beckoned her. She waiting for all the sounds in the house to die down, for Ma and Pa to settle into their large creaky bed, and for Pa to start snoring. She heard her brother, Bill, shuffling around next door and the click clicking of Sweetheart's claws across the floorboards. The dog whimpered softly as she pawed at Bill's door, and then shook her head, her collar tinkling as he let her in.
    Blue Girl looked at the stars, wondering if they were dead or still burning, wondering if aliens would ever come to Earth and uplift civilization and mankind. Probably not, she thought, those stars were so far away - unless they could travel faster than the speed of light, or come through a black hole from another dimension. Blue Girl's brother, Billy, read a lot of science fiction, and sometimes she swiped his books but skimmed them, so her notions of what was possible in the real world and the real universe were fuzzy.
    The scent of wildflowers was on the breeze and beyond that, something that smelled swampy and rank. Beyond their town, the wild was still lurking as if they were on the edge of the known earth. Jimmy probably couldn't get out tonight, she thought, or else she would have already seen him cutting across the yards. Sometime in early spring, he had realized she liked him and had developed a habit of sneaking out during the night and coming over to her house. The first time it happened she couldn't believe it. He had been so matter of fact, and so charming. That was the thing about him. He could get away with just about everything. He would charm the teachers at school with his put on manners, and even her Ma, who was so sour, and locked into her own suffering, smiled at his fancy talk.
    Early that spring he had started coming over, late at night sometimes, just because he couldn't sleep, he said; he was so anxious for the year to end so that real life could start. In the beginning, they would just talk.
    'Just talkin', Ma!' she would shout when her mother poked her nose onto the porch to check on them.
    But recently they had stopped talking, not because Jimmy didn't have anything to say; he always had all kinds of crazy thoughts and ideas, but because they had started necking. She guessed she was in love with him, even though he made that funny sucking sound when he kissed her, and even though sometimes she wasn't that interested.
    It felt good and all, but Blue Girl had her own thoughts and ideas, just as he had. Sometimes when Jimmy would start talking about inventing things, machines and how they worked, she would just zone out.
    'I'm gonna sing, Jim. I'm gonna be famous,' she said once, interrupting him.
    'Sure you will, Cath.' Then he tried to feel her up, so she never knew if he had really meant it or not. It had only been a passing idea, anyway.
     
    Blue Girl played the piano; she filled her notebooks with snatches of poetry. Sometimes she worked the poems out, sometimes she just jotted down phrases that came to mind. Walking through the woods with Sweetheart, her brain would fill with ideas that came out of nowhere, and she would rush home to get them down on paper. Sometimes they'd sit near the quarry, and Blue Girl would look at the water and dream all sorts of dreams.
    'Eh,' Ma said, 'Everyone thinks something wonderful will happen to them when they are your age.'
    Ma and Pa expected Blue Girl to go to college. She had applied and been accepted but even with her scholarship, they could barely scrape together enough money to send her to the state school. They had never gotten the chance to do that themselves, but Pa always read a lot. Ma was too busy. She never had time to sit.
    'Go to college. You have good grades. You can make something of yourself,' Ma had always said, and the implication was that she had wasted her own life, a life which had gone nowhere and