Read A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir for Free Online Page B

spoken to each other.
    After Cuffy failed to call, my sights were set on some football player in my English class.
    As the school year drew to a close, Witch Boy was still staring and following me around like a puppy. One day he smiled, and I smiled back. He moved closer. He talked! I laughed and laughed and laughed. He was so funny. Some little comment like “So” could cause a burp of mysterious chuckles in me for the rest of the day. Jokes turned into little paper notes—scribbles of “Hi” with a doodle or whatever.
    It turned out his name was Dave and the bus-driving witch was his aunt. On the last day of school, Mabel announced that the Barkmann Bus Company was offering its annual trip down to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore in a few days. I didn’t really think about it, but someone else did, figuring it was now or never, time to make the move. Dave asked me if I wanted to go. I told him I had to think about it and would let him know. I had to ask my parents.
    They said OK, so on June 23, 1973, I was wooed into a first kiss on the boardwalk. We played the machines in the penny arcade, games of chance, did the cliché photo booth shots, went on the scary rides, and kissed well and often.
    Dave and I started dating. Living out in the middle of nowhere, that summer I read Gone with the Wind. Scarlett became my role model for her strength and perseverance. I saw how she used her feminine ways to her advantage and how she was different from her mother, who was different from my mother. I definitely preferred Rhett over Ashley. Dave was more like Rhett.
    Dave loved to work on cars and had a motorcycle and a snowmobile. He fished and hunted deer and pheasant. He had many friends. He had everything my mother hated, and I loved him for it. For some reason my troublemaking stopped.
    Deer hunting season was during the first week of December our first year together. At the end of the week, after the hunting was over, Dave picked me up at home. We drove to his parents’ house, a converted barn which was part of the salary his father received as the grounds manager for a wealthy family’s estate. Their home seemed comfortable enough, though you had to open the sliding barn door to enter. Inside, I met Dave’s uncles, all unshaven with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. After they said hello, they continued recounting their hunting stories and guffawing about the success of this season’s deer haul. Everyone was happy.
    The men then left to butcher the deer meat, coming back with roasts, legs, and other cuts, some with hair, some sprinkled with shot. Dave’s mother led the wives in wrapping the meat and marking up the packages, which were then put in boxes for each family to take home. The women talked and I sat and embroidered between meat boxes while hearing booms of laughter rising through the floorboards from the basement. After the butchering was done, there were toasts and shots of the hard stuff. They were all manly men, rugged.
    After drinking a beer from a bottle and taking a bath, as there was no shower, Dave took me home in the light blue metallic 1963 Nova SS with “three on the tree” that he had just finished restoring. Along the way, we parked on the side of the road and steamed up the windows, necking. I decided then I was falling in love.
    One weekend during my senior year, Mom was sitting in her usual post in the kitchen when I arrived home from a Friday night date. As I climbed the two sets of stairs in our split level, Mom spit out venomously, “Get in here!” She was sitting at the table in her black negligee with a carafe of wine and an empty glass, her face all red and splotched from picking the hairs out of her face. As I approached, she snarled, “Sit down,” and smacked the table while flipping her solitaire cards. Then she looked up at me and started going off about Dave and how I was getting too serious with him. Receiving no response, she stood up and pointed that finger at my