She is sophistication, and we are sneakers.

Well. Allison is not really all that sophisticated, if we’re being honest with ourselves, and we are nothing if we aren’t honest. But she thinks she is, so what’s the difference? We could be Maid Marion, but if Allison thinks she’s the sophisticated one, then it is made so.

She has brown hair with carefully placed, white-trash (in our opinion) highlights. Her chin is unattractive, but she has perfect teeth, and we can’t compete with that, no, ma’am. She has a sales job and a Discover card and a boyfriend who went to Furman, and her accessories cost more than our entire wardrobe. Allison drives an SUV, and doesn’t appear to know about the whole hybrid situation, because why should she? She’s never had to be aware of anything. She is blank; if we were to cut her open (my word – how could you even mention such a thing!), there would be nothing but a skeleton and some air.

She has the next six months worth of weekends in stone, and we continue to ponder the point of breakfast.

It is important that she only shop downtown Charleston on King Street; she still calls it “The Omni,” even though they changed the name ages ago. It is important that a teenager at an overpriced car shop vacuum out her SUV on Friday afternoon, because she and He of Furman are going to a football game at his alma mater. Allison will meet his college friends, and she will make it her business to dazzle, and she will document every moment with pictures, make some memories with her brand new memory card. She will eliminate all doubt, and it won’t even take her all weekend

We have lost our looks, and Allison looks slimmer than before. We know how hard she has to work for it, and feel strangely proud.

We remember a night at a sketchy club with a silly name on Shem Creek, when we wore that halter dress. We looked good that night. We’d spent more time than we should’ve in a sports bra and our trademark sneakers, running round and round the neighborhood under the killer August son, the humidity alone enough to send us straight to God before it was necessary. We analyzed how and why she took him away from us, and we dreamed up how we would walk into a sketchy club with a silly name on Shem Creek one night in that halter dress, and we would show them.

We would show them, all right. We chatted with a frantic smile on our face and held a Miller Light and pretended to drink it, and we waited for the perfect moment to impress, and then we saw Allison with her secretary’s ass, enchanting the one we’d carefully plucked our eyebrows for, with a simple glance from her unremarkable eyes. It was our eyes that were meant to enchant. They were our best feature.. They still are. But they are no match for a Discover card. They cannot touch sophistication.

No one uses that word anymore, now that we and Allison are all grown up and out and over. It was a nineties word, and now the nineties are over and the Mayans lure us towards their carefully crafted disaster, and we doubt they care about expensive accessories. Often, we wonder why we still do. Perhaps the fight is more important than the prize. But none of that matters, because by the time everyone realizes how precious we were and how ordinary Allison was, it will all be finished anyway. We (all of us, even Allison) will all be the same thing then, a big mess of dirt and molecules and rot and fresh fruit and saliva, and sophistication and sneakers, and papers floating down to the ground. They still won’t notice our halter dress, not even then.