Orange County Party Girl is dead. Face up in the rain. Eyes vacuous. A flash of lightning. This disappointment was inevitable. Her sweater begins to sop up raindrops. She could have been so many things, but dead is how all of them ended, and after all, she had killed herself long ago, and many times since. Her dreams and hopes had been shadows in the fog, retreating from approach, almost theatrically. Curtain. Lights. Applause.
Her first real kiss - kiss of death. A handsome young boy from another town. Different. She was instantly drawn to him. He was younger. Too young, but she didn't care. Cared more. She kissed him. Deeply. Passionately. Under moonlight, in the cold stillness of night, setting him ablaze.
He had never kissed a girl, nor had even ever thought to. Dirty magazines don't teach that tedious stuff. But his mouth, his tongue, his hands. God. She had transformed him from an awkward, aimless boy into a man in a fleeting moment, with all the suddenness of a passing car on Newport Boulevard.
She felt the metamorphosis, the storm of passion breaching the upper atmosphere of him, welling, billowing, darkening. It surprised and frightened her. Was this her power or his? Both. And neither. She retrieved his hand from between her legs and restored it to her breast, his wild, reckless kisses undeterred. She could feel herself beginning to love him. She could already feel her heart breaking. The sadness began to seep in and rise like tepid water.
She turned her face away from his, abandoning him to the abyss of desire. She felt him tumbling into it, and this too broke her heart, inevitable as it was. There was a certain feminine pride, of course. They sat alone together in the long, wet grass. She shivered. He pealed off his vintage Army jacket and draped it around her as he had seen done in movies.
The next day, he scarcely left her company, following her even to the bathroom to watch her apply her makeup as she readied herself to leave. His complete captivation mesmerized her, the way he stared at her so intently, fascinated by every mundane gesture. It made her uneasy, yet she relished his attention.
When she returned again a few weeks later from Garden Grove, it was only to discover he had moved away back east. The 'For Sale' sign impaled in his front lawn may as well have been impaled in her heart. In time, and not without difficulty, she managed to find his new address. She wrote to him on lined paper, carefully, neatly, eloquently detailing her sadness in pink pen. Folding it all up in an envelope with a matchbook sized portrait of herself, she posted it, and eagerly awaited a reply which never came.
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