>Johnny’s Princess
>For every crazy and controversial story I tell here on Suburban Turmoil, there are dozens I can’t write about for one reason or another.
It’s one of the pitfalls of having my real name on this blog. I have to assume anyone and everyone I know is reading. And so, while I’d LOVE to tell you about the _____ who _____ _______ on my _____’s ___________, or how _______ took a __________ to the _________, I just can’t.
Not if I want to keep living here.
However, enough time has passed to tell you at least one story.
It’s about a little girl named JP.
JP appeared for the first time in my stepdaughter’s fourth grade classroom, the new kid in a sea of familiar faces.
She was impossibly tiny and cute, with long, shiny blond hair, big blue eyes and baby-doll like dimples, but while you might start out with an “Awww,” when you saw her, it would soon turn to a “Whoa.“
The girl had an attitude, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. With a hand on her hip and her head cocked to one side, she quickly took over as tough-talking queen bee of her classroom, awing her classmates with the fact that she wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. Hubs and I had lunch with my stepdaughter once a week at school, and we were highly entertained by JP and her reflections on life, delivered in the back country accent of a ten-year-old Holly Hunter.
“I ain’t afraid of any a them,” she said wryly one afternoon as the girls at her table whispered about a particular group of boys at the next table, who’d sent a few pop tops sailing their way when the cafeteria monitors’ heads were turned. “I can shoot a gun, ya know.” She grinned and popped a straw through her Capri Sun with obvious satisfaction as the girls around her leaned in to hear more. “My daddy taught me,” she said easily, “just before he went to prison.”
JP’s daddy, Johnny, was one of her favorite topics. She thought the world of him, and the feeling must have been mutual- It was soon revealed that JP was short for “Johnny’s Princess.” We often wondered privately what Johnny was in prison for, and a few weeks into the school year, my stepdaughter found out during a whispered conversation with JP on the playground.
“He hit her mom’s boyfriend on the back of the head with a pipe,” my stepdaughter said breathlessly when she got home from school that day. “And her boyfriend almost died.”
“Oh,” I said. “Was that all?”
As JP and my stepdaughter got to know each other, she became a frequent caller at our house. The girls would talk for hours on the phone about whatever it is that 10-year-old girls talk about. But the calls were often cut short by JP’s mama, who my stepdaughter claimed could be heard screaming bloody murder in the background just before the phone went dead.
We thought she was exaggerating, of course, but on one occasion when JP was scheduled to come over for a sleepover and she didn’t show, my stepdaughter called her on speaker phone to find out what was going on.
“My mama can’t bring me,” JP said pitifully into the phone. She sounded like she was crying.
“Tell her we’ll come get her,” Hubs said. “We just need to find out where she lives.”
“Mama?” we could hear JP ask in a small voice. “They said they could come pick me up.”
“Didn’t you hear me, you little b!tch?” we heard a woman’s voice say. “I f#cking said NO! Now you give me that phone, before I–“
The line went dead.
The three of us looked at each other for a moment. My stepdaughter had tears in her eyes.
Of course, I talked to my stepdaughter’s teacher about what we’d heard on the phone, but there wasn’t much more we could do. Although we made several more attempts, JP never did make it over to our house, and after a while, the calls between the girls lessened. We didn’t hear much from her for several months- Then, toward the end of the school year we received a phone call. It was Johnny. My husband answered it.
After talking to him for a few minutes, he hung up the phone. “Johnny’s out of prison,” he announced. “And he wants us to hire him as our handyman. He says he’s having trouble finding work because no one wants to hire someone with attempted manslaughter on their record.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
Shockingly, we had no projects for a handyman that day. A few more weeks passed, the school year ended and I breathed a secret sigh of relief. I worried about JP in the care of a mama who obviously had some issues. I also worried about her daddy… and I wondered if he knew where we lived.
When the next school year rolled around, JP was gone. We never saw or heard from her again. It’s been ten years since fourth grade. JP would be 20 now, and I wonder sometimes what happened to her. How could even the prettiest, sparkliest, sassiest ten-year-old girl grow up and accomplish anything under those circumstances? I hope she’s one of the rare souls that overcomes childhood adversity and goes on to do great things, but I wonder….
I wonder what Johnny’s Princess is up to now.
