HIGH TOPS, harry bingham

High Tops

— HIGH TOPS —
AN EXPOSITION

     You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he
     won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves
     you. And you feel like you've done something
     terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed
     pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and
     you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy,
     and you're trying not to tell him that you love him,
     and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and
     you're trembling, but he reaches over and he
     touches you, like a prayer for which no words
     exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your
     body, like you've discovered something you didn't
     even have a name for. ━━━ Richard Siken

     WEST HAM ISN'T FOR THE FAINT OF HEART. It's a two-way street of double-edged swords and words of multiple meanings. A classic suburban nightmare: a one-horse town with its adults bleeding the atmosphere dry and pumping it full of cigarette smoke; a one-horse town with its teenagers drinking after hours in the forest, not because they necessarily wanted to, but because it was the only way to stay on top of the social hierarchy, the only way to keep five of their perfectly manicured fingers piercing the flesh of the West Ham gossip mill.

     And, well, Eliza O'Hara, after many-a years walking the sidewalks in her blue Nike high tops and waiting at the bus stop at the corner of Main and Clearwater with Oliver Tijani and Finn Coggin, still has quite a firm grip for better or for worse. For Eliza, knowing the who, what, where, why, and how keeps her alive; it's a survival tactic more than anything, in a wealthy town where Eliza is anything but. In a wealthy town where money really did matter, there was a strategy to make people forget. So, Eliza mastered it. She figured out how to wield West Ham like it was her own sword, balanced to her grip.

     Part of her strategy, besides caring entirely too much about nearly everything, is to pretend not to care. Being unbothered, convincing people you're unbothered, keeps them away. If you're bothered, if you care about things too intensely, there has to be a reason. The second part of her strategy is to know everything. To truly win, to bluff an entire town with the shitty cards Eliza has been dealt, she needs to know everything. So, even if she would rather be at home, even if she would rather be on the train to Boston to visit her little half-sister, even if she would rather trail her best friends to their out-of-state hockey games, she sips whiskey that her classmates have swiped from their parents' shelves out of red Solo cups in the forest.

     She doesn't think it's calculated, really. For a town that calculates everything down to the nearest cent, Eliza is probably the least calculated of all.