Free The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison

ignore it was the height of spinelessness. Francie had taught me that.
    Just earlier that day, I’d thought I wanted to be like Francie, but that wasn’t it. Well, it was and it wasn’t. I did want to be like Francie, but sitting there on the curb outside my house, I knew that it went further than that. I wanted more. There was so much more to want. I wanted everything.

Chapter Eight
    J rancie disappeared without explanation the day before winter break. She wasn’t in school, and her cell phone went straight to voice mail when I tried to call her. When I hadn’t heard from her three days later, right before Christmas Eve, I thought about going by the house on Maple to see if there was anyone there, and then decided against it. I didn’t want to be a stalker. With nothing to do, I occupied myself by lying on my bed and listening to music on my headphones, staring at the ceiling and thinking, wondering what I might have done to piss her off. I worried that I hadn’t done anything, and that was the worst possibility of all. What if she had come to her senses, had just suddenly realized what I had suspected since the beginning: that I was not at all what she had expected me to be.
    Wasn’t I, though? I wasn’t who I had been. That much I knew for sure. The girl in the back of the classroom was gone forever—I remembered her like a cousin I’d known as a little kid and had fallen away from as we’d gotten older. But with that girl gone for good, I was uncertain who had replaced her. Because lying there on my bed, with my headphones on, Francie who knew where, I could feel myself scattering, the edges of myself blurring into limitless dark. I could feel myself grasping for my own name. Vendela? Vickie? Valerie?
    I thought I had changed. I had cut my hair, learned to steal, changed everything about myself. Now, with Francie gone, I had to wonder if I’d just been imagining things. Was I just a question mark without her?
    If she had been there with me, she would have taken me by the wrists and shaken me, laughing. Would have told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. Or said, “Please, Val, don’t you think you’re overthinking things?” Or maybe she wouldn’t have needed to say anything.
    Because sometimes, after trips to the mall, Francie and I would go back to her house and not even talk. She’d turn on Prince or Joy Division or the Aztec Camera or whatever band she was obsessed with at the moment, and we’d just lie on her bed. Her chain-smoking with her laptop balanced on her thighs, sending prank messages to strangers on MySpace and laughing to herself, and me looking through Vanity Fair or whatever, maybe reading the horoscopes out loud butotherwise quiet. Stealing a drag off her cigarette from time to time. We didn’t need to say anything. We had a kingdom, even if it was just the two of us, and in the throne room of Francie’s bedroom, we’d been untouchable and ultimate.
    The point wasn’t the talking, and it wasn’t quite the smoking, either, because I wasn’t actually into the smoking part of smoking. I thought it tasted gross, plus it made me lightheaded. Despite what my health teacher insisted, I wasn’t doing it to be cool. I just liked the feeling of being with Francie, sharing something intimate and quiet. Smoking with Francie, me on her swivel chair and her on top of her duvet in nothing but fancy lace underwear and green rubber Wellingtons—which she liked to wear for no reason when the mood struck her—I sometimes stared at the smoke drifting, the light catching it in its intricate, ghostly spiral, and felt bodiless, like maybe we had stepped outside of the normal flow of everything. Like, as long as the cigarette was burning the Earth might continue to rotate while Francie and I stayed casually fixed in one universal location.
    With Francie, in her room, I knew who I was. I knew what I was supposed to be. In Francie’s room I could see my world set out in front of me as a simple,