I Was a Teenage Monster

Yes, I’ve had that newspaper clipping since 1995.  So worth saving though, right? Especially since I gave birth to girls, who will eventually be Teenage Girl Monsters.

I was not a teenage monster. I was a late-bloomer monster. Specifically, I was a monster for two years: 1991-1992.

For those two years, I was monster-iffic. Which meant that my sister and I actually got along. I blame myself.

Because I was tired of me. I was tired of busting my butt in college classes, tired of walking the straight line, tired of worrying about making Phi Beta Kappa. What I really wanted was to kick something. Hard. Preferably in studded boots.

So I went Renegade. Hog-wild.  What can I say? It was heavy metal, dudes. It infected my brain, hi-jacked my hormones, turned my mousy-beige ass scarlet.

Scarlet Harlot.

Except that I wasn’t. I tried. I particularly tried with DJ, a singer in a heavy metal band called Extra!Extra!, but he wouldn’t touch me.

“Virgins freak me out,” he said.

Somehow, no amount of makeup and leather could hide the fact that I was a Good Girl. The Scarlet V.  And as bad as I tried to be, my sister always trumped me. No contest.

***

“This car is a piece of shit,” I say, crawling over the steering wheel to the passenger side. “How do you break a door?”

“There was a wee mishap with a stop sign,” my sister says, cradling a Coors Light between her legs and firing up the engine. “And hey, the R__* Bastard has had some times, you know, so give him some respect.” She launches the Bastard onto the street with a hearty lurch.

“Headlights! Headlights! Hello! You sort of need those at 3am, dude.”

“Chill, Schoolmarm. It’s all good.” She flicks them on.

“Are you sure? I think I should drive.”

“You forgot your glasses, moron. Remember? What’s worse, you driving blind or me driving rocket-fueled?”

She sort of has a point. Not only am I horribly nearsighted, but I’m night-blind as well, just like Mama. “Just stay in the slow lane, okay?”

“Screw the slow lane. Hey, where’s that Whitesnake tape?”

Beer in hand–the hand that’s now the only one on the wheel–she begins rummaging under her seat.

“Yo! Jesus! Just drive, okay? I’ll find it.” I reach down between her spike-heeled feet. “Here.”

I don’t know where I’m going/but I sure know where I’ve been…

“You know what we need? Nachos. We need nachos…Fuck, I’m out of gas, dude.”

“What do you mean we’re out of gas? We’re on the freakin’ highway!” I jerk the volume on the stereo down. “Okay, you need to take the next exit. The next exit, all right?”

“Yeahyeahyeah, just quit yelling. You are so uptight. Do you have any Advil?”

“No.”

“So, dude, I think you just ought to give up on DJ.  You reek of purity.”

“This sucks! God. I’m the only person I know who tries to be a slut, and fails.”

Suddenly, there’s a hideous grinding sound, a sonic whoosh that throws us back in our seats and sends the car reeling sideways. My seat belt snaps me back and my chest nearly shatters at the force of it.

Standstill.

My sister immediately rubbernecks to the back windshield. “Fuck! Is there anyone behind us?”

I can’t catch my breath to answer. I’m afraid to turn my head. I look straight ahead, wondering what on Earth we’ve hit, but I can’t see anything except scarlet. Scarlet blazes in my eyes, my head, my chest.

“Holy crap. Un-be-lievable,” my sister says. She sees scarlet, too. Suddenly, she throws open her door and teeters onto the highway in her stillettos.

“Get out of the road! It’s a highway, for Chrissakes!”

She gestures to the empty pavement. “It’s the middle of the night, moron! Do you see any traffic? God, this car is a piece of shit. How the Hell did the hood come loose?”

It’s only then that I realize what I’m looking at. The hood of the Bastard has somehow unlatched and, at 50mph, flown up into the windshield, which–miraculously–is only cracked.

“Stupid crapmobile Ford,” she mutters, kicking the bumper with her pointed heel. “You know what Ford stands for, don’t you? Found On Road Dead.”

“We should call Dad.”

“Hello? Idiot! We are so not calling Dad.” She grips the hood roughly and snaps it down with a ferocious yank. “You are the dumbest fucking genius I’ve ever met. Call Dad. Riiight.”

She stalks back to the car, throws open the door and begins riffling through the wasteland of fast food wrappers and empty beer cans on the floor.  “We need a rope.”

“I’m pretty sure you don’t have a rope anywhere in your car, dork.”

“Shut up.” She digs for a few minutes more, then pauses. “Are you wearing underwear?”

“Um, yeah?”

“Give it to me.”

“I am so not giving you my underwear. What the Hell?”

She yanks her tiny skirt up a few inches in outrage. “As you can see, loser, I’m not wearing any. Fork it over.”

“I am not giving you a seventeen-dollar thong from Victoria’s Secret.”

“Fork it over, dumbass! Now!”

Reluctantly, I shimmy out of my pink thong and throw it at her. “Whatever. Jeez.”

She teeters back onto the highway, presses firmly down on the hood of the Bastard, and with a few swift loops, jerry-rigs the hood into place. With my underwear.

She slides back into the drivers seat, takes a slug of beer, and grins wickedly. “There,” she says. “Back in business.”

*This was written in response to The Red Dress Club’s prompt this week: Red. We were not allowed to use the actual word “red” in the post, however. Thus, the R__ Bastard.  And yes, to my shame, this story is true.

Tagged as: crazy sisters, teenage monsters, the red dress club