Pulp. Robin Talley

Miss Wood must have thought Janet was older than she was. Eighteen-year-old girls didn’t accept bus tickets from people they’d never met, or venture off by themselves to faraway cities.

      Besides, it was beyond her wildest imaginings that she might actually go to New York and meet Dolores Wood herself. That she might enter a bar and see other girls like Janet and Marie. Girls who “engaged” in “practices” like the ones the Bannon Press letter had mentioned.

      Janet’s mind spun. She closed her eyes, and all at once she saw a story unfolding.

      A nondescript bar with no windows on a quiet Greenwich Village street. The type of place workingmen hurried past without looking up. Those men wouldn’t notice the girls who walked in and out of the bar with their eyes trained down, their hands tucked discreetly into their coat pockets.

      Janet could see it all perfectly. As though she’d visited this bar already, where girls danced with other girls, as though that were a perfectly normal thing to do.

      Behind her closed eyelids, Janet pictured two girls sitting at a small, grimy table, slightly removed from the other patrons. One of the girls had dark, curly hair and glasses. The other had blond hair and reminded Janet of a girl she’d once seen on television—the daughter of a contestant on some quiz show. The girl on the program had worn bright lipstick and a lovely dress, and as she’d smiled and twirled before the cheering audience her skirt had billowed out, offering the briefest glimpse of her knees.

      Something about that girl had captivated Janet in a way she hadn’t quite understood, but now she saw that she was exactly right for the story forming in her mind.

      The blond girl in the bar had met the brunette that very night, Janet decided. It was the first time either of them had dared to enter the place. Which was called... Penny’s Corner. And the two girls were... Paula. And Elaine.

      Their story was only just beginning.

      Janet opened her desk and reached in blindly, grabbing her old home economics notebook and a pencil. She turned to an empty page. A strange, tingling feeling flowed into her fingers as she wrote the first words.

       I’d never come to an establishment like this one before. At first, I was so nervous I could barely see straight, but when I spotted the blond sitting in the back, looking lost and lovely at the same time, I knew I’d made the right choice.

      As Janet’s pencil scratched across the paper, the tingling sensation crawled up to her chest. It was just like the night before, when she’d climbed onto that streetcar with Marie.

      Janet lowered the notebook, gazing down at the pencil marks on the page. She’d just written the first sentences of her first novel. From here, the story could only grow.

      A new set of lines began to take form in her mind. They were for later in the story, so Janet skipped her pencil down the page.

       “There’s something I have to tell you, Elaine. Something I’ve longed to tell you.”

       I was so breathless I could barely speak. “What is it, Paula?”

       “I love you. I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you.”

       I closed my eyes and tasted each word.

      Elaine and Paula would fall in love. Janet could see it as clearly as she saw her own reflection in the mirror. The tenderness the two girls shared would be deep, true and undeniable. Until, tragically, society came between them, as it always must.

      A title drifted into her mind, too. Alone No Longer. Janet wrote it across the top of the page.

      She kept writing, the words coming to mind faster than she could scrawl them out. She jotted down notes for later, too. Scenes she would write soon, about love and loss and heartbreak.

      Sometime later, her grandmother knocked on the door, but Janet claimed a headache and wrote on. She wrote all through the evening and the night that followed, until her eyes refused to stay open and the pencil fell from her limp fingers. Yet even as she finally felt herself passing into sleep, that tingling sensation never went away.