Re: Third class hallways
She is relieved by ink-stained humdrum girlhood, music more martial than swing. Vaudeville does not remember school-bells or whispering in class but she might the sly-long looks of the boys at the cleft of white shirts and she knows hems hiked high.
“Oh darling,” Vaudeville lets the cigarette depend between two knife-blade fingers with the delicacy of debutante at a dance, “Hell’s in one of the other rooms, it’s not me.” But she’s vain, and her hair is mussed and the light low and she must look a fright. The beads click and clack as the sooty sweep of lowered lashes hide the agate-poison of her eyes and she sees the turgidity of schoolgirl plaid over bare knees, the torpor of books and bored innocence in her interlocutor, and rubs an itinerant hand over the rust crumbs on her neck, unamused. No flit-in-the-light likes to be caught when the house-lights rise, loose morals and lost virtue in the dark.
“Are classes out for the day?” The smoke grits against her lungs, curls into her mouth. Her lipstick on the filter is dead blood carefully applied like a vamp. Vaudeville is an age of innocence left behind, she has no use for a schoolgirl.