Maddie by Grey Traynor

Maddie liked to chew her hair yet no one liked to watch her do it.

            Feels right, she’d think to herself before blurting it out loud. “It feels right!”

            Then everyone else at the bus stop would further glaze their eyes or the person coming down the grocery aisle might spin their cart around, a squeaky maneuver, made awkward by the bulk of metal—anything to get away from the screaming woman slurping on her hair.

            And that’s what Maddie was, a woman, despite her juvenile tics and her preferred nickname.

            “Madison sounds like a name you give an ugly dog,” Maddie would say over her weekly pasta dinners with Mom. “And I walk on two legs and I don’t drink out of the toilet!”

            Maddie’s mother, Petunia, at the other end of the mahogany dining room table with its peach runner would just sigh. There was no arguing or persuading or proffering to her child, only pacifying with the empty release of a sigh.

            Petunia had raised Maddie in the shoulder-padded age of constantly reminding young girls that they “could become whatever they wanted to be.” The hollow slogan was borne out of the hope that there might be a later uptick in female physician’s assistants or lady lawyers who sweat ponds into their uncomfortably high heels, but Petunia, who had suffered at the entitled, grabby hands of male hippies even though she wore the same kind of brown love beads in similar shit brown pants, wanted more for her daughter’s future, one of complete independence. So Petunia went big with the female empowerment for Maddie, allowing her daughter to eat whatever food she wanted, to participate in whatever hobby crossed her mind, and to have whatever hard plastic toy she craved.

            Soon, their shared small 2-bedroom duplex overflowed with green tutus, broken-but-never-used easels, and bowling pins specifically for juggling, with a fridge full of chocolate cakes and only frozen grapes in the freezer.

            Petunia stopped to take in the living hell of her house one day, registering her young, energetic daughter banging and sliding across Petunia’s once beautiful house; now every step meant a bare sole pierced by stray beads and dirty glitter; every wall was striped with crayons and acrylic paints: a neon zebra’s hide.

            “Enough!” Petunia cried, her arms outstretched and rigid, parting her own brand of Red Sea. “Be nothing, Maddie! Be so small! And so quiet! I want to run the risk of accidentally tripping over your tiny, silent self!”

            But the damage was done, no matter the length of Petunia’s sighs. Maddie continued to wield her desire to desire as she became a thirty-six-year-old.

            “I want to do karaoke for my birthday,” Maddie said with a red ring of sauce around her mouth.

            Petunia gulped. “…Here?”

            Maddie’s mother worked hard to keep her house tidy after the tyrannical 18-year mess ended since, luckily, Maddie identified with the independent part of her childhood conditioning and left the duplex when she came of age. But that didn’t mean a few mugs weren’t smashed or Petunia’s white carpets didn’t find themselves slapped with arcs of rosé at weekly dinner.

            “Oh, Mother,” Maddie said. “I gotta go out in the world on my special day—shake some hands, maybe get laid…”

            Petunia gripped her heart.

            “Besides,” Maddie continued. “I’ve never sung in public before. Isn’t that weird…Mom, why did you keep me from singing?” She bit down on some particularly crunchy garlic bread and, oh, did a spray of crumbs land and settle into the fur of Petunia’s gray cat.

            “I don’t know, dear,” said the mother, who suffered through a million hours of unsteady “Smoke on the Water” pluckings and “Rhapsody in Blue” so audially soured it would make your local shitty punk singer politely beg for mercy. “I just don’t know.”

            Maddie did indeed visit her local karaoke bar on her birthday in her favorite checkered blazer and a lavender tulle skirt. “I was something of a ballerina,” she told the bartender who didn’t ask.

            In truth, Maddie was a poor excuse for a dancer, one who slouched and never could get the positions down.

            “Second position, mademoiselle!” her ballet teacher would correct.

            “Forgive me if first position is really more MY thing…crabby!”

            “Crabby” was Maddie’s replacement for “asshole” because “asshole” scared her, made her picture a shitting anus—GEE-ross!

            Maddie twirled unsteadily for the bartender as he set down her Chardonnay with ice—she loved a chilled grape. She pounded the drink then twirled once more; this time Maddie nearly fell backward. “Sixth position!” she said after catching herself, but the bartender had already fled to the kitchen.

            At 4 pm on a Tuesday, there was no one else in the bar besides Maddie and the karaoke jockey, so the two of them took turns.

            Maddie sang first because, hello, it was her birthday!

            Under the oscillating rainbow lights with her third white wine in hand, Maddie cooed the first few lines of “Why Not Me?” by The Judds, only it was slower than she remembered. “Change it! Change it!” Maddie bellowed into the microphone, running toward the karaoke jockey whose meek, wide eyes said she might not be the right person to herd singing drunks.

            And Maddie got her way, speeding and heating things up with “Genie in a Bottle.” The birthday girl remembered and implemented the slinky music video choreography for the bartender with his deep black tattoos. She couldn’t see him through the blinding lights, but she didn’t really care because she “rubbed it the right way;” Maddie killed her first time doing karaoke.

            Shuffling her feet in black flats back to her tiny table with the battery-operated tea light, Maddie cheered for herself, and the tinkling ice in her fourth Chard couldn’t help but add to the applause.

            “All right, that was Maddie with a little do-over Christina. Now here’s myself, K.J. Ashley Daniels, hitting you with a little Britney—”

            Maddie sliced her chin diagonally through the air, thinking it was a real Crabby Craberson move to degrade her stellar, debut performance by calling it a “do-over.”

            In full view of K.J. Ashley, as Maddie was seated right in front of the performance area, the birthday girl turned around in her seat, facing across the roomful of empty tables to the back black wall that revealed a sweaty sheen any time one of the rainbow lights zipped across it.

            But if Maddie had killed her song, then K.J. Ashley Daniels annihilated her performance: singing so clearly and on key while perfectly imitating Britney’s baby vocals.

            And that really pissed Maddie off.

            During the climax of Ashley’s performance, two guys walked in—opportunity.

“Chuck! Enrique!” Maddie waved her hands like a traffic controller new to meth, butting into the performance area, nearly smacking Ashley. “CHUCK! ENRIQUE!”

            The men ignored her at first but when someone’s screaming at you, saying what you’ve long known to not be your birth-given name, it’s still something you gotta deal with.

            Her tulle skirt so beautifully lifting over her running legs, Maddie charged at the bearded men who held up their hands expecting a collision.

            “Chuck! Enrique!” Maddie’s voice echoed throughout the bar as K.J. Ashley Daniels had finished her song.

            “Woah!” Not-Chuck said, not unlike what you’d say to steady a wild horse, and looked over to Not-Enrique who shook his head in both confusion and denial. “We…don’t know you.”

            “Oh, I know,” Maddie said with a wink, before craning her neck around to hopefully catch K.J. Ashley Daniels crying globby mascara tears in her little booth, but the woman at work looked bored, head angled down, her big eyes dulled, scanning her phone.

            Try living that one down, crabby! Maddie thought, as she swagger-shuffled back to her table. Her satisfied smile dimmed when she saw that her fifth white wine was gone, a bar tab in its place. “I’m cutting you off :)” was written on the receipt, and Maddie made sure to put her own smiley face next to her $0 tip.

            She hurled the bar’s pen on the ground but then snatched it back up after its second bounce—stealing it, depleting them of their resources, was the real power move.

            “Crabby!” Maddie said, hurling herself toward the bar, but the bartender ignored her and carried on taking Not-Chuck and Not-Enrique’s orders.

            Scrunched nose, Maddie didn’t want to stay, even though she knew she could because it was a free country, but she also did kind of want to stay in case either Not-Chuck or Not-Enrique might be up for sex. Then she narrowed her eyes at them, these two men leaning against the bar, sharing a chuckle with that stupid bartender she hated more than soggy fish sticks.

            They were the enemy too. The place was crawling with them and their ten legs, hard-shell.

            “Well. GoodBYE!” she said, stomping toward the toilet.

            As the first two white wines streamed out of her, the tulle skirt rolled in her fists, Maddie drifted her aim toward the toilet seat itself, getting a misty splash on her upper thighs.

            Either K.J. Ashley Daniels was going to sit in it or that bartending bastard would have to mop it up at the end of the night. Both scenarios settled some of the fury raging in her heart.

            Washing her hands under scalding water because who knew what kind of germs in this dump—Maddie twisted away from herself with a grimace, the image of a shitting anus returning, until her eyes flashed open…

            K.J. Ashley Daniels, the total prissy type, meant that she was that particular kind of uptight, self-righteous, fun-ruining jerk who looked before she sat down on the throne.

            So Maddie shuffled over to the only other stall and pissed on that seat, defiling all of Ashley’s choices until another consideration landed on Maddie’s head like a ballistic football: Ashley might avoid public peeing altogether, preferring to relieve herself at home, enjoying the soft carpet on her pedicured bare feet—two coats of Cactus Rose on her toenails.

            Maddie banged her fist into the stall door stemming from another delightful realization that the bar probably had a cleaning crew and Crabby the Bastard Bartender wouldn’t even have to touch a drop of her piss!

            “It’s my goddamn birthday, GODDAMMIT!”

            Fingers fumbling in her purse, searching for her phone to call Petunia because someone was gonna hear about this, Maddie stopped, lasering in on the shiny silver lock to the bathroom door.

            In three sprinting steps, Maddie flipped it locked then cackled.

            Just wait until the bartender caught wind of this with a full line of thirsty customers.

            Just wait until there was so much commotion about the wild, untamable beauty in the bathroom that no one paid attention to K.J. Ashley Daniels and why should they, she doesn’t even know any video choreography.

            Maddie hopped up onto the dry side of the counter, not the other half she soaked, and prepared herself for a hunkering down—a sit-in—just like her mother had done in the late 60s for peace, but Maddie was fighting for a more noble cause, protesting what it was those monsters on the outside had taken from her.

            But she would regain her glory.

            She had water. She most certainly had a bathroom at her disposal. She had the backup protein bar she took with her everywhere.

            It was the people on the other side of the door that had, and would continue to have, an unfulfilled need unless the birthday girl, sucking her hair like spaghetti, decided they should be as deserved as her.