Holding the Ace of Age

Holding the Ace of Age
 
 
 
On their eighth grade trip to close the year,
five girls stole from Six Flags
stuffed bags with new goods,
each without receipts to cover tales told.
Sweatshirts and tees and bucket hats
and ball caps and stuffed animals
and penny jars stamped with zodiac signs
and plastic hobo stogies tipped with fake ashes
and gag sunglasses that were never funny anyway.
Five hundred thirty-nine dollars and twenty-eight cents
—giant in ‘85—their haul on the long table
divided into mounds to bear account.
Asking who won, joking to keep some,
knowing the penalties of law didn’t apply
to theme parks
or those entering high school.
 
Soon, a suited woman stood in the doorway,
dressed more for a board meeting or parent-teacher night,
chin up and shoulders back; stoic, the figurehead on a ship.
The girls spotted their principal—
and giggled.
Swelling to laughter and crashing down the row,
animated, exaggerated, the look of a pie-eating contest,
but slow, mouths frozen open over the five piles.
The principal grateful for answers she wanted to hear:
No, the park would not press charges.
Yes, they would have to leave.
Yes, they could sit on the bus in the lot.
But they had no idea she was holding the ace of age,
a player seasoned and skilled, skipping
the chiding of children and ephemeral scolding:
though decades past, she, too, had been an eighth grade girl;
and this was June.
           
“And none of you will go to the dance.”
 
The first shrieked, another groaned, faces twisted,
sickened by the simple sentence.
They cried and wailed
and pleaded and begged
and banged on the table with their fists
and threw back their heads from the pies.
And fifteen minutes later filed
behind the figurehead leading the walk to the bus,
all talk of what dress to buy,
what hairstyle to wear,
or what boy to see,
a sudden
waste of time.
 
 
originally published in Torrid Literature