Days this hot belong to us. See us run both sides of this street, every
lawn our lawn. We are sprinkler kids, shoeless and soaked through,
blistered and noisy, playing Duck, Duck, Brick while some window mother—not
ours—yells for us to not get concussed. It is boys versus girls, and my
brother Chip and I are the leaders. Our teams are pink and peeling, kids
willing to do whatever it is we say. The rules: no crying, no aiming for
eyes. Base is that stop sign, safe is both hands wrapped around any part of
it.
Our chow-chow Shasta is going berserk along our fence, barking and
snuffling through the knotholes Chip and I pushed out so she can watch over
us. She runs as fast as we do, stops when we stop, pushes first one eye and
then the other out to see the world. Shasta keeps track of us because our
mother is a couch mother who doesn’t leave our house, not ever, because
she’s afraid of the wrong things—Satanists and wide-open spaces, the white
trails that spew out behind airplanes. She stays away from the windows and
makes Chip and me walk all over God’s Creation instead of driving us,
afraid that some feeling in her foot will give her the urge to ram a
crosswalk person with the car.
Where we live is all cul-de-sacs and flat nothing, shimmery heat coming up
from the sidewalks. Our dumb town is known for two things only: the Buddy
Holly statue by the strip mall and the big, big sky. I hate that stupid
statue—just seeing it sticks the whiniest songs in your head, makes you
think of creepy, old-timey ghosts: poodle skirt girls and guys with goop in
their hair, all of them dancing the most embarrassing dances. The sky is
all right, I guess, streaked pink and orange, but it’s more like a lid than
a promise. We’re nowhere. If you wanted to leave you’d be driving for days
and days, not toward anything, just away.
Duck, Duck, Brick is just a big name. We mostly throw dirt, pebbles, stuff
we like to lob at the lower half of people where it can’t do too much
damage. But today our stash is real bricks, small hunks of them that come
from DeeAnn Pith’s busted up mailbox, which was baseballed all to hell by
midnight high schoolers. Her house gets toilet paper in the bushes and
shaving cream on the lawn, once a whole two-liter of Coke sprayed at the
screen door, so it was no surprise to any of us, DeeAnn included, to wake
up to junk mail and bricks and stuff exploded all over. DeeAnn is from a
fat, hateable family. What’s worse, her dad is everybody’s dentist. If you
were feeling mean and had a metal bat and a fast car, it’s the Pith house
you’d target.
But DeAnn’s bricks, they’re perfect—they’re the reason I shouted her name
from the street and made all the other girls promise not to scratch her or
anything, not today. We’ve wheelbarrowed our supply, hidden it behind a
wingwall. There is no time to really look at DeeAnn’s wide face, or be
annoyed by how grateful she seems, running with our pack through the mist,
ducking from whatever the boys are throwing.
The boys’ fire is endless—who knows where they keep their stash? I’ve been
working on my psychic powers. I’d like to be the one the police call in to
find missing kids—to solve the tough crimes, like when somebody finds a box
of chopped-off pinkie toes or a blanket wet with blood. So far, I can only
read my brother’s useless thoughts. I swear it’s true. I can dip in and
scan boring stuff off him all day—what sandwich he wants to eat next or
which bathroom at school is the best for number two. Sometimes I can even
cut right in and say my piece to him, brain to brain. I do this when I have
to, when we’re at home and Mom is wearing a fitted sheet tight over her
head and shoulders like a shroud, naked underneath. Or when she’s got her
tackle box of makeup open on the coffee table and she’s taking herself from
day to evening for no reason, fake eyelashes and all.
Sometimes I break into Chip even when I don’t have to, when I want to say
something in two ways at the exact same time, like when I am digging
half-moons into his forearms, fighting him for the remote control.
Mine!
I roar, right through his stupid skull.
Don’t you be commandeering me,
he’ll say with his mind, annoyed when I cut through his thoughts like that
just because I can.
It is not calm enough or still enough for my dark magic now, everybody
screaming in the street, plus I am sure, without cheating even, that this
game is a dead heat, boy and girl lineups perfectly paired, all of us
giving it our all. We are glorious, every one. Even DeeAnn Pith is pulling
her weight, of which there is a lot. My brother’s boys hut-hut and
hailmary, get good spirals out of their throws. We girls dodge and tumble,
take running starts for our cartwheels, our handsprings and punch fronts.
That mom who isn’t ours, she is still going on, yelling from her window
about SPFs and antbeds. Her voice is a kind of thrum in your head that
makes you meaner. I spin a chunk shotput style and catch slackjawed Wesley
Ellis in the crotch. My sunblind brother upholds his best friend’s honor,
fires an underhander at my heart. Fat chance! I am so, so quick. Baked clay
buckshots the sidewalk where we’re standing and slivers into our girl feet.
Wesley Ellis wears wind shorts and no underwear and when he sits you can
see everything about him stuck to his sweaty thigh. He smells like pee and
when he comes to sleepovers at our house he leaves before bedtime. “I need
my beauty rest,” is what Wesley Ellis says, his mother looking down at her
feet on our front porch.
The heat has all of us riled and screaming, the arching water from the
hoses gone warm. A new kid’s glasses go flying, then he skids out. “Man
down!” Chip says. Our street—it slopes. A misstep and you go rolling. Chip
makes a T with his hands and says the word that makes us stop and watch
from slick grass. Little clots of new hair sop out under his arms. My
ponytailed team looks to me to see if I am still slinging. I make like a
heap has already left my hand, brotherbound. Chip takes it hard in the
shoulder and doesn’t flinch. There are times when I don’t hate him all that
much.
I see that Glasses is hunched up and sweaty with hands feeling his empty
face. His eyes are watering like he’s working himself up to break a rule.
Wendy Popov, one of my best girls, snakes her foot into a flower bed and
comes out with specs clenched in her toes. She brushes off her anty leg,
tries to make good.
“They’re not cracked,” she says. “Just weedy.” Wendy puts the glasses on
Glasses’s face, parts his sweaty hair one way, then the other. She gives
his back a pat.
Too little too late—Glasses spits a tiny blob of blood into his palm and
holds it out for us to see, a little red streak that ruins everything. He
wails and it is a serious sound, the kind that means the game is over.
Where does my brother find these donkeys?
But the game was incredible! The game was amazing! Brain to brain, I shout, Victory! Victory, for the girls! to my brother. He shoots me a
black look.
Then it’s time to put our teams into high-five lines. “Get up,” Chip tells
Glasses, who is snotty and drippy, squatting on the grass. Glasses looks at
my brother but doesn’t move. Chip says, “Get. Up.” His voice is scary calm
like when a psycho in a movie is about to lose it on somebody. Glasses
whimpers and takes his place at the end of the boy’s line.
When Chip gives us the signal, we rush our teams past each other and all of
us say, “Good game, good game,” when we slap hands. You have to look your
opponent right in the eye or else the line starts over. You have to mean
it. Satisfied, Chip and I tell our teams to go on home. DeeAnn Pith lags
behind me, asks what I’m doing next. I swat her away like a big, slow fly.
“I thought I was coming to y’all’s house to play,” DeeAnn Pith says. I tell
her there have been plenty of times I thought I was going somewhere that I
wasn’t.
“Get used to it, sister.” I say.
Wesley Ellis wants to come over too, and I hear my brother putting him off.
“My spirit is swinging,” is what Mom said when she sent us out this
morning. Maybe it is swinging way up high or maybe not but Chip and me need
to get a feel for things before we start bringing people inside. When the
spirit is soaring, our mom is a yes mom or a soft no mom, the kind who lets
us get away with anything. We’ll have a dozen kids over, sliding down the
stairs on a piece of cardboard like a sled. Spirits up, Mom lets us dig
through her purse and order a whole pizza for everyone, even one for
Shasta—pineapple and pepperoni, her favorite. Down is something else.
If it were my decision, Wesley Ellis would be banned for life, no matter
the swing. He thinks he’s so smart. He says that in some countries, Shasta
would be a meat dog, sliced up in a bowl of rice. When he and Chip play
video games, when Mom gets dressed up for no reason and limps around the
living room, asking which shoe we like better, Wesley Ellis smirks and
says, “Well, Donna, I guess that depends on where you’re headed tonight.”
He teaches my brother awful stuff like Cat Brains.
“C’mere and see these cat brains,” they say to me and the other girls, but
we know better than to look by now. “Wanna see some bubblegum?” they try,
cupped hands low in front of their crotches. I don’t know how boys can walk
around being so disgusting, doing nutsack tricks all day.
Shasta is yelping and clawing at the fence because she knows the game is
over and she can’t see where we’re standing. I wish sometimes I could use
my magic on her, read her dog thoughts, tell her she’s got a treat coming
or ask her why she thinks she can lick the sparkle off the sidewalk.
My scalp aches where earlier Chip forced me to the ground, his knee on my
ponytail. My feet are starting to sting too, all the hurt catching up at
once. It’s my one chore to turn off the water hoses and reel them in but I
can’t be bothered today. Let our grass get soggy, see if I care. Chip says
it’s not fair, then threatens me with the bucket of bagworms he has picked
off the juniper bushes. Bagworms is his one chore.
“I got my work done,” he says. “I’m accountable.” He talks this way but
Chip only does exactly whatever he wants.
To show Chip I am not afraid of him and his gross bucket I snatch it from
him and put it on the grass in front of me, then stomp my bare foot right
into it. The bagworms split apart and their juice spews out. I kick my
drippy foot up at DeeAnn Pith, who is horrified, still standing with one
hand on base. Chip says I am looney tunes but he is laughing. He is proud
of anyone who stands up to everyone.
Chip and I turn away from DeAnn and Wesley and we go up our lawn, limping
and hungry for lunch. Mom might be waiting by the door to blink her phony
lashes at us, open her eyes wide and ask us which one looks weird. And
they’ll both look weird, in different ways, one with a black line swooping
crooked and thick, the other swiped with too much shimmery blue, like the
side of a fast fish. Maybe she’ll say she has a new palette she wants to
try on me. I hate the way the makeup chokes my skin but I’ll break into
Chip and ask Do I have to? and Chip will say back with his brain Please, please I’ll owe you. Mom will start smearing me with
greasy colors. “We’ll do Ultramarine all over and Scuba in the crease,”
she’ll say. “I can’t wear these hues myself. You’re a spring. Your daddy
was a spring. Chip and me are falls.”
Then it will be all yeses and I’ll invite Dee Ann Pith and Wendy Popov over
to say “Peggy Sue” ten times with me in my dark bathroom mirror. If you
make your voice gravely enough and do the devil horns just so, you get to
see your own dead face all covered with blood. And Chip and Wesley Ellis
will play Mexican Shrimp Hunt which is just this game where they run around
screaming “Camarón!” trying to poke up everyone’s butts
with their shrimpy thumbs.
Or else Mom will be locked into her lighted mirror, spreading pastel colors
on her face, dead to the world. Or worse, she won’t be able to make her
hands move, and she’ll just be sitting on the couch looking stunned,
watching TV people kiss and hold each other’s faces.
Shasta is gone from our fence now, waiting for us to let her in the back
door or else she’s down in our drained swimming pool where there’s shade,
scraping her blue tongue at the concrete. Inside the front hall, Chip
punches for bad guys who might be hiding behind the long burgundy drapes
and I throw open the coat closet to check for psychos. We can’t hear Mom,
not yet, but the house is cold, AC blasting. It feels so good. Chip and I
look at each other and then we go into the living room together, waiting to
see what kind of a house we’ve walked into.
Illustration by Carolyn Tripp