I hate flying. It's so cliche. I might as well wrap myself in chains and moan from the depths of the shadows.
Don't get me wrong; it's not that I can't fly. I can. Anytime I want to.
I just—see, it's like cutting in line because you know the ticket guy at the movies.
It's a dick move.
# # #
Today, I am who I was back then: a seventeen-year-old underachiever with a metabolism that left people wondering if I had an eating disorder. Yes, even back in 1982 people worried about skinny teenagers.
My haircut is/was my own handiwork. The year before I died, my father told me to go get a haircut; it was part of a punishment; he'd already grounded me, already slapped me with a never-ending list of chores, and I just didn't care. So he made me cut off my hair.
I went to the local barber with a cover of a Rod Stewart album and told the guy, "Make it look like that." He proceeded to twist clumps of hair and amputate whatever couldn't fit between his thumb and his forefinger. It didn't turn out horrible. At the time, I wasn't intending to look like a punk rock kid, but damn if that's not what I ended up with.
Of course my dad hated it. But the hair was cut, just like he'd asked. He was not amused. That sums up my relationship with my dad in those last few years of my life. My continued stabs at humor in the place of achievement, and his knee-jerk response to punish me. At some point, the punishments no longer worked.
But I digress.
My hair. After I saw how the barber cut my hair, I determined that I could do that myself and save my folks the fifteen bucks. To be honest I never noticed a difference. I guess nobody else did either, back when I was alive. A skinny six-foot bean pole with spiked hair and dark moody eyes is probably not something most people paid attention to. At least, that's how I felt back then.
On the day I died, I was breaking restriction again. I'd been grounded for seven weeks, with the added threat of another week for each time I left the house. By the time you get grounded for two months, another week or two doesn't matter.
Me and Eddie and Jason were flying down Reeder Circle, heading to the dead end on our bikes. On the left and right side of the dead end were old brick ranch homes, sitting back from the road. But right at the end of the circle was the woods.
The woods were where we'd go to escape. It was a three-mile stretch of dense forest in the middle of a city neighborhood. Several roads dead-ended up to the woods, a creek ran through it, deep below where the streets were. The entire forest was like a small valley; which is probably why they hadn't developed any more houses in there yet. There were steep hills covered in ivy and pine trees, a creek, and dirt paths that wound through the entire area.
Eddie had a pack of cigarettes, Jason had a couple of cigars he'd lifted from his step-dad, and I had my walkman. The three of us pedaled our bikes to the dead end, pushed through the bushes and let our bikes slide down the hill. We'd pick 'em up later, but first, I wanted to swing on the rope.
The rope had been there since I could remember, can't even recall who told us about it first. The rope was about forty feet to the right of where we'd broken through the bushes.
You couldn't see it when you first entered the woods, and when we were little kids, we always cut to the left to follow a path to the creek and our tree house. We never even saw the rope till somebody pointed it out
I know what you're thinking; how did we play in those woods for seven or eight years and not once see a fifty-foot length of rope hanging out over a sheer drop-off? I wish I knew. Then again, I bet one of us would've died a whole lot sooner if we'd found the rope when we were ten or eleven.
