Lilly woke me at four-thirty in the morning, shaking my shoulder.

     “I wrote the song,” she said.  Her hair was unbraided, long and wild.  She looked like a witch with moonlight shifting through the window behind her, shrouding her little body with a white aura.  I smelled alcohol all over her.

     “I hope you left some of the Heineken for me,” I said groggily, still exhausted from the musical workout with Krystal earlier.

     “I left two.”

     “You drank four beers?  God, Lilly.”

     “It helped me write.”

     “Yeah, and it’ll help me get my ass thrown in jail.”

     “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

     “You’re fourteen.  I worry.”

     “Okay.  Anyway, I wrote a song to replace ‘Christie.’  I want you to read it.  It was hard to write it.  I feel all crazy inside, like I don’t really know what I’m doing . . . what I was doing.  I need you to tell me if it’s any good.  The song.”

     “Can we do it tomorrow?  Shouldn’t you be sleeping?  I usually sleep when I’m drunk.”

     “I’m not drunk.  Just a little, maybe.”  She sounded a little drunk.  “But we have to do it now, because I can’t sleep.”

     I certainly could have, but I gave in as usual and turned on the light.  She got on the bed – on top of the blanket – and handed me a typed page.

     “You did this on the computer?”

     “Yeah, because I had to make a lot of changes.  I re-wrote it like a thousand times.”

     I looked at the title: “Lollipop.”

     “Great Floozie title.”

     “Yeah,” she said.

     There were a lot more words than in most of our songs.  I read the first line, and I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew I was looking at something way past good, way deeper than “A Tear Comes from Here.”

LOLLIPOP

VERSE 1

Hello Mommy it’s been a while

I hope that lifehas made you smile

As for me I’m rotting right here in LA

Thinkin back yeah I still remember

Your loving arms and your sliky fingers

Thinkin about it now brings a tear to my eye

CHORUS 1

You changed my life with a wink of your eye

You were the first one to that made me smile

And you made me your lollipop, a candy coated cherrie drop

You made me a promise to me you’d never let me cryy

And you made me your lollipop, I screamed so hard that we had to stop

Cause I have never been touched like that bfore

Slow and easy after schoool, you sneak up to my room

Then like maniacs we go, I always praye noone would know

I once thought that it was wrong but that changed before too long

And even thought it had to stop, I’ll always bbe your lollipop, your lollipop, your lollipop (repeat however many times so it fits)

     Even with Lilly’s predictably horrible drunken treatment of the English language, sweat tickled my hairline and I felt a little weird inside, myself, as she’d said she did earlier.

VERSE 2

You would coacks me, then you stroke me

I thought for sure that it would choke me

But like everthing else it grows easy with time

Dad never knew it but oh how we’d do it

Now I think I guess I blew it

You know it’s just like a dream that is tarpped in my soul

CHORUS 2

Now I cant see the light of day

Since the night daddy took me away

And you made me your lollipop, a candy coated cherrie drop

You made a promise to me you’d never let me cry

And you made me your lollipop, I screamed so hard that we had to stop

And I have never been touched like that before

Slow and easy after school you sneak up to my room

Then like maniacs we go, I always praye noone would know

I once thought that that was wrong but that changed before to long

And even though it had to stop, I’ll always be your lollipop, your lollipop, your lollipop (repeat ect.)

SPOKEN

I hate you mother.  I’ll hate you for for the rest of my life.

     “What do you think?” she said when I’d had plenty of time to read the song and was, in fact, starting in on it again.

     “I don’t know . . .”

     “Is it too much?”

     “No.”

     “Too little?  Hello – earth to Gary.”

     “Yeah, I’m here.  I just . . . it’s just kind of startling.  Does it mean what I think it means?”

     “What do you think it means?”

     To momentarily avoid what I knew was coming, I said, “It means you’re not paying attention in English class.”

     She stared at me, unimpressed.

     “It’s about what happened with your mom,” I said.

     “That’s basically it, but what I was thinking was that this could be how Heather explains why she’s the way she is, you know, with all the sex and stuff.  The Floozie Heather, I mean.  Fiction, you know.  Real, but fiction.  But in a hidden way.”  She coughed.  “In a way.”

     “It’s deep.”

     “I know.  I might be drunker than I originally thought.”

     “Yeah, well, isn’t it too . . . personal for Heather to sing?  If personal’s even the right word.  It’s a great song, but–”

     “Yeah, but see, what happened was, by writing it, it’s like I got rid of some of the pain, and by performing it, maybe I can get rid of some more.  Having Heather perform it.  All of us perform it, I mean, but Heather singing it.  And Krystal playing guitar and Celeste playing drums and all that.”

     I pulled her over to me.  Her head flopped down on my shoulder as if her neck was broken.

     “And me on bass, as always.”

     She was very drunk, but I didn’t care.  Maybe getting drunk and writing about the pain was the only way she knew to escape it.

She began to cry.  I kept my mouth shut.

     “The thing that hurts the most is that I never knew why she did it,” she said when her crying had softened.  “You’re a kid, and the person you love so much starts doing things like that to you, and you just go through all the confusion and stuff – she loves me, okay, so this must be okay, but then you realize that it’s not okay, that it’s not normal.”  She coughed a few times and cleared her throat.  “It sucks.”  She swallowed hard.  “When I was little, before all that, before my step-dad-person-thing came to live with us, I stepped on this rusty nail one time and had to go get a tetanus shot, or whatever you call it.  At the hospital I was all crying and screaming and everything, and she promised me, my mom promised me, that she’d never let me cry again, like how I wrote in the song.  Of course I cried again, but at that time – I was seven – I thought it meant she would never hurt me.  But she did, and I don’t know why.”

     “People do things we don’t understand,” I said lamely.

     “I know.”  She moved her left arm around my back and scooted her body closer to mine.  “I never knew how to deal with the pain, how much I hurt, so I pretended it wasn’t there.  But it was there.  I want to face it now and see if I can get past it.”

     “That’s a brave decision.  You know I’m here for you.”

     “I know.  And thanks for not hurting me, or lying to me, or taking advantage of me, even when you probably could.  You probably could have did anything you wanted to me.”

     “I would never do any of that.  I would die first.”

     “Don’t die,” she said.  “Just see if you can love me a little.”