Rikki
by
Steven Hunley
When Rikki let me unbutton her top button I was certain she was going to give it up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I was convinced it was coming. All the elements were there. We were alone. It was warm, dark, and comfortable. Music was on low slow and romantic. Parking brake was set. We just come from downtown on the ferry and were sitting in front of her mother's house in Coronado.
We’d been flirting for weeks in class. I’d finally asked her out. Two weeks later and we saw Lawrence of Arabia for the second time and been to dinner. Now, parked in the concealing darkness her face had been seeking since puberty, it was time for dessert.
I’d been taking my time, maybe because I was an old hand with women, or maybe because I had no idea what would come next.
I’d been working my way down from behind her ear with a trail of kisses, and now nearing her neck where it met her shoulder. I paused, inhaling her scent, a mix of a particular woman and perfume, an exotic proprietary fragrance worn by no other woman.
“It’s a wonder how women are,” I thought.
This hesitation made her inhale, swelling her breasts, urging them to tug against the constraint of buttons and blouse.
I moved down to the second button. But then she grasped my fingers and pressed them to her lips.
“I just can’t do this, Steevie-weevie,” she said softly, “Not now.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause tomorrow I’m going with Tony to Mexico.”
“Tony, that idiot with the motor bike?”
She nodded.
“But why him? Why not me?”
She dropped my hand, placed two fingers against my mouth to silence me, and looked directly in my eyes.
“Because,” she said, looking down as if she were in pain, “Tomorrow he’ll still be here. You won’t.”
I was speechless. Not because I was dumfounded you understand, but because I had nothing to say. I didn't want to admit it, even to myself, it was so perfectly true.
On Monday when I walked into Color and Design 101 she wasn’t there.
“Where’s Rikki?” I said to a girl who sat in front and was staring at the empty desk.
“Oh, the pimple-faced girl? Haven’t you heard? She’s dead. A drunk driver hit her in Tijuana. She was on a motorbike, Tony too. It knocked them fifty feet.”
I knew there was a funeral, never went to the funeral. Don't do funerals. I figured I’d paid my last respects on that night in my Chevy when I’d stopped at the second button.
And though it seemed the whole school appeared shook up by her death, they were shamming.
It was the fall semester at City College. I remember going downtown with Rikki to Woolworths and eating Baklava, doing the old Lawrence of Arabia thing. She was the one turned me on to exotic sweets, never considering she was one of them, so exotic you couldn't place her. There aren’t many maple trees left downtown but there are a few.
I went down today and the old Woolworth’s is abandoned. A cold wind blew a few twisted maple leaves past my feet and into the gutter.
The others, those kids, those various student bodies, shed nothing but crocodile tears. She meant no more to them than a dead leaf.
Only I looked into her eyes and listened to her whisper, my ears heard her profound truth, and understood its logic and implications.
Only I would live to regret it, regret myself... and the way I acted.
©Steven Hunley
http://youtu.be/vfBkd1s5Mq8 Steely Dan--Rikki Don't Lose that Number
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