Things couldn’t be worse. Mark still won’t talk to me and his best friend Dean keeps calling me, wanting to — I don’t know what he wants — but it’s not cool and my mother refuses to screen my calls unless I explain the entire situation to her and that isn’t ever going to happen. I don’t think I’ll ever leave the little room again. Well, I have to for school, obviously, but other than that, never.
I’m sitting in the little room now, listening to one of my sad tapes and Spandeau Ballet’s “True” is playing. I suppose Spandeau Ballet isn’t the most horrifying thing on this tape. That would have to be one of those Top 40 ballads I taped off one of the AM radio stations. But still, Spandeau Ballet is pretty bad. “True” is such a school dance song and school dances remind me of Mark, which is the saddest thing I can think about right now.
I have three secret tapes. They’re unmarked and I leave them in the bottom of my desk drawer. Not that I think anyone would be digging around in the bottom of my desk drawer, but I think it’s best that there is no song list just in case someone happened to somehow see the tapes. Like it wouldn’t be the worst, most embarrassing thing if, say, Kevin found a tape I made with “True” on it. I’d never hear the end of it. My life is bad enough as it is.
*
Image: Spandeau Ballet, as featured in MTV: Who’s Who in Rock Video, Zomba Books, 1983.
Welcome to the Little Room is a series of 250-word re-imagined vignettes from my ’80s youth with a focus on music and style. It appears weekly on periodicult.com.
