MAILBOX: A Scattershot Novel of Racing, Dares and Danger, Occasional Nakedness, and Faith by Nancy Freund, Gobreau Press, 2015, Chapter 8: Christmas Tree Whizzer
Twice a week my brother has soccer practice at the high school's football field that is all patchy with weeds. It's next to a big road with yellow lines, and when he's there, I wait on the side with my mom or sometimes in the car. There aren't any bleachers so we sit on the ground, against a chain-link fence when we sit outside. Usually, I like to go and watch. Usually no one notices me there, or sometimes one or two boys will say hi.
Chris has fifteen boys on his team, and you need at least eleven. I know all those boys, except sometimes if I'm cheering for them, I can't tell Kirk Kirby and Bill Gustave apart, because they both have blond hair and they both play fullback and they both are pretty fast, although I think Bill might be faster.
You can be fast even if you're short. My mom says those guys are scrappy. They both go for the ball and get it when other guys would give up. My dad says another good word for the way they play is "tenacious." You can remember that because if you really try hard for something, and you don't give up, you probably are at least ten years old. Ten for tenacious. Also, in French, they say tenir for "hold," and I picture a hand taking hold, like a tenacious fist that won't let go. It's probably the same word back in ancient Latin or Greek that made tenir in France and tenacious in England. People think having all different languages in the world makes it hard for people to communicate, but if you think about it, it also gives us something pretty amazing to discover when we realize no matter how different we seem at first, our roots are all growing from the same place. I love words! Palabras. The Spanish word for words is my favorite. The Spanish word for questions is pretty great too. Preguntas.
But between scrappy and tenacious, I'd rather be called scrappy. I mean in life. I'm not a soccer player. Girls don't play soccer. They should though, because I can head the ball, and I'm pretty fast, and I can dribble, and I know how to kick. Never kick from the tip of your toe or you'll have no control. If I could play, people might say "she plays like a girl," but hopefully, they'd actually think I play like a player. But that's not how things are. If I want to play a sport in high school, it will have to be field hockey in a plaid skirt. If I ever get to play hockey, put me in a rink in pads and skates and all the equipment, and ice-swipe sounds, and the flat stick, and puck, and thwacks in the cold.
"Thwack!" Six letters on a piece of paper, and you say it out loud and actually hear what it sounds like. That's called "onomatopoeia," which is another neat word to know if you want to be a writer. In My Antonia the grass goes "swish, swish," and that was my first onomatopoeia I learned. My Antonia is a prairie book by Willa Cather, and the locusts come and everybody dies and people freeze to death. It doesn't have anything to do with society today, so I didn't like it. Teachers are always making people read books that have nothing to do with real life today, but we all have to pretend they do.
Kirk Kirby and Bill Gustave look alike on the soccer field, but their personalities are really different. Kirk is mean. He punched Chris at the picnic last year. Sometimes if it's one of those two guys with the ball, I just yell "go!" even though if I knew for sure it was Bill, I would yell his name because he's nice to Chris, and sometimes we play at his house. When someone gets close to the goal, my mom always yells "shoot it!" She was a cheerleader in high school. She cheered in Madison Square Garden.
My dad says those boys are playing magnet ball and they need to keep to their positions. My brother is the goalie, so he doesn't get to shoot unless it's penalties, and then he's really good. But they don't usually do penalty shoot-outs under ten. But he makes good saves in goal, and that's important. My mom and dad always yell "good save!"
On Tuesday we were at Chris' practice, and I was mad because I didn't like my shirt that I had to wear. Mom says fashion sometimes requires a risk, but I think if it's between a mom and her daughter, and the mom is saying take the risk, the daughter should get to say no. It buttons at the back, at the top, but that's the only button, so otherwise it was open. She also says a girl's clothing speaks for her, and if that's true, then I think that shirt might say something I don't want to say about myself. Some girls my age already wear a bra - some girls even wear a bra at age ten. I don't think a girl my age should wear a shirt that tells everybody whether or not she wears a bra and makes them think about that question. So I sat against the chain link fence and let the metal dig into my back, to keep the gap in the back of the shirt closed.
All the boys were running zigzag drills so I'm sure they didn't notice me or my shirt. But then my mom said the boys all liked me. Like all fifteen boys, which obviously isn't true. That's ridiculous. She smiled like she was giving me a gift, even if it was a lie. Maybe it was a white lie. But it didn't make me happy because my back hurt from the fence and I wasn't going to move no matter what, and I didn't want any boys to like me or notice me at all. Boy, I hate that shirt. I wished she hadn't made me wear it on a soccer day.
We heard a car screech, loud and really long. We had time to turn our heads to the road and see a boy's body, in jeans and a blue t-shirt, navy blue, as his gangly body all arms and legs, just like it cart-wheeled onto a brown car's hood and windshield and then the car was stopped, and the boy's body bounced right off the windshield and back down over the hood, then, and it landed in the road where his bike had skittered over and was lying there. And other cars screeched too and stopped. I heard my mom shout "oh!" and I felt the fence dig into my naked back where I wanted it to stay and I felt her bony hand on my hand, and I thought how weird that a boy's body would fly right up there onto that car, and then go down as if it had meant to do that.
And all the soccer player boys, my brother and his two coaches and all of them were running now toward the busy street, my mother up and grabbed me and all the cars were stopped so no traffic would hit the boy, the bike, the brown car, and its lady or all my brother's friends streaming toward the road in their soccer cleats. The head coach, Mr. Dean, held them back, and the boy with the blue jeans and the blue t-shirt, who got hit by the car, he just stood up, like it was normal. He wiped his nose the way a boy does when wants to seem tough, with his arm. The other coach, Mr. Spalding, was on his knees then, looking at the boy, and when he put his hand on the boy's shoulder, the boy yanked his shoulder away, so I didn't think he was hurt. Just his feelings.
The lady in the car was crying though, pretty loud, and my mom put her hand on the lady's shoulder through the window. "You couldn't see him," my mother said. "He came out of nowhere. He's OK. The boy's OK." The lady cried more, and my mom gave her a Kleenex from her purse, all crunched up like it was used, only I knew it must be clean. And the lady held it in her hand and kept repeating what my mom said. "He came out of nowhere." Her windshield was cracked. You could still see through it, so she could still drive her car, but my mom reached in and turned off the lady's engine. She put her hand on the lady's back and kept it there. The boy stepped away from Mr. Spalding and stood kind of near me. He was taller than me. I knew him. His name's Larry. I don't know how I knew his name.
I knew him from the Christmas tree lot that opens after Thanksgiving at the church down the road. He doesn't work there really, he only hangs around and sometimes he drags people's trees to their cars and asks for tips, even though the trees are supposed to be sold by boy scouts who would never ask for tips. He was there last year.
"You'll need to get checked by a doctor." Mr. Spalding tipped the bike back up and wheeled it to the sidewalk. He flipped the kickstand and left it there. The lady in the car was crying so much she couldn't breathe. I could feel the back of my shirt gap open and I wished it wouldn't. I tried to open my shoulders, like if I had really good posture to make the shirt close, but that seemed like a terrible way to stand in the road, with my shoulders wide open, like I was proud of something.
I could hear a siren coming toward us, maybe from near Brookside. Mr. Spalding kneeled down in front of him, but Larry jerked away and said, "I'm fine." Then he scuttled over to his bike, got on and raced away. It didn't even wobble. Both coaches started to run after him while the siren came closer, but then Mr. Dean came right back and made all the soccer boys go back behind the fence. Mr. Spalding must have chased Larry a block or two and then gave up, because he came panting back, same time as an ambulance arrived. I don't think Mr. Spalding normally likes to run.
The ambulance man took a look at the crying lady, mostly at her eyes, and she was only sniveling now, and nodding her head at my mom. People said that boy was lucky. Some of my brother's friends knew his family so they were going to call his mom. And my mom talked to the ambulance man, and I started not to care so much about my stupid shirt. That night at dinner, my mom told our dad about what happened and she said that accident will haunt that lady all her life. I think because she said that, now that boy Larry and his bike and that lady will haunt me all my life too.
Last year, when my mom and dad were picking out a Christmas tree that boy Larry told me he whizzed on all the trees. He said piss is good for Christmas trees, which isn't true, and also it is very rude to call it piss. In our house we only call it whiz, or sometimes pee, if someone doesn't know what whiz is. If a dog pees on grass too many times, it kills the grass, so obviously, it's not good for a tree. Especially one you've already chopped down.
Luckily my parents didn't buy a tree from that lot. We already have a silver store-bought fake tree with blue satin ornaments, and we add some ornaments Chris and I made at school. The blue balls are wrapped in satin threads and if you nudge them with your fingernail, you can see the white ball underneath. I don't like those blue balls even though they're very soft and shiny. I don't like the way those blue threads nudge and show the white. My mom calls it angel's hair. No one else has a silver tree, but at least our silver tree doesn't smell like pee.
Here's something weird. I felt kind of bad because I felt kind of good about Larry getting hit by the car. I'm glad he didn't die, but I hoped at least he got some bruises. Camille said if I went to confession, I would have to confess it because you can't be happy when someone gets hit by a car, even if you don't like him. That's one way to know you have to confess a thing - when you feel kind of bad about it. My mom says a person doesn't need confession to know what's right and wrong. It would be better if people knew on their own when a thing is bad, and if they're sorry they should say so, and they shouldn't have to double check everything with a priest. We should just know that stuff ourselves.
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