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Shellie Zacharia __________________________________________________________
Jump You, J.P., were ten, or maybe eleven, and you wanted to stand on your roof and pretend you were Ace Frehley from Kiss. You had your face painted up: black lines like flames around your eyes, drawn with your mother’s liquid eyeliner. Your best friend had cat whiskers like Peter Criss, but he stayed on the ground. He didn’t take the ladder from the garage and prop it against the side of the house. He did hold the ladder though, so you could climb the rungs. You stood with your arms stretched toward the sky. You had blond hair longer than most boys and a tall skinny body that I watched during the neighborhood games you always seemed to be in charge of. Captain. Quarterback. Of course girls would have crushes. Of course I would. You yelled, "Love Gun!" and then you jumped from the roof and I smiled to watch you fly. You landed in the grass and rolled and you didn’t even break anything. Later I’d climb the tree in my back yard, the huge bischofia that hid me in the late afternoons, and I’d carve our initials and a heart but I wouldn’t say anything about it. Sometime during ten, or eleven, I saw you on your bicycle in your driveway. You were crying and though you didn’t want me to see, I did, and there was no way I could ask you why. But later, it was all I could think about, and when you picked teams for kickball and when you walked home down the street when your mother called and you tossed the ball skyhigh so we’d all scramble and scrabble to catch it, I’d remember those tears. I shimmied up my tree and looked at our heart, but I didn’t trace the initials with my finger and I didn’t make secret wishes. Because all I could think was rock stars don’t cry. __________________________________________________________
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winter 2008 |
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