The Girl Zone: Four. Diana Dead. Princess, Boyfriend Killed in Paris Paparazzi Car Chase

It was a sunny mid-morning, when Mimou parked her forest green Mazda too widely in the driveway of Dina’s parents’ house. She always did her best not to hog the entire space in case Dina’s father suddenly decided to pop by on his lunch break, which almost never happened, but worrying that she would ruin the lawn on the other side, she managed to end up taking two thirds of the two-car driveway. It was ridiculous, really, since her little green car was one of those minuscule early-Seventies miracles.

Mimou was wearing the following garments:

1.  Her blue-and-white vintage Adidas tennis shoes;

2.  Her father’s pinstriped jacket;

3.  An olive-green supply bag from an army surplus store.

Ellen was already there. She was sitting on the huge sofa, surfing the channels. They gathered familiarly around the large round kitchen table, took out their books and school assignments and other needful things from their young women’s treasuries that were their enormous school- and handbags. Dina asked if anyone wanted some coffee; everyone did, and she poured water into the coffeemaker. What about bread? This time, too, the answer was yes, so she raided the fridge.

Dina’s parents were the perfect parents because of the following reasons:

1.  They always had lots of white bread handy, and the fridge, by all means, was at the girls’ disposal;

2.  They were always gone;

3.  They were tolerant to Dina’s friends’ smoking, because the girls always, always, smoked outside, and left no stubs to be found anywhere.

Mimou was sitting in front of the window, and the lemon-colored sun made large squares of white and yellow light on the table and on her back. She had grandfather’s old gray smoking jersey on, and it was too hot for the day, but she felt reluctant to take it off. She loved the jersey and wore it all the time, and besides, soon they would move their pre-lunch meeting of the minds outside to have that eleven o’clock smoke, so why undress? Ellen left the TV on mute, while they tried to decide on the music of the morning. A ton of CD’s and mixtapes were scattered on the table among schoolbooks, journals, cigarette packs, pens and pencils, and Dina’s unfinished artwork consisting of multiple drawings of different kinds of eyes with lush lashes drawn on one by one.

Among the CD’s one could spot at least the following titles:

1.  OK Computer by Radiohead;

2.  Doolittle by Pixies;

3.  Post by Björk;

4.  Parklife by Blur.

“Should we put on the Radiohead?” Mimou asked. “Yeah all right”, Ellen replied, looking for the case for the Breeders album that was currently playing. She found the case, removed the CD from the player and replaced it with another one. “Man, I love this album”, Dina said to no one in particular, pouring coffee into three different kinds of cups. The girls each took a cup, put on their shoes, and before exiting the house, Ellen cranked up the volume of the stereo system.

They were smoking leisurely, sitting on the concrete step in front of the redbrick house. Mimou put on her yellow-tinted Woody Allen -sunglasses. Dina fidgeted with a dark green piece of yarn, unraveling from her own sweater sleeve. They were talking idly about the films they had watched the previous weekend at Ellen’s, Leigh’s Naked, and Antonioni’s Blow Up. Ellen was saying something about the Edward Munch biography she was reading. Mimou was only half-listening to her, replied some nonsense about her own current favorite, Frida Kahlo, while taking in the sweetness of the day, relaxed, and happy to be with her friends just then. The smoke from the cigarettes rose slowly upwards in elaborate curls and swirls. The sun was aflame on the hood of Mimou’s Mazda. It wasn’t summer anymore, but it wasn’t fall, either, and the girls were enjoying the type of simple, unspoken camaraderie they would never again share with other people, partly because they were young and there, partly because that was one of those final moments of childhood not yet turned into adulthood, but almost.

The sun blazed so that once inside, the girls had to squint their eyes a bit before the relative dimness of inside became the present state for the brain. Thom Yorke kept whining beautifully on the stereo. Dina shot her Vans sneakers off, Mimou placed her tennis shoes neatly next to Ellen’s Doc Martens. The BBC News was on the muted TV. The girls gathered back to the round table, ready to continue with their homework.

It was Ellen, who first noticed that the entire news seemed to consist mainly of Lady Diana shot at various functions, in fabulous sequined evening gowns, walking on a beach in a bathing suit, shaking hands in smart suits, hugging children in large sunglasses in Angola, standing with Charles and then without Charles, a blushing bride in the bridal gown of a true princess, an independent woman in a gorgeous little black dress, with the new man in her life, Dodi, then, pictures of a tunnel, with the police there, the paramedics, yellow tape, a car totaled into a jumble of steel.

“Something’s happened”, she stated solemnly. “What? What is it? Is she okay?” “Turn off the damn Radiohead! Let’s get some sound here.” They huddled on the sofa, forgetting their homework, their elevensies, and their childlike belief in happy endings, on the kitchen table.

Someone rode by the house on a motorbike. The faint sound of the lawnmower dribbled through the ajar kitchen window. Mimou put her hands in the smoking jersey’s torn pockets, and felt the two and three holes inside each pocket. A short life. A short life, she thought, not really knowing who she was thinking about, the car crash victims, her grandfather, or herself.

This was how it happened. However, the following three points can be wrong with the picture:

1.  The sun might not have shined that day;

2.  It was possible that Ellen wasn’t present, although highly unlikely;

3.  Maybe they weren’t just then eating giant loaves of bread bought by Dina’s parents.

Mimou supposed it was possible that they could have been somewhere else entirely, not together at all, the chain of events pieced together in the years that followed, assembled from some unrelated moments in her memory of what her life was like back then.

But Mimou could have sworn it was exactly like this.

For H. and L.