■V» 5 T J i f By Sharon Doubiago ■ Illustration by Stuart Mead Design by Gail Swanlund Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 37 We move to Angel the first of April, three weeks before my thirteenth birthday. On Friday night I stay with Sarah. Her twelfth birthday. Our last night together. I’m full of anguished love for her. I don’t want to move. She is so beautiful. Her long legs, her thick blond hair, the depth of her being I fall into. She has pubic hair, the first person my age I know of, other than myself. In the sixth grade she was the smartest kid in school. I was second smartest. In the seventh we entered enormous Rancho Los Amigos Junior High School and became lost from each other. This night we come back together, renew the bonds of our souls. We vow to always know each other. We still do. On Monday afternoon my brother, sister and I are enrolled in the fourth, sixth and seventh grade classes of the Angel schools. Los Amigos Junior High in the Los Angeles School District had three thousand kids, El Angel Junior High has one hundred. Do they wear lipstick here in the seventh grade? Will they get the wrong idea because I do? I don’t dare go without it now, I’m so plain. The principal, Mr. Nordahl, looks across his glasses from Bridgit to me and says, “ Good!” His eyes fall , to my breasts, the same size as my mother’s. They’ve been growing since I was nine. “ You, my dear, will be our Miss Angel when you are sixteen.” “ And Bridgit, I see that you are the brain of the two.” He looks up from her records. She is eleven, two years ypunger than I, but only a year behind in school because in the second grade her I.Q. registered 182. She doesn’t have breasts yet. “We can use you, too.” Then he focuses on my little brother. “ I see, Jasoh, that you have neither brains nor beauty,” He makes ________ i ____ ■
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