Track 16: Typical Girls by The Slits

Justine’s mother always told her: “You can be whoever you want to be.”

In front of the fried chicken shop, night air raising goose pimples on her legs and arms, Justine thinks of her mother and feels a stab of loss.

“I’m that kind of person,” she says. “So I smacked her.”

Elesha sucks her teeth.

Some boys cycle over all ‘what’s up, where you going?’ Elesha asks if they smoke.

One youth, face like polished darkwood, places two cigarettes in his mouth, lights them and passes one to Justine.

Like Paul Henreid in ‘Now, Voyager’, she thinks.

She already knows she’ll feel this boy against her in a park or alleyway later that night, hard and sharp like twisted metal, weed smoke like dry ice.

Around them traffic and people, the bass sounds of car stereos, a helicopter above. Answering her mobile phone, Justine interrogates her boyfriend before hanging up.

She is so fucking bored of Elesha. Bored of ends, weed, fucking.

To be with her mother, curled up quiet with a book, is all she wants.

This is a choice, Justine tells herself. They don’t know it, but I do.

There’s more to life than this, she thinks.