this is a short story I wrote, inspired by my first concert and by the feeling of magic as I waited for my own kids last year outside the Eras Tour.
No one liked them or really knew much about them. They stuck together, the five of them. I don’t go to school with them anymore. I go to Merion now and they go to Upper Darby, or went to. But we were girls together. My mom taught each of them at least once since preschool. She graduated high school with one of their moms.
That last month, my dad, he works at the school too as a guidance counselor, noticed they were always giggling, and seemed to be planning something. Dad said he could not understand what they had to be so happy about. With their Target wardrobe, he would say, their beat up Converse and fake Golden Goose sneakers. They’d be stuck in Clifton Heights forever, he’d say. My dad is from Clifton too, but we live the next town over now. When someone asks him where he’s from he never says Clifton Heights he says Springfield even though they are right next to each other. He loves to tell everyone who doesn’t ask that I go to an academy on the main line.
One of the five was really pretty in a delicate way. Everyone said she had a stalker in the high school. My mom said she saw her crying in the hall one day the week before. There were rumors that she was dating a teacher. “Dating is the wrong word,” my mom said, looking horrified.
The night Taylor Swift came to town was the most important night of my life. I had never been able to go to one of her concerts before. My friend Meredith from high school got me my ticket and we were going to be in her dad’s box. Meredith is loaded, my mom always says. I would have flown on my own wings if no one got me in. My mom drove me and Meredith and my dad drove separately with some other kids from school to try and get last minute nosebleed seats or at least hang outside. Dad wasn’t into Taylor, he said she was nowhere near as good as who he listened to…Led Zeppelin, Guns and Roses, Journey, Eagles, maybe Nirvana. Dad went for the kids.
Since this was my first real concert, Mom was telling me again all about her first. She saw Madonna at Veterans Stadium when she was a young girl, a freshman like I was. She can tell you that the date was July 11, 1987, that the moon was full that night, and that it was hot and humid, even for summer. For probably the one thousandth time she told the story of the comb. “Madonna had asked the fans for a comb and everyone was throwing combs at her, it was crazy.” My mom was smiling at the memory. She was wearing her “Who’s that girl ‘87 Tour
Philadelphia” t-shirt from the show. The shirt was faded and looked rough but the eyes of Madonna still stared out from it intensely.
“I can’t imagine us being allowed to throw things at Taylor,” Meredith said.
“Well it was the eighties, and it was the Vet” Mom said.
For some reason she didn’t tell Meredith the rest of the story, the best part. Madonna used one of the combs another concert goer had tossed onto the stage and then threw it back into the crowd, and my mom caught it. She has kept it ever since like a relic. Really, if isn’t in her bag, its on a shelf in the living room next to a bottle of Lourdes water and a statue of St. Rita. It is big and brown and gaudy, with a phoenix painted on one end and a nautilus shell on the other. It has a long horn handle and there used to be pearls but they broke off and scattered long ago. It looks like something made on the boardwalk in Ocean City or Wildwood . My dad was her date that night, her very first date, but he ended up kissing another girl and they had a big fight. My mom left without my dad but had traded in her old plain comb for a new one at least. The Vet was demolished soon after that and Mom always said it was her revenge that brought it down. I believe her. My mom is super witchy.
On the way to the show we listened to Taylor and talked about the five girls. Mom said she hoped they would get into see the concert somehow. She knew they were major fans, but didn’t have much money, or really know anyone who would connect them. Meredith and my mom started to talk about school, and connections, and how important it was to have good people around you. I was staring out the van window at the planes landing along I-95 as we drove past the airport. Ever since I was little, Dad liked to look at the planes coming in for a landing and tried to figure out where the passengers had been. Mom and I liked to watch the flights take off and imagine where the people were going. I was getting excited for the show and tuned Mom and Meredith out, focusing on the magic, the music. I reached into my mom’s bag for the Madonna comb. I had straightened my hair for the concert and wanted to smooth it down even more.
As I combed, I suddenly remembered back to fifth grade when lice was going through our school. You’d have thought it was the bubonic plague ripping through our little Catholic school the way people reacted. Everyone was suspicious of where it came from. I had just been at a sleepover with girls I used to be friends with and was so afraid everyone would think I started it somehow. I was new to their group and wanted them to like me. It turned out I had it really bad. The school nurse asked me where she thought I got it and I blurted out the name of one of the five, the pretty one, even though I had never even been close enough to her to catch a cold, let alone lice.
Earlier that same morning in school before I met with the nurse, I had watched the pretty girl get teased by the creepiest bully in our fifth grade class. It was his standard attack and didn’t even last too long because two of the other five that were in the same classroom (they divided us) rushed in to help her, like avenging angels. The pretty girl’s friends practically made the bully cry. They were always there for each other, those five. Always faithful. My dad has a tattoo that meant that on his arm. “Semper Fi.” He had explained it to me, that Marines and ex Marines would get that. He kept his hair military short and liked that saying but Dad was never in the Marines. The pretty girl had been touching her head while all of this was happening with the bully and then the friends, so maybe that is why I chose her. Anyway, the nurse seemed to like that answer and I heard the word “skank” whispered among the adults in the nurse’s office.
My mom was one of the moms who came into check everyone’s head and comb out the lice. I don’t remember in nine years of school with the pretty girl, ever seeing her mom or dad. Once she saw that there were no creepy crawlers in the pretty girl’s head, my mom used her special Madonna comb on the girl’s hair. “She just looked terrified,” my mom said at dinner that night. “Like she was in so much trouble. I just combed her hair and tried to calm her down and make her feel better.” What amazed my mom was that, as she combed the girl’s pretty hair, the girl began to sing. “She straight up sang,” mom said. “She calmed down and started humming a tune I thought I knew then she started with the lyrics.”
“Quien es, esa niña who’s that girl?”
When you see her, say a prayer and kiss your heart goodbye…
"Light up my liiiifeee...who's that girrrrllll"
“I recognized it and you won’t believe it but she was singing a Madonna song from the concert I saw!!” Mom was super jazzed and seemed to think it was a sign they were connected or something.
Meanwhile, I had used her comb before and after that office visit and told my mom the lice would surely spread now. “No, there’s something the nurse explained, like a bond once the main adult bug is removed, the eggs won’t be able to really attach to the next person, that’s the part people misunderstand. If it spread that easily we’d never be rid of it. It’s like it’s good when some bonds break.”
My mom told us at dinner that night that she felt sorry for the girl, that she had no bugs in her hair but that she did have bruises on her back that my mom could see. Her clothes smelled bad and her skin, lovely as it was, looked dirty. She had something else, she had a birthmark on her scalp. It was shaped like angel wings. My mom commented on it to the girl as she combed her hair and the girl told her that her grandmother, who had recently passed away, always said it was a magic mark, her ticket into this world and to the next one, and that all she had to do was touch it when she was ready to exit.
I eventually got rid of my lice but I must have always felt bad about blaming the pretty girl, because I was still thinking about her and that birth mark, sitting in our van four years later. The next week, after visiting the nurse, one of the girls from my sleepover, who wouldn’t be my
friend much longer, came into school with a new, short pageboy haircut that was just about all
the proof I needed that she was the one who had the lice all along. I wondered as we drove to the concert if my mother ever did anything about the bruises, and if not, if she felt guilty. I didn’t ask because we were getting close to the stadium and the air was changing. It was like there was a goddess in that stadium summoning her minions. I had butterflies in my stomach.
The five girls never did get their tickets. My mom saw them just outside the entrance to the Linc, with their Eagles and Phillies blankets spread out. But they didn’t even sit down once through the whole concert, Mom said. They jumped up and down so much Mom thought they would levitate. She sent me a video inside and I watched it. I couldn’t see their faces. I almost wished I were outside seeing the concert with my Mom, as close to her as they were. Meredith was not as into the show as I was. The five girls didn’t even seem to mind that they weren't allowed in.
Inside, Taylor started one of her songs with a story. She told us about how she wrote a love song based on a tragic play but changed the ending to a happier one. All of us had bracelets that lit up in the same color for certain songs. I touched my bracelet when it lit up for that love song and thought of the pretty girl outside and hoped she forgave me. I knew she didn’t have a bracelet but wondered if she were touching the birthmark on her scalp.
All night, Mom kept an eye on the girls, making sure no one bothered them, and to see if they needed her or my dad to give them a ride. She even told them that. Mom had felt a little bit uneasy, as if someone else were watching the girls, too. Mom, being mom, made friends with some of the other parents waiting for their kids. Towards the end of the concert, she stopped to chat with the roaming explosives-finder guy and his German Shepard who had also been patrolling the crowd all night.
What happened next is still a mystery and debated, in our neighborhood, in internet articles and on television. Mom’s last visual of the girls before petting the dog was when Karma started to play and fireworks were going off. She remembers the smoke, and how happy the girls looked, and how they were still so close together even as they danced. Then they were gone.
No trace of them has ever been found. They never came back to school. No one ever knew if the stalker, if he were real, got them or if they just decided to skip out of town together. I have watched the video my mom took of them dancing so many times, it’s how I like to remember them now. I like to think they danced themselves into another dimension, right next to ours. Which might sound silly but not really compared to other theories that have developed. It was a magical night and there was something in the air that mom could feel. I felt it too, even though I was inside and away from her. It felt like anything, I mean anything, could happen. Things that I don’t even say out loud to anyone.
Maybe I just don’t want to think something bad happened to that little group, especially to the pretty girl that I had betrayed. In that little vestibule they danced in, I saw them, and see them, in my mind’s eye, pegasus like, free, protected. Wrapped in something I don’t yet have words for.
What's crazy too is that somehow, the Madonna comb broke that night like a curse. More has happened since. And I couldn’t be sure, but mother swore, that before the girls went missing they grew wings.
END
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