—NEXT THING YOU KNOW

  

I Don’t Like Mondays

 

She thinks about the girl the song was written about, Brenda, how she’d gunned down her classmates years before the practice became common and in vogue, how they’d asked the sixteen year old killer “Why?” and Brenda had said, “Dunno. Guess I don’t like Monday.”

Swinging into the living room, loopy already, the girl’s father draws lopsided circles in the air with his tumbler empty of scotch and asks, “What’s so funny? You never laugh.”

He’s wrong about so much, correct about so little, but this bit is true.

The girl turns up the volume in her earbuds, the lyrics simple yet complex, a masterclass or blueprint for those in the know. The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.

Her boyfriend is a year younger than her father. Smells like sulfates and peppermints. Hairy knuckles. Always with his fingernail grin. He says he’s her boyfriend undercover of the night, constantly squeezing, pinching, and biting as if she’s a chew toy. Boyfriend teaches Introduction to Chemistry. He could be good at it, but there’s always some experiment going awry, smoke and explosions that no one ever notices until it’s too late. Until it’s them.