After community college I get a job babysitting all the grimy-faced neighbor kids on the wrong side of town. They’re a rough crowd. Every one of their households has a utility drawer filled with expired medication, marijuana dust ground into the couch cushions, and an unloaded gun on the highest shelf. I provide adult supervision, which is unnerving. I was not necessarily the most responsible kid in the car on a Saturday night. For example, since kids make me nervous, I might pop a couple Benerol to take the edge off. Benerol is a doctor prescribed headache medication specifically designed for female physiology. It makes you the kind of sleepy where all you want to do is stay up and talk. In one word: fantastic.
I meet the kids at the Bunny Hutch where everyone goes for ice cream, soda, and rotisserie chicken. Rotisserie chicken is the Bunny Hutch’s specialty. The kids arrive in dilapidated sedans or nicer mid-range trucks driven by teenage parents. Each child passenger barely resembles the person in the driver’s seat. There are five of them total, two girls and three boys. Jenny Almond is the oldest at ten, clearly resentful of her position as leader of the babies. Kyle and Nevaeh are eight. The twins are seven. Kyle only moved here last month. After examining the Bunny Hutch sign he asks, “They don’t serve here what I think they serve here. Do they?” I tell him he’ll soon develop a taste for rabbit. We all have, it being so close to Easter and all. I’ve decided lying to kids is my new passion.
A five-minute walk past the Bunny Hutch leads into the woods, and ten minutes past that ends at a running creek. The kids want to trek deeper, but we’re all wearing t-shirts and shorts, hazarding deer ticks and risking Lyme disease. We reach a clearing of felled trees, and I make the kids stay put. I know the best course of action is to befriend Jenny Almond. Clearly, she’s been running the show. My presence is merely ad hoc for the parents’ benefit. Jenny Almond is destined for popular things with her strawberry blonde hair and her willowy frame. She has sway, influence. I hope that by getting in her good graces the boys will stop whipping chicken bones at me. No one eats anything around here except rotisserie chicken. It’s that good, and so I can’t really blame them. Tiny bones litter the ground. The boys play pretend atop this makeshift chicken graveyard. They lumber about like ogres in miniature, knocking into each other and shouting declarations of, “If you do this, then I do that,” or, “I’m the bigger!”
Jenny Almond stands on a flat stone in the middle of the shallow creek and pointedly ignores me. She holds her left elbow with one hand and tells Nevaeh to join her, lest she get chiggers from standing in the wild brush. Nevaeh is her biracial sidekick, her hair a resplendent Afro. They share space on the rock, holding hands. Sunlight pokes through the tree canopy in diagonal shafts, catching their upturned faces and igniting Nevaeh’s hair into a fiery crown. It is the cutest inspirational poster I have ever seen. Way better than any iceberg advertising hidden depths. I’m convinced true friendship really is colorblind. When Nevaeh informs me her name is heaven spelled backwards, I know her mother must be white trash. I tell her with the utmost sincerity, “I’m real sorry about that.”
Jenny Almond decides they should play a game called Cult and appoints herself the leader. I wasn’t invited, and so I don’t know the rules. But from what I can gather, it’s basically a bossier version of Simon Says. The prophet commands unto thee: do this. The prophet commands unto thee: do that. You get the drift. According to Jenny Almond, the only reason she invented Cult was because of the last game the boys played called Panda Bear. It involved punching each other in the face until someone got two black eyes. Last time Kyle had won. Or lost, depending on how you view the game. Despite being older and taller, the twins had still bested him. The stupid violence of little boys steals my breath while little girls are sinister in their passive-aggression.
Jenny Almond insists the twins are filthy with original sin. They splash in the creek, giving each other impromptu baptisms, while the rest of us watch bored from the grass. I choose not to stop them because quite frankly, they could use the cleansing. The twins are identical but not really. One is fatter than the other. They have eternal Kool-Aid mustaches, and I avoid touching them because they’re always so sticky. I can only picture their single mother hosing them off at night in front of a tool shed with a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. I don’t judge. Parenting seems hard and thankless. Meanwhile, I’m getting paid for my troubles, ten bucks an hour by the head. When I earn trust and everyone gets used to me, I will spike my fees. It’s a racket, you see.
I feel itchy for Benerol, which I purposefully didn’t bring, and decide enough is enough. Jenny Almond isn’t the captain of this ship – I am. And we’re going to play one of my games called Funeral. We gather in a circle, and I explain to the kids I will be taking them on a tour of the five stages of grief as delineated by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. In the first stage, denial, you deny the person sitting across from you a painful truth. To demonstrate I tell the fat twin he’s not that fat. This confuses everyone except Jenny Almond. She’s wise to the action, but I can see the subversive intent leaking out of her like stink lines in a cartoon. She wheels around on Kyle and tells him he’s not a little boy. He’s a little girl. Kyle sits to my right, and I watch as he licks his lips compulsively, like a dog trying to taste the insult. He’ll never figure out why he’ll forever be at the bottom. Because every game is a blood sport for Jenny Almond, she continues, “Kyle, when you’re old enough, I’ll teach you how to put in a tampon.” Blood pools in his cheeks, and he grows silent with rage. The twins launch into hysterics, whooping and cackling, while Nevaeh remains neutral. She pulls at the longer blades of grass and pretends to be deaf.
To settle the score I say, “You don’t even know how to spell tampon.” Silence falls and a breeze sails up my shirt. My sweat runs cold. I’m not exactly bowled over by my wit, but the twins roll on the ground like they’re on fire from the laughter. Grass stains cover the food stains covering the old stains on their clothes. Kyle finally smiles because I will protect him, and Nevaeh, to my left, looks at me. She really looks at me. Jenny Almond’s eyes burn blue, and she levels an icy stare my way that says, look who just showed up to the party. I almost feel lightheaded from all the attention. Almond makes it plain she could take or leave me. She attends to the remainder of the round with the rigorous respect of true sportsmanship.
Shaky from low blood sugar, I make everyone stand up and balance on the balls of their feet, ready for anything. We proceed to stage two: anger. The only rule is no words allowed, and the only objective is the heady rush of physical catharsis. We yell and we scream. Our voices grow large as the trees. The atmosphere soaks up castrato-style shrieks and high-pitched wails. The twins begin to grunt and snarl, and the rest of us follow suit, venting our frustrations in the language of dogs. I howl the unending howl of a wolf lost in a canyon, and Jenny Almond, never once taking her eyes off me, barks rabidly. Spittle flies everywhere.
We collapse on the ground, breathing deep, when a red-faced Jenny Almond stands over me. Wisps of hair have fallen into her eyes. The strands get sucked into her mouth before bursting forth from heavy exhalations. She looks scary with exhilaration, practically foaming at the mouth. She says, rather meanly, “Why don’t you teach us how to play Rocket Trip,” as if I haven’t been earning my keep.
Rocket Trip is how the seventh graders get their kicks. You may know it as Choke, Airplaning, or Brown Out, depending upon your regional affiliation. In eighth grade they’ll discover whip-its and do that instead. Around here cheap thrills constitute cutting off oxygen to the brain in one fashion or another. Dumb fun is crucial to any fledgling community.
I tell Jenny Almond that teaching little kids how to suffocate each other is not only grounds for dismissal but ethically dubious at best. Believe it or not, I live by a code. She and the other children promise not to tell, crossing their hearts and hoping to die. She haggles with me, testing my level of authority and demonstrating for the others how uncool I really am. The kids chant backup, her personal Greek chorus. I tell her she’s not appreciating the fact that if her mother found out she’d shake me until my head popped off. Jenny Almond waits a beat, then says, “You’d be like this.” She erupts into an epileptic fit, keeling over and seizing on the ground repeatedly. Her death scene, drawn out and hammy, culminates with blank eyes frozen in horror. Her mouth hangs open. A long rope of drool snakes down her chin. The children laugh hysterically at what I would look like dead.
Then Jenny Almond gets up and goes for the throat. She says, “You think you’re hot shit. My mom says all you do is eat chicken, sleep, go to the doctor, and try to get on Jeopardy. Which you’ll never get on because you only went to community college. My mom says she only lets you babysit because she feels sorry for you and wants to give you money. My mom says this is an act of charity, and if I have charity in my heart then I’ll let you babysit me even though everyone here knows I can babysit myself.” After accusing me of being hot shit, she had forgotten the punch line and doubled back to reclaim it. She inhales deeply to deliver her final sweep of words. “In conclusion, you are just cold diarrhea.”
How does Jenny Almond sleep at night? On a pink princess canopy bed under the dead-eyed watch of no less than twenty teddy bears. How do I sleep at night? With a handful of Benerol, thinking about all the other lackluster townie jobs I could have had: lifeguard at the public pool, folding sweaters at Junk Tacky’s Thrift Boutique, or even piercing belly buttons at the mall. This is where a major in child psychology will lead you. Then and there, I vow to myself that someday I will break into Almond Manor and eat half a rotisserie chicken on Jenny Almond’s bed, rubbing grease into the lacy duvet and wiping my mouth on the pelt of her favorite stuffed animal.
The third stage of the game is bargaining, but I don’t know how to go on. I don’t know what to bargain for. Part of me wants to run to my car and scavenge the back seat for something. Errant pills, a forgotten can of sun-warmed Natty Light, anything really. I know I can’t excuse myself. Not out of any sense of pride or ego. I’m scared if I got all the way to the car, I might not come back.
We’re all stuck staring at our shoes when kindest Nevaeh speaks up. Maybe it was the prospect of a new sheriff in town. Maybe she was sick of carrying the load that is second fiddle. She looks thoughtful and forthright, an eight-year-old jury foreman about to hand down the death penalty. She says Jenny Almond made the boys play a game where they kiss and touch each other. I don’t even want to know what this one’s called. Nevaeh says the boys didn’t want to, but Jenny made them until they cried. Then she swore everyone to secrecy, promising they’d go to hell where the devil rapes and tortures everyone, little kids most of all. Tattle of the century. The children share guilty looks, wondering what I’ll do. My temples begin to throb, and I rub my eyes hard. I ask, “Do you guys even know what rape is?”
Kyle says, “It’s when they jam a stick up your butt.”
When I ask Jenny Almond what she has to say for herself, she denies the whole thing. I tell her I’m letting the parents know including hers, and she begs and pleads for mercy. She screams and sobs, and I can’t say I care to see this side of her. To make a little girl cry is nothing in this world. I tell her to calm down and that I need time to think. I decide what we all need is a good cry, and we sit down and bawl ourselves silly, which returns us to the game and completes the fourth stage: depression. After our sobs dwindle into choked hiccups, I make everyone get up and shake hands. Acceptance ends everything. My fingernails are dirty with responsibility.
We head back to the Bunny Hutch, and I make the ones who don’t get along the most hold hands. I mess up and pair Kyle with the fat twin who drags him along like a dog on a leash. Because I’m not a hypocrite, I pair myself with Jenny Almond. This forced arrangement pisses everyone off, and I don’t know why this satisfies me but it does. Petty power is still power, I guess. We exit the woods at a leisurely pace, but at some indeterminate point we start running for nothing like a bunch of idiots. Upon arrival I treat everyone to lime popsicles.
The harsh light of middle afternoon mellows out. Dusk and dinner plans are up in the air. One by one parents or legal guardians return to collect the children. Everyone stares at me through the rear window, frantically waving goodbye until vanishing into the distant point of angular perspective. Only Jenny Almond remains. We’re sitting on a curb waiting for her mother to finish night school. Power lines buzz electric. Citronella rides the air. Rivulets of sugar wind down our wrists like melted wax. We take a cue from the twins and use our t-shirts like giant napkins. Jenny Almond eats her popsicle like a crazy person eats lipstick, applying it thickly and then licking it off real slow and luxurious.
She asks, “Are you going to gank me out?”
“You’re using gank incorrectly. To gank is to steal from someone as in, ‘My shit got ganked.'” She swallows down a smile, pleased that I used an expletive. “Narc would be more appropriate. Although maybe no one’s saying that these days? Maybe you could start it back up again.”
I want to level with her, prod her empathy with a sharp stick to see if the muscle jumps. I opt for a truthful survey of the embarrassing facts of my life. In particular the time I played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board at a sixth grade slumber party. I was the board while the other girls attempted to levitate me. The experience was really weird and slightly sexual and totally not cool. There’s a time and a place for delicate situations, and it’s not the sixth grade. For girls, it’s college. For boys, any type of camping trip will do.
She nods her head, pretending to get it.
I want to explain the accidental harm she may be causing in her role as gay puppet master. She shouldn’t force boys to commit private acts publicly, especially in front of witnesses, never mind if they’re hapless or willing. It could really warp them. “Do you know what Columbine is?” I ask.
She shakes her head no.
I tell her she can’t have it both ways, halfway playing by the rules but also undermining them when she becomes bored. It’s bad for character. I tell her, “Everyday you have to choose between good and evil. Pick a lane and commit.”
I hope she saves this willful recklessness for later on down the road. There’s plenty of time. Like at my age, like right now. I’ve got time like a prison sentence. I’ve got so much time I flush it down the toilet by ingesting substances that render me unconscious. I’m hoping by summer’s end I won’t need anything to fall asleep. When I’m older I won’t do stupid shit like I do now. When I’m 30, I’ll be happy.
Our limbs hang low from a day spent outside. We’re draped over our bent knees, our sneakers sliding on gravel and the cement biting into the underside of our thighs. When I get up, I will deposit Jenny Almond back into the exhausted arms of her mother. When I stand up, it will be with lifted spirits and love in my heart. Jenny Almond’s eyes are drowsy. Her head hammocks on the lazy fulcrum of her wrist. I don’t think she’s listened to a word I’ve said. I ask her, “Why do you do the things you do?”
She smiles a thoughtless, toothy grin and instead asks, “How do you play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board?”
Theresa Holden lives in Chicago where she studied fiction writing at Columbia College. Her previous work has appeared in Hair Trigger 31 & 32, Word Riot, and Knee-Jerk Magazine. She was recently included in plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing 2010published by Bennington College.