A/N: Did you ever think life was a little too perfect sometimes? This is the story of the girl who rebelled against the monotony.
Destiny
Landon's Grove was a small town, with the sickly-sweet coating of cute that all suburbs seem to carry. It was the classic suburb, with perfect winding streets and perfect trees every 27.3 feet and perfect little people. It was Americana. There was an ice-cream store and a locally owned drugstore where the clerk called you by your first name and a little grocery store where everyone knew everyone. Everyone went to Angel Wings Catholic Church every Sunday. It had a semi-downtown with little clothing shops and one pizzeria operated by old Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Rivitello, who had lived there since they were both born in the spring of 1877 in adjoining houses. Every single one of these buildings was painted the exact same shade of a strange greeny-blue, like bread mold or something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Every building had a basement, two stories, and an attic. Every building outside of downtown had a family, and every family had a father who brought home the bacon, a mother who stayed home to fry it, 2.2 kids who ate it, and a dog named Spot or Rover to get the leftovers. Every father could remember the battles of World War 2, and every person in town came to the Veteran's Day parades, the fathers from World War II and grandfathers from World War I and kids with mini American flags in their chubby hands.
Every little boy played baseball and got a varsity letter, and every little girl played Tea Party and danced and tried out for the cheerleading squad in high school. And everyone married by 23 and had little boys and girls of their own.
And Mary and Robert Johnson, in the summertime of 1951, had a baby girl who they named Jane. Jane Johnson entered a family with a toddler brother named Joey and a retriever named Puff. Jane Johnson was a little girl with pretty blue eyes and pretty blond hair and a pretty but nondescript face. And when Jane was a week old, on Sunday, her mother took her to the Angel Wings Catholic Church and she was good as gold. She lay in Mama's arms and listened to the preacher with her perfect little ears. Not a peep came from her perfect little mouth. She was baptized the next week, the perfect little suburban girl.
Jane Johnson grew up in a land where everything was wonderful and the church ladies were always right. And as Jane grew,
christian louboutin outlet, she started to question the American Dream. Jane had seen the realization of the American Dream, and she feared it with a gnawing, consuming dread. To finally own a house and get married and have kids while her husband who had gotten a varsity letter in high school and married her the day after graduation went out and lived seemed wrong. Her parents said it was a good life, and the church ladies who went around in pearls and high heels while making pot roasts for their families said so, and the boy she was "pinned" to said so.
But to Jane it seemed a wasted life. And to Jane, the idea of a Heaven with fluffy clouds where you run around happily with your loved ones forever was wrong, and the Church Ladies had made it up after sniffing too many oven fumes while baking their cookies every day. Jane wanted to live life, because she thought it was all you got. She was not an atheist, but she wasn't exactly a good Catholic girl, either. Jane Johnson was Jane Johnson. If only she knew what that meant.
She didn't want to stay,
belstaff outlet, get married to Mr. High-school Football Superstar and have kids and drive a minivan and be successful (AKA living in Suburbia until she died forgotten in a nursing home, having done absolutely nothing of worth). Jane Johnson thought all day on that hot August afternoon the day after her eighteenth birthday. She wanted freedom. Joe Quarterback had proposed to her the previous day, but she had pleaded for time to decide. Now she had decided.
Jane Johnson walked home, removing her promise ring on the way and leaving it on Joe's doorstep. She passed the pizzeria, now owned by the Rivitellos' grandson since they had died years before. She ate pot roast and apple pie and smiled at her parents, chatting lightly like a good girl. She patted PJ, son of the dearly departed Puff,
Mulberry Icons Bags, on the head before climbing the stairs and going to bed in her little pink room.
Later that night she left the house on Oak Street quietly and walked downtown to the bus stop with a suitcase. The seventies were soon to begin and so was her life. She lived in a motel for a few days on the money she had saved up being a waitress at Johnny's Diner, knowing that the police could not look for her.
She got a job as a waitress and at the restaurant,
puma sneaker, a man offered her something. She accepted. Jane's parents searched the bus stations frantically for their lost daughter while Joe Quarterback held the ring and cried, but they were too late.
Jane was sitting in the terminal at the airport, eating a ham sandwich manufactured during the Lincoln administration and reading a cheap copy of Catcher in the Rye. The ink smudged under her fingers whenever she touched the page. It was beginning to get on her nerves. A little ways down she could see a man in an official-looking suit playing with a cute beagle, and further down she saw�� her mother, holding a photograph. She grabbed her coat from the seat next to her, jumping up and shoving Catcher in the Rye into her shoulder bag, dashing to the gate and shoving her boarding pass at the tired man at the entrance. He waved her past, and she dashed down the dingy gray tunnel to her freedom. The seat was G13,
asics nimbus, and she stared out the window, pulling out the driver's license and passport. She gripped her salvation tightly as the plane took off into the gray skies. The air was growing cool, and in the sky, a new life began.
Mary Johnson tapped her foot, waiting for the airline worker to look through the files. She would find her daughter. The worker turned around.
"I'm sorry, nobody by that name has purchased a ticket."
Maybe a suburban girl named Jane Johnson, with a stay-at-home mother, a businessman father, a brother named Joey, a dog named PJ, and a future husband waiting for her departed from that airport. But her family never found her. Jane Johnson died on an airplane to Los Angeles, California,
cheap louis vuitton bags, in an empty gray sky, on August 27, 1969.
Cecile Caldirash stepped out of LA International, feeling the Call pulling at her. She had bought freedom for 100 dollars, and at last she was free to follow it. Stuffing Catcher in the Rye into her bag once more, she walked down the street, feeling destiny within her grasp. As she walked away, Jane Johnson faded into oblivion with the California sunshine.
Related articles:
http://www.maalmo.com/members/home
http://www.k-linkers.com/index.php?p.../viewstory/675