2003-11-12 || 10:00 a.m.

|| neenay's birthday is november 14. ||

aline is turning twenty-seven on friday. when we were eighteen there was an unspoken mutually-agreed upon uniform of old lady dresses with i. magnin slips worn underneath held together with safety pins and careless sewing. we held black patent leather purses with both hands while crossing pacific coast highway on wednesday afternoons in search of perfect cardigans dusted with the scent of moth balls and dead ladies' cedar drawers. there were soundtracks of painfully bad ska bands we had danced to at old world and aline's grandfather's mariachi band and beck and nina simone. at lunch times at school we sat on a grassy knoll with a fancy boy named carlos who wore italian loafers and was obsessed with the saints and the virgin mary, who brought them up, la virgen de gudalupe and saint catherine de aragon and saint christopher, during noon-time conversations like they were in our statistics classes. when i had a boyfriend we ate in the cafeteria and i held his hand under the table while he studied music with a perpetual frown. he had hair like an angel, but dyed black and dented in places from sleep. aline didn't like him. he spoke japanese and played bass and was very competitive, and we stopped talking after i refused to see gwar with him for all the fake blood.

fake blood and old lady dresses did not mix in 1995.

aline was my lab partner. aline spoke french. aline was referred to by my dad as "mi hija," because he was thoroughly excited by the idea of someone with which to use his broken spanish that was almost unintelligible due to the battering it received from picking up the crude diction and cadence from chilean fisherman back in '67. she would come over to watch lawrence welk before we drove to huntington beach or anaheim to dance, and when we'd go into the kitchen to find something to eat, she'd give an emphatic "i love you, mr./mrs. hand!" and catch them off guard with her fierce hugging.

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