Mrs. Martin Part 1

I'll call her Mrs. Martin because I’m making up parts anyway. Because it’s memory and I’m always making that up. Mrs. Martin lived in a wheelchair and never left it as far as we knew. In fact, she never moved at all. In all the times we’d ninja into her yard close enough to get a look, we never saw her stir. The room’s only life was the constant flicker of television lighting up the windows and walls. She lived where Della Street U-ed into an industrial road that made the property value of our street just crap enough we could all afford to live there. We being Emily, Melissa, and me.

Our street only had three kids near my age. Em, a tom-boy with her own tree fort who believed in black magic, curses, and hexes. Melissa, a fifth grader who deigned to hang out with us, and would cock her head sideways, stick out her new chest, and tell me I’m cute when I laugh. Which would color me instantly. The third kid was Jason, who I hung out with for a week until we were in the forest playing commandos and he pulled down his pants and threw his own turd at my head.

It’s hard to be a boy with two girls as best friends. What I couldn’t see then is our first sonars of puberty, these first soundings. Sometimes Melissa would reach for my hand during cartoons. Em would wrestle me in her fort and just lay breathless on top of me. Em bought a training bra before she needed it because of Melissa. Melissa was jealous of the tree fort and found a secret place for us between our hedgerows. Once I asked Melissa if we could touch tongues after our daily batch of Kool-Aid. In the middle of her room, our tropical red tongues tipped together. She said later our first kiss was French. Em brained me with a rock when she found out.

We passed Mrs. Martin’s on our way to the forest. It looked all grown-back I told my Mom. I know the word now is reclamation. The twin maples jutted in, scraped against and into the attic window. The yard hadn’t been cut in years and the grass was head deep and pocked with litter. Probably not having noticed, Mrs. Martin had not followed the suburban trend of residing and her house looked bedraggled compared to the plastic sheens of her neighbors. Her house of cards was a fault line of expectations, a paint peeling question mark, a great breath of hesitation before something.