There was a strong smell coming from my underwear. I looked down at the stains and realized I’d better try to find a cleaner pair in the dirty laundry. We didn’t have a washing machine, just the two stationary tubs in the back yard and a washboard. We didn’t have a clothes hamper, either, so Momma and I were in the habit of dropping our dirty clothes on the floor of our bedroom closet. They’d pile up there for weeks until Momma would be forced to sacrifice one of her precious days off to do the laundry by hand.
I pushed hard one more time and broke out in a sweat from the pain and exertion. Finally, relief. When I wiped, there was blood. I got up to wash my hands and I looked at myself in the mirror over the basin.
I hated how I looked. I hated the freckles all over my face. I hated my short hair. No matter how much I pleaded, my mother still refused to take me to a beauty parlor to get my hair cut. She didn’t understand how humiliated I felt to sit at the barbershop next to the boys from my school and how much I hated being made fun of for looking like a boy.
I thought of Linda’s long, shiny ponytail and the familiar feeling of envy sank its sharp teeth into my stomach and ate its way up to my heart. I smiled at myself in the mirror; people always told me I had a nice smile. But yellow, tartar-covered teeth jeered back at me, mocking me. I took my index fingernail and scraped as much of the ugly scum off my teeth as I could. My mother had never taught me the importance of brushing my teeth. She’d bought me a toothbrush at some point, and she kept baking soda in the rust-spotted medicine cabinet, but I hated the taste so much I didn’t use it, and she never asked if I had brushed.
With one more critical glance in the mirror, I went into the kitchen and made myself one white bread, pickle, and mayonnaise sandwich after another until I was finally full. Then I sat on our rickety, vine-covered porch and watched as the birds and insects dive-bombed at the rotting apricots covering the driveway, biding my time until Linda finished her lunch and I could go back over to her house to play. I felt just as rotten as those apricots, and like just as much of a target.
All the houses in the neighborhood were nicer than our little ramshackle house tucked in behind the Hills’s house, but Linda’s house stood out like a jewel in a pile of rocks. It was a pale green, wood-framed house with white shutters and flower-beds bursting with daisies and gladiolas and chrysanthemums. Most of the lots in the neighborhood were so long that most people had a garage or work shed or a guest house in the back of their house, but the Landers just had a huge, chain-link-en-closed backyard where Linda and I usually played.
Today we decided to play spinner after lunch. We held each other’s wrists tightly, leaned the top part of our bodies back as far as we could, and began to twirl around in a circle. We spun faster and faster, giggling hysterically at the sensation. Then, without making a conscious decision to do so, I let go of Linda’s hands. She went flying across the yard and landed hard against the fence, which made her cry out in pain so loudly that her mother came running out of the house.
I stood there, paralyzed, while Linda’s mother yelled for someone to call an ambulance. I felt terrible. It was my fault that she was hurt. I stood there waiting for Linda’s mother to yell at me, but she never did.
I later learned that Linda had broken her clavicle bone, whatever that is. Her mother wouldn’t let her play with me for a long time after that.
I’d already gone through so many kids in the neighborhood, and Linda was my last chance. I missed playing with her. I also missed simply being around her, which made me feel almost normal—at least until I had to go home.
Shortly after the spinning incident, I caught one of my frequent colds. When other people caught colds they sneezed and sniffled for a while and then they felt better, but my colds immediately went to my lungs. I’d develop a deep cough that would put me out of commission for weeks at a time. And this cold was a particularly bad one. When I coughed I spit up green stuff, which Momma said was a sign that my chest was infected. I’d already missed a week of school and it didn’t look like I’d be going back anytime soon.
I’d been coughing for hours—deep, hacking coughs that shook my body and made my throat raw. Unproductive coughs, my mother called them. She’d given me some of her cough medicine with codeine, but it didn’t seem to help. It just made me feel stranger than I normally felt, as if my head wasn’t attached to my lead-weighted body. I drifted in and out of a fitful sleep, waking myself with my coughing and then, feeling exhausted, falling back to sleep and strange dreams.
At one point, I woke up and noticed that the light was on in our tiny bedroom. My mother was coming toward me with something in her hand. She looked angry. I was keeping her awake and she had to go to work in the morning. Her gray hair was standing up the way it often did when just getting out of bed. It reminded me of a movie I’d recently seen called The House on the Haunted Hill. In it a woman with white, frizzy hair rolled through the house wielding a large butcher knife and scaring the daylights out of everyone.
She was coming closer and closer
