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Written by Timothy Jay
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Wednesday, 06 December 2006 |
She came from trenches filled with money and that never mattered to either of us. We would sit atop the huge grassy hill a few hundred yards from her father’s Victorian house and watch the afternoon summer sun drown the world in wonder. Every now and then we would steal a glance at the other, her looking at me because she was curious about poor boys, me glancing at her because I couldn’t contain it.
“You’re lucky,” she said, her face solemn, her gaze pinned on a dirty pond out in the sunny distance. Her long skinny legs were stretched out smoothly before her and she leaned back on her palms. “You don’t have to live here. You can just come here and leave and go back home to where things are probably simple.”
I didn’t smile, just glanced at her and looked away. Maybe I should have been offended by her words, but they were so honest and sincere that I knew she meant no rancor.
“We’re doing a pretty simple thing right now, you know,” I said, and my face became red, it was like all the brightness of the day emanated from my face, like I was lighting up the whole world with my unease.
“I know,” she said. She looked back at her father’s house, its huge white pointed roof like the upturned jaws of some beautiful 19th century beast. “I don’t like it here. I hate my father.”
“Why?” A formation of birds floated sluggishly through the air above us. I watched it make shadows on the sprawl of grass before me.
“He makes me…do things,” she said, and looked at me. Her eyes were large and purposed and there were the beginnings of tears being born somewhere behind them.
I gulped hard, wondering if it was really true, wondering if maybe the dark corners of the Earth had somehow infected my small, poor, thirteen-year-old world.
“What do you mean, things?”
She threw a few blond strands of her gorgeous blond hair out of her eyes. Two or three of the strands were stuck, trapped in the oily perspiration at her temples.
“Like, I don’t know,” she said. “Just things. Like he makes me play tennis with that stupid Allannah Hughes.” She turned to face me, her body suddenly filled with energy. “God, she’s dumb. And sometimes he yells at me because my mother’s so far away and he really wants to yell at her, I can tell.”
I sighed, thankful that she hadn’t meant what I thought she meant. I looked away from her, down to the dirty pond, up to the clearest of pale skies, ashamed at myself for thinking such terrible things, hoping she hadn’t seen the shame and discomfort on my face.
“And he makes me play with that horrible girl Ingrid Thompson, her mother’s such a bitch,” she said.
We continued to sit in the sun and she talked to me about all the things she hated, all the terrible things in her world, and I watched the birds fly and I slapped the mosquitoes from my bruised and hairless skin and smiled at her every now and then. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to ride the train home after sundown because my mother would whip me until I bleed again. |
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