Sweet Bird of Youth (working title)

A Story by furlong

It was a funny thing: Ally and Mackie didn’t grow up together, but their childhoods were the strong foundation on which their friendship was built. Their first conversation had been about a TV show they both enjoyed separately in their youth, Young Kids. The show centered around a group of high school kids who begin an underground zine together depicting their views on their high school. The show was a sleeper hit and only ran for three seasons, but Ally and Mackie remembered it well. That conversation led to more about other TV shows from their pasts as well as toys, games, saying and clothes they both enjoyed. Though Ally was four years Mackie’s senior, any stranger would have guessed they were separated conjoint twins.

Ally had recently received her Bachelor of Arts in Communications and began interning at a small independent magazine almost immediately after graduation. She aspired to work in public relations, but her career was always on the back burner because her leisurely pursuits always took first priority. Together with Mackie, Ally would spend hours eating bowl after bowl of ice cream and cake at Crazy Harry’s Ice Cream Palace. Not surprisingly, Crazy Harry’s had been the local hotspot for both girls in their pre-teen and teen years, though they never crossed paths before they became coworkers at Clover Cinemas where Ally worked only because her interning job did not pay enough.

Mackie was struggling to finish her undergrad degree and envied Ally. She didn’t envy the fact that Ally had begun her path to adulthood and a career, but only the fact that Ally no longer was in school. Mackie had been at Clover Cinemas only a few months when Ally was hired and then all of a sudden her dreary job which helped pay her tuition wasn’t so bad after all.

Among the girls’ mutual love for their childhood TV shows, comics, books and movies was their inability to grow out of being teenyboppers. Age had done nothing but taught them how to better hide this truth and privately they shrieked and screeched every time they saw their teen idols on TV. A recent teen idol they had both become obsessed with was Jonah Grime. Jonah Grime was to Ally and Mackie what David Cassidy and Frankie Avalon had been to teens before them.

Tall, fit with a shaggy mop of sandy hair, Jonah Grime was the reason some girls got out of bed in the morning. He was dashing and charming with eyes always sparkling and a voice which even made grown women swoon. He was the epitome of the teen idol and he was the love of Ally and Mackie’s lives. It should be noted, though, that Ally and Mackie loved Jonah Grime in a much different way than teenage girls did. To Ally and Mackie Jonah Grime was the boy you look at and wish desperately you were still a teenager because otherwise you feel like a pervert cradle-snatcher. Jonah Grime was only seventeen. Nevertheless, it was generally acknowledged that Jonah Grime was a good musician and so Ally and Mackie were not as ridiculed for their interest in him. However, they always made sure to keep mum about their seemingly undying crush on him.

In a nutshell, Ally and Mackie’s childhood infatuations were a source of amusement to their friends and never bothered the girls at all. Why should it bother them? They thought. There was no reason why they couldn’t in their twenties and still enjoy the pleasures of childhood. Then one day it was announced that Jonah Grime would be doing a concert in Ally and Mackie’s city.

Of course, sudden preparations were made of the girls’ parts. Tickets were bought, schedules were cleared for that night, T-shirts sporting slogans like “It’s JONAH TIME” and the less creative “Mrs Jonah Grime” were made to be worn at the concert. The girls were pumped; they had made sure to buy tickets as close to the stage as possible so that Jonah Grime would see their T-shirts and maybe throw them a smile or two, or when he decided to pick a girl from the audience to sing to, one of them would be that girl.

Come concert day Ally and Mackie couldn’t think of any other day in their lives that equalled or exceeded their expectations for that day. They strolled in early and lined up, scanning the crowd. There were a lot of younger girls but there were also a fair number of people in their twenties. Ally and Mackie spent their time waiting until doors opened singing various Jonah Grime songs with nearby fans. Once doors were opened, both girls’ pushed and shoved their way to as close to the stage as they could manage and settled down to have the time of their lives. Jonah Grime was nothing in magazines or on TV when compared to his live self. Ally and Mackie screamed and danced until they thought their legs would just break right off, and then continued dancing harder and faster and with more energy,

There was an intermission during which Mackie left to get some snacks for the two of them. Ally stayed behind to make sure no one tried to sneak into their spots. While waiting she scanned the crowd of people around her and noticed that except for a couple of mothers with very young children, she was the oldest person there. She scanned the crowd again because this revelation didn’t sound right to her and was surprised to realise that it was true, weather it sounded right or not. Everyone around her was in their early teens. They were clad in Jonah Grime T-shirts and headbands clutching souvenir tour books which they had probably saved up all their allowance to purchase. The girls were all young, in the very prime of their youth, and were absolutely delighted to be there despite the fact that Ally and Mackie, being a couple of the tallest people there were probably blocking their view of the amazing Jonah Grime.

It was like an epiphany, only it hit Ally a few days after the concert was over. She was looking through her monthly bank statement and was a little surprised at how much she’d spent that month. Reading over the transactions she discovered that the majority of them were superfluous purchases she’d made with Mackie on useless items like comic books and DVDs of shows which aired in reruns every single day. After deducting the monthly minimum owed to her credit card and her bank fees, Ally found she had only a small fraction of her pay check left: not nearly enough to really live on at all.

All of a sudden Ally tuned in to what others had known for years: she wasn’t a child anymore. She wasn’t even a youth anymore. She was a full-fledged adult physically and socially, yet mentally and emotionally she chose to remain an adolescent. She suddenly couldn’t fathom why in the world she was holding herself back from this rite of passage into proper adulthood. All it had brought her was a bank balance of zero and, as she recently realised, a wave of mortification which apparently was not a one-time deal.

She jumped when her cell phone rang – the ring tone was her favourite Jonah Grime song. The caller ID stated that it was Mackie calling. Ally reached for the phone, then glanced briefly at her bank statement before deciding to ignore the call.