You Take It From Here by Pamela Ribon Page A

what you did, that’s how a man was a good man to a girl who was suddenly going to be a mother. They got married and tried to pretend they were in love with each other. It never caught on between them, never tricked their emotions into believing it. Therefore, I was pretty much a sentence they were serving. My mom got out early for terrible behavior.
    She defected from the family, declared herself a “roving artist,” a woman who only wanted to be married to “Our Lady America.” I’m going to go ahead and guess that’s an area that never went past the five boroughs.
    Because of her reasons for not wanting to live even in the same state of the union that I was going to be in, she had me concerned that the citizens of Louisiana were restricted to ultrasnobby ladies with abusive husbands, men unironically named Bubba, and people who still owned slaves.
    The first time I did meet an actual man named Bubba, I was heartbroken my mother had been at least slightly correct.
    I was all alone, thrust into this small Southern town, attending a school filled with people who talked like wordswere made out of taffy. They pulled and squished their sentences into any old form they wanted. These people said “might could.” As in, “You might could find a more podunk town than this one. But I sure do doubt it.”
    I was so far out of my element, I was positive I’d never meet anyone who could understand me, who would want to be my friend.
    That’s when I plopped down into the desk next to Smidge’s on my first day of biology.
    I remember her eyes as she gave me the once-over, how big and wide her pupils looked. She was wearing blue mascara, which I’d never seen anyone actually use before. She looked famous, important. Smidge had a way about her that could make you feel extremely self-conscious. When she’s in front of you, you don’t see her; you see her looking at you. People are always tugging at their hair when they’re under her gaze, fixing themselves, straightening their shirts, surreptitiously wiping their noses, adjusting their necklaces. You don’t know what she’s thinking, but you have a feeling it can’t be good. Her stare bores right into your secret shame and gets your brain screaming, “She knows! She sees my lies! I knew I shouldn’t have worn this padded bra!”
    Smidge was barely fourteen the day I met her. She always looked younger than everybody else. Did you know she had a fake ID before she was sixteen?
    She was chewing gum with her front teeth. The pink wad crackled briefly before disappearing somewhere into her surprisingly large mouth so she could ask, “What’s your name, new girl?”
    “Danielle.” I remember the word barely made a sound, I was so nervous. “I’m Danielle Meyers.”
    “Well, Danielle Meyers, if you are going to be my friend, we have got to do something about this hair.”
    Coming out of her mouth, the word hair had two syllables. Hay-ir. She grinned, leaned over, and held my sad strands in her left fist as she shook her head in pity. “Poor hayir.”
    She was always bold when talking to a stranger. It never occurred to her to have a boundary, or attempt something that resembled a tactful approach.
    “If you had toilet paper stuck to your shoe, you’d want me to tell you, right?” she once asked me. “Even if I didn’t know you, you’d want me to say something. Well, imagine your hair was that toilet paper. Because it was.”
    Not much changed about our relationship after that first exchange. Smidge fixed my hair that afternoon and became my self-declared guardian forevermore.
    I was smart enough to know not to contradict her about that. It’s a lot like having a lion for a best friend—everything is really fun and exciting until the lion is unhappy.
    Did you know your mother once stopped a woman in a mall and told her she should get a mole on her face checked? “That thing is ugly,” she said. “And God wouldn’t have made it so hideous if he didn’t want