Posts
From: Stacey Marchenkova
To: dom borax < mailto:printthisplease@printthis.com >
Sent: Thursday, May 27th, 1999 21:31 PM
Subject: Hey I guess you chose option 10
Hey Dom…it feels odd not getting an email from you…didn’t think it would…but it does…it’s like the last few days have been biding their time…
anyway…thought I’d drop a short email letting you know…not quite sure actually…letting you know that I’m dialling up and waiting, I guess…
I’ve only got myself to blame of course…unless you opted for number one on my list and you’re currently bleeding to death with two pencils up your snoz…
Anyway, though we are silent, I thought you might find a small anecdote about Jenny Wrangler (the girl I suggested you kill for not including me in her Charlie’s Angel’s club) interesting to help us – well me, really…through the week…
See, I met Jenny Wrangler in my fourth year of primary school…she came from America…she had a brother called Kenny and parents who wore matching tracksuits and didn’t understand the cruel notion of the rhyme names among children…
Initially Jenny and Kenny stuck to themselves…of course they would…the taunting song of ‘Jenny and Kenny’ followed them around the playground like a sick dog…
But after they came back from the Christmas break, Jenny had changed…she had dyed her hair…blonde…and…managed to convince her family that Kenny belonged in another school…because he was getting a little fat…
…now alone, Jenny set about her transformation…
she started wearing clothes imported from America…her blonde hair gradually started showing pink swirls throughout…her voice got that little louder…more earrings emerged…black leather started growing from her body…well her jacket…teased fringes of pink blonde trusses got bigger creating a massive peaked cap over her ivory forehead…sunglasses appeared on her face…even in class…and she traded in pop culture…
see Jenny had access to American television way before it aired here via mailed VHS tapes from her family back home…this power of information was a great tool in trade as she bartered in spoilers for friendship…21 Jump Street…was most desired…
Soon…Jenny had a gang…a powerful gang of pink swirled blondes who actually called themselves the Heathers until they saw the film…
Then the Charlie’s Angels club happened…I so wanted to be part of that gang…and for a brief moment was included…as Bosely…but this didn’t work for me…so in between practised shadowed poses of babes with guns gestures in the afternoon sun by the science block…I lobbied for a position in this far from benevolent tyranny of crime fighting and bitching…
It didn’t work…indeed after my rejection of the Bosely role…I was regularly cast as a villain and assaulted with spit ball pellets fired from air guns…actually not sure if they were air guns…but it was some gun-like device…
Now this daily attack finally took its toll…and I tried to form a Murder She Wrote group in response…a quieter group that was more brain that blonde…but no one really wanted to be part of it…and truthfully one Angela Landsbury is enough for this world…
So I retreated further and started hiding in the library at lunchtime…this worked for me as I was a kid who liked reading…and once you find CS Lewis…it’s hard to renter the world…
After a month or so...Jenny and her confectionary clones backed off and picked on a Russian exchange student (actually I think she was Greek…but the accent was enough for Jenny and her cohorts to believe there was something ’foreign’ and therefore ‘communist’ about her)
The year continued on…and with distance…I became invisible…completely…but in the final week of school, I reencountered Jenny Wrangler…it was a small nearly non-encounter…
but something about it has always stuck with me…not sure why…
see Jenny and I shared the same English class…and this one day in December, I found myself sitting next to her…now we’d always been in the same row…but there was a few students separating us…but this one day, a couple of students were ‘away’ (read; parents wanted an early holiday) and Jenny and I was as close to each other as we’d been for months…
Three empty chairs separated us as the teacher droned on at the front about The Hobbit….I wasn’t into the Hobbit…indeed as a kid I had a sharp sense of feet-fear…so I confess to not listening purely as a tool for psychological survival…
instead I was doodling…notes…musician notes on my exercise book…after about twenty minutes I started to hear a strange soft noise coming three chairs up…it was a kind of sniffle with a staccato violent intake of breath…I looked up from my composition and glanced across the row…
…there I saw Jenny Wrangler…her head was in her heads as the teacher indulgently and blindly read out passages from her self proclaimed favourite book…
I looked more closely at Jenny…small drops of eyeliner stained tears were trickling through her fingers and hitting her blank exercise book in small pools of Rorschach-like black puddles…
…now usually I would’ve dismissed this action as a cheap attempt at attention getting…but this time is was different…it was private…I could see that Jenny was trying not to cry…really trying…and as she fought this misery…I started to feel really sorry for her…
so I gently moved from one seat to the next, taking my books with me…I was quiet and no one noticed…
Over the next ten minutes I managed to get closer to Jenny…her crying had started and stopped a number of times…
finally I was sitting directly next to her…she didn’t notice…I put my hand out and touched her shoulder….she jumped…she stared at me…I offered a kindly smile…but Jenny didn’t smile back…she wiped her tears from her face and snarled at me…
’Don’t you ever tell anyone about this, alright!?” She hissed…
I nodded as Jenny turned her attention back to her self loathing and I crept back to my seat…
After summer…Jenny didn’t come back to the school…no one knew what really happened to her…her family disappeared…and she didn’t keep in contact with anyone…
But one thing always stuck in my head about this odd encounter in English Class in grade four…
as I moved away from Jenny…I saw something written on her exercise book…it was blurred a little with her dark stained tears but there was one thing I could make out on her notebook…one little phrase…it said…
“I don’t understand…”
And from that point on…I understood…I understood that even Jenny got confused…and if she got confused…there was hope for all of us…
Anyway…hope you have a good week and hear from you on Tuesday, I guess…
Stacey
