10-10-2014, 12:25 AM
Grown
If I was about eleven, Casey was about twelve because she was a few months older than me. That was around the time they started dropping me off at the top of the gravel road she lived down, and I'd walk down to her house. It was probably early fall since it was still warm, and it was getting dark, and when I got there, she was sitting on the ground out at the edge of the frontyard. She told me to sit down next to her, so I did.
She had a little hollow stick with a hole that went all the way through it and a pack of matches, and she was holding the stick like a cigarette and blowing smoke through it. I was sitting there just watching her do it, it was kind of interesting to me. It seems now like it must have been late summer, because the way the dark looked and the way things smelled was like summer. And she was being real quiet, she hardly said anything for a while.
I watched her blow smoke out of that stick. The way she was doing it was like it was having the effect of a cigarette, she looked calm, but like something dark was going on in her that was bothering her. Across the dirty, narrow road was a field of yellow grass that kind of glowed white in the little bit of light that was left. And beyond that was a few houses, but they was way off in the distance, it was almost too dark to see them.
A few times she would say things, like asking me questions then wouldn't say anything in reply to my answers. She was still blowing off that stick, it was darker and darker, but I could still see her and the stick and the smoke.
She said, "Did you miss me while I was gone?"
"I don't know," I said. "You won't very long."
"I know," she said in a quiet voice, almost like she was about to sigh but didn't, and took another draw on the stick and blew out more smoke.
I just kept sitting there waiting for her to ask me another question. The field was gone off in the dark, but I could still see her and my arms and legs as I leaned down on my side.
"We go back to school soon," she said in that quiet voice again.
"Yep," I said.
"I wonder if we'll be in the same class this time," she said. She didn't look at me when she said any of this stuff, she looked ahead like she was thinking about something else, or about other things. Every once in a while she'd open the matchbook and get another one out and light it to put to the stick.
"I don't know," I said.
"I don't know either." This time she did sigh, and almost looked like she didn't know I was there. I looked at her face and something about the way her eyes was looked silly and fake to me.
"What have you been doing while I was gone?" she kind of asked, kind of just said out loud.
"Somebody broke our old bottles," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I went down to our base and looked, and they was all broke. Every one of 'em. C.W. said Joseph said he done it, but I think Frankie and Kyle mighta done it," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I don't know why Joseph would break 'em, he was collecting 'em too," I told her.
The expression on her face hadn't changed one time since I'd been sitting there. There was still that blank-like look on her face, and that silly look in her eyes. I'd later become more familiar with that look, because it's a way a girl starts looking when she thinks she's doing something you don't like. Casey seemed to be looking that way because she was sitting out where her family couldn't see her, and she was smoking that stick like it was a cigarette. It felt too silly to be real to me. I felt the kind of way I felt when kids was doing things that they would end up getting in trouble over if they got caught, the kind of feeling I felt when I was just about ten or eleven and imagined whatever was going on was like a crime being committed. It gave me a dark, surreal feeling, like something too real was happening that was interrupting the story I lived in.
"I don't think I can do that kid stuff much longer," she said, looking off into the dark road but kind of downward, and like she wanted to smile but didn't think it was appropriate.
I didn't say anything. I knew she was having silly thoughts, and I felt embarrassed and a little nervous.
She was holding the stick to the ground and there wasn't any smoke coming off it anymore, I could feel that she was still concentrating on it and consciously drew strength from having it with her. I felt these things because of that silly look on her face.
"I met a boy when I was in Louisiana," she said. She'd went down there and stayed a week, this was the first time I'd seen her since she was back. "His name was Ricky and we fell in love. We knew I was going to have to leave and we was never going to see each other again. So on the last day I was there, we did it. And I don't regret it at all." She was shaking her head No as she said the last part.
"He was thirteen. He lived on the road my aunt lives on," she said. When I think about it now, I think it's funny she said "He was" and "He lived" since she'd only just seen him a little more than a week before.
She kept the silly look on her face, but now the smile was coming out a little more. It seemed she'd needed to get it off her chest, and the way she was acting, I felt like she just needed me there to tell me about her and the boy, and that I wasn't much more than a child to her now. She was done with my kid stuff and now she had to smoke a stick pretending it was a cigarette.
I don't remember anything else about that night. It didn't have much effect on me. I wasn't jealous or anything, I'd known her since as far as I could remember, she was my cousin and she felt kind of like a sister. I wasn't mad or disturbed or confused or anything. It wasn't a big deal to me, so I forgot about it. It didn't change anything about the way I saw her or acted around her.
Then on the Friday before school started, we used to go back to school in September back then, Casey called me to come over her house, and she had excitement in her voice that was a lot different from the last time. I had planned on going vampire hunting that weekend, me and C.W. had made some stakes with the sander in his papa's shop, and I had a backpack full of stuff I'd got together for my vampire hunting kit. Though C.W. had to go down to his dad's in North Carolina every other weekend, and that was one of those times. I planned on going in the woods and hunting by myself, but now Casey was real excited and was like she was begging me to come over. I asked her if we could go vampire hunting, and she said we would do whatever I wanted, she just wanted me to come over.
When my ma dropped me off at the top of the road, Casey came out from behind the old out of business store that set there. She had a goofy look on her face, and when my ma was gone this other girl we knew named Tara walked from behind the store smoking a cigarette and handed Casey one that was already lighted. They stepped around from behind the store and back moving their legs around kind of like they was dancing and smoking them cigarettes like they'd been doing it a hundred years. I sat my backpack on the ground and was getting ready to sit down, but Casey said we had to get going.
I looked at Tara and asked if she was going vampire hunting too. "Yeah. We're all goin'," Casey said. Then we started down the road. "We're going this way," Casey said when we was about to come on her driveway, then we went right through the woods by the edge of the road and walked down past the houses across from her house and behind the field.
Tara came singing some song that I didn't know. Both of them kept giggling to each other, and I was thinking it was very unlikely that we was actually going vampire hunting, but we were going down in the woods and that was fine. I'd been back in those woods in front of Casey's house a few times, but not much deep in them. Mostly I'd just been on the dirt road that went down the far left side of the field. I'd been down there a few times with Casey, I'd gone to Felipe's house one time and Stuart's house a couple times, and one time we went to somebody's house I didn't know: Casey had acted like she knew the person that lived in the house, but when we knocked on the door, the man didn't act like he knew us. We went inside and stood in his kitchen, I really don't remember much about it anymore. He went down the hallway to another room for some reason and told us to wait there in the kitchen, but when he was gone a few seconds, Casey grabbed an apple off the counter and said "Run," and we ran out of the house and back up the dirt road. We ran about five minutes till we was out of sight of the house then we stopped by the side of the road and rested, I don't think I'd ever run that fast or with such intensity before. I was real nervous, and Casey was looking up the road and holding the apple and kept laughing. I kept feeling nervous standing there so I sat down in the red mud by the trees. "You just get up, we gotta go," she said. I kept on sitting there. I started playing with some sticks and rocks. Somehow I cut myself. There was something sharp on one of the rocks I picked up and it cut my hand and I started bleeding. It reminded me of the time I sat near the back of the bus with two high schoolers, one of them was a girl with blonde hair that I had had a crush on a few years ago. She was a lot older than me, and I remember she caught the bus a little ways down from the store at the top of Casey's road. She and this boy sat with me on the bus, people would cut the seats open and hide cigarettes and sometimes even beer cans in them. One time the blonde girl cut the boy's hand with something, they was always talking stuff to me, older high schooler stuff, and laughing about it. He was like, "See how mean women is," and held his bleeding hand up. When I cut my hand I started feeling like I had done something bad, and I saw Casey standing there with that apple she stole, then I just started crying and took off running up the road. I heard her saying something behind me, making fun of me or something, and I just kept running. I got to her house and called home. I didn't even see her again before I went home.
We was going down through the woods and was behind or on the side of the houses that was on that dirt road. I didn't care much what they were laughing and carrying on about. I wanted to go vampire hunting and was going to do it whatever they thought. It annoyed me when people didn't take what I wanted to do seriously, but they could do what they wanted. I always knew what my days were about, I always had plans and did whatever I needed to do. But I always liked it better when I had people doing things with me. It was better when there was just two of us, sometimes three if it was me, C.W. and Joseph, but mostly if there was more than two, two would gang up and make fun of the other one. When we was wrestling, I always got double teamed when Frankie was around. I always had to take on two people at one time, and it was like that when I wanted to hunt for fairies or vampires, if Frankie or Kyle or somebody like that was around, they'd all turn on me, because Frankie and Kyle always wanted to play football or something. Everybody wanted to do what I was doing if it was just us. But I'd do whatever I wanted to do anyway, even when I had to fight and stuff.
I'd did a lot of hunting that summer, some with C.W., but mostly on my own. When my ma would go to Winn-Dixie at night, I'd sit in the car and get a mirror out of my bag and hold it in front of me when suspicious looking people went by to see if they cast a reflection. I remember I was behind the store next to C.W.'s grandma's house one night and I heard somebody moving around in the woods back there. It was dark and I crept alongside the tall bushes till I got close to the woods, but I couldn't see in the woods. It sounded like a person walking though. Then a bat flew out. I watched it fly away up over the store. I figured it was a vampire that turned into a bat. I told C.W. about it, and we were nervous the next few nights. I would stay over his grandma's house one night, then he'd stay with me at my house the next night. We'd stay out to eleven or midnight hiding by the bushes at the store or in one of our yards, looking out in case the vampire was going to come back for me. It never came for me, but I never forgot the threat was possible.
I had a mirror with a handle that was my grandma's and sat back on the dresser by the bathroom, it looked like crystal on the handle and around the sides of the glass. The handle spiralled or wrapped, tucked in smooth then sticking out till it got up to the part around the mirror glass that was on both sides where it was just smooth around all of it. One time it got broke in the bag somehow and there was a crack down the middle of the glass on one side. Breaking a mirror was unlucky, so I felt it was a bad idea to keep a broken mirror in my vampire hunting kit, but it was a special mirror. I remember my ma being mad about it when I told her it was broke, but I felt I had to tell her about it because I was already in bad enough luck, I wanted to tell on myself and hoped that would be something good. I found a smaller mirror that I added to my bag, but I kept the mirror with the handle in there.
But me and Tara and Casey was walking farther down in the woods than I'd been around there before. Tara was the one that had brought the cigarettes. They didn't ask me if I wanted one, and I didn't anyway, so that was all right. We came on this old house down there, it looked old and tore up kind of like the old barn back in the field next to Kyle's house. We went in there, or they did, when I saw there was somebody already in there, I stayed outside. I heard them all in there laughing, the windows was all broke out so I climbed up in one and jumped in. "Dude just came in the window." I heard a boy say. It was Tony that used to go to the high school. I remembered him, but he never rode our bus or anything, though I knew he lived somewhere down there. He used to go to the same schools we did, but then he started to go to some other school for some reason. He was older, about fourteen or fifteen. And there was some other boy in there that looked like the same age he was. They was laughing at me, but Tara and Casey didn't pay much attention to me now, there was two couches in the room and Casey sat down with Tony and Tara sat down with the other one, and they were smoking and kissing. The girls was laying over in their laps and they were making out, and I wasn't important anymore. They talked and laughed, and I said stuff about how I was down there looking for vampires and they laughed and sat there making out and saying things I don't remember now.
I went back out the window and came back in through it a few times. The boys kept laughing at me, but Tara and Casey was like they didn't know I was there anymore. They all would talk a little then they would sit making out and didn't say anything no matter what I was doing. They hardly paid attention to me at all after a while, I started feeling bored and kind of mad. There wasn't anything fun going on, and I was jumping around saying things and trying to be funny, but really I was mad. I don't know why Tara and Casey wanted me to come with them. But I was down there and that was all.
I didn't like talking about my vampire hunting kit very much. I didn't want to cheapen it. I had it and used it. But there wasn't anything to do or to talk about, and I wanted to get the others' attention so I started trying to get them to listen about what was in my bag. I got a little plastic baggy out of it and showed them my garlic spice, it seemed like something that would be funny to them, and I wanted them to laugh with me, though I took it serious too. I told them about my stakes and some of the other stuff I had in there, but they weren't interested in anything I was doing anymore. Tony and the other boy said things and laughed, they made jokes or sometimes just said things and laughed for no reason. Tara and Casey laid over across their laps, and both of them looked up at the boys they was with without saying anything, they listened and kind of smiled and just kept looking up at them with looks on their faces and they kind of looked dumb to me, like they weren't thinking much anything, just listening to the boys talk and waiting to start kissing again. The boys both held them around their waists and rubbed their stomachs under their shirts a little bit, but didn't touch them anywhere else. Sometimes they had their shirts up so high you could see their bras, Tony kept doing that with Casey, but he didn't do anything but rub her bare stomach and kiss her mouth.
They sat around on the couches kissing a long time. They never asked me to leave, I just sat down after a while with my legs crossed Indian style with my backpack on looking at the ground, saying comical things every once in a while.
"He looks lonely," Tony said about me, "you should tell him to go up to the house. I think Angela is there. If he wants somebody to play with." Angela was his little sister, about a year younger than me. She'd gone to my school, but she went to another school too now like her brother. If I was almost twelve, she would have been eleven I guess. She looked older then, because I remembered seeing her sometimes. I was mad and didn't say anything when Tony said that, I figured he was making fun of me, and he was. But looking back on it, I really should have pressed the issue, because Angela was good looking, she had dirty blonde hair and she had a body that could have passed for fourteen probably. She had blue eyes, I remember. And she had a pretty face. She was known to fool around with boys. And I remember Tony said too, "She's at the house by herself. She don't have nothin' to do, she's probably bored." I imagined her sitting up there watching TV, being bored. I imagined, though only a few seconds, how she'd react if I showed up there to talk to her. As far as I knew she didn't know me. I don't think we ever talked before. But I'd seen her around. But anyway, I didn't go see her. I should have, looking back on it.
But I was getting really bored. None of them seemed to care if I was there or not. They didn't seem to be going to do anything else but kiss. Casey had wanted me down there with them for some reason, she'd begged me to come over, and this is what she wanted me for, though I didn't know why. I talked about leaving on my own, they could stay but I was tired of being there. Casey said, "We better go. Cry Baby's gonna get lost without us." It was a stupid thing to say. We weren't far from her house really, I'd have to be retarded to not be able to find myself back. But I figured she worried I might go over to her house and say something to her parents or her sisters or something. She sat up like she was going to have to leave now because I wanted to go. "Why on't he just go?" Tara said. She was laying back on the other boy's lap, and I could tell she wanted to stay there. "Naw, we better go before he throws a fit," Casey said. Tara started to sit up too. Neither of the boys said anything, but I felt kind of bad. Seemed like lately everybody was using me as an excuse not to keep doing what they was having fun doing. But it really didn't matter to me, I was tired of being down there and just wanted to leave, no matter whether I went on by myself or not. Casey was on the couch but out of Tony's lap, she was rolling her shirt back down. Tara was still staring in the other boy's eyes with that almost blank look they both had had earlier. Maybe Tara could stay, I really didn't care. I was leaving anyway.
Casey sat on the couch smiling. She barely looked at me, but when she did she almost seemed a little embarrassed. I saw Tara sit up and look over at the couch Casey was on. "He might go crazy again," Tara said. "You know he beat me up a few years ago," she said. "What?" the other boy said and started laughing. "He beat me up bad," Tara said. "On the bus. He blacked my eyes and almost knocked my braces loose." I looked at her and the boys then I looked at Casey and she wasn't looking at anyone she was just kind of looking down. Tara was rolling her shirt down too and sitting up on the couch.
What she'd said about me had happened. It was last year on the bus. I'd always liked Tara, and she sometimes liked me back and sometimes didn't seem to. For a while I was sitting in the seat behind her with Joseph who was her cousin. I don't remember who was sitting with her, some girl, but Joseph wasn't there that day, and I had the seat to myself. Tara was wearing her cheerleading outfit, and I always thought she looked real good in it. It was cold and she was wearing gloves too. I was keeping on reaching through the side of the seat by the window tapping Tara's shoulder and she was getting mad about it. She turned around a few times and told me to stop but I wouldn't. I remember how her class would be out too when we had P.E. and I'd play on the bars next to the blacktop, and she'd come over there and swing on the bars with her friends. That day she went up and hung upside down on one of the bars in her cheerleader skirt and I could see all those brief things she wore over her underwear. She saw me watching her when she did it and was laughing at me. When we was on the bus I was attracted to her and the way her outfit felt when I touched it. She was wearing her cheerleading coat over top of it, but I'd felt it before and could kind of feel it through the coat. One time she turned around and slapped me with her gloved hand, then I stood up and just started punching her. I hit her under one of her eyes a bunch, then I hit her in the mouth and cut my knuckle on her braces. She was crying, and when I stopped for a few seconds she started saying, "Please, please stop." But then I started punching her again. Finally one of the high school boys behind me, a senior, I think it was Frankie's cousin, Dylan, yeah, I know it was, stood up and said something like, "That's enough," and pushed me back down in my seat. Tara was crying and I could hear her so I started laughing. I laughed real loud and was putting on a little. I could hear Dylan and some other people laughing too, and I remember seeing his face. After that time Tara wasn't allowed to come over my house anymore. I really didn't like her much anymore, but sometimes I thought about her, and wished we could like each other again. We still talked, and she always just talked about me hitting her like a joke.
They didn't seem interested in that anyway. We left after that. I don't remember what we did after we left the old house. Me and Casey kept going over each other's houses, and I saw Tara at school and on the bus and sometimes around Casey's house and other places. Tara had real bright blonde hair, like it was glowing sometimes when she was in the sun. Her eyes were blue, she was a little girl, people made fun of her sometimes because of how skinny she was. But she was real confident around people and flirted with boys all the time. She used to flirt with me too when we was alone, she liked older more popular boys though, they were the kinds of boys she had as her boyfriend. Most of the time she'd hold your hand and rub over your chest and shoulders and stuff even in front of other people, and people would say they was going to tell her boyfriend, but she'd just laugh.
Casey used to want to touch me sometimes, like she was just playing. She'd grab me like she wanted to wrestle then she'd pinch me between the legs or on the butt. Girls always did stuff like that to any boy they was with, even if they was related to them. Both her and Tara would touch Joseph like that too though he was littler than us, like six or seven. That's the kind of stuff they wanted to do as they got older, they wanted to play the Kissing Game where you had to tackle somebody to the ground and when they was on their backs you'd kiss their mouth. Everybody let themselves get tackled down and moved their faces around like they was trying to guard their lips but the other one always got them on the lips. Most of us that came around would play it when we was eleven or twelve, and the girls my age would kiss the littler boys too. There weren't any younger or older girls, so I just would play against Casey and Tara and their friends. None of their friends was very pretty, but I liked playing against Tara. I would never let her tackle me though, she could never get me, but I'd take her down easy and kiss her mouth real hard that sometimes she got mad, and she'd say that she didn't want to play against me anymore.
We only had a summer after that, and next year we was in high school and Tara and Casey didn't come around anymore. They only would hang out with the older high schoolers then. After I was in high school a few years, C.W. and Joseph's parents didn't like them playing with me much since I was older, and they didn't see why I didn't want to have friends my age, and when I did, they didn't want C.W. and Joseph playing with them. Frankie and Kyle didn't come around much after I got new friends either. I went from wrestling and playing in the woods with the girls and my younger friends to playing music with my high school friends. Casey never talked to me but one more time that I can remember. She was working at the video arcade in the mall, and one day me and my ma passed her when she was leaving, and she talked to us for a few minutes, but mostly to my ma. I didn't say much to her.
Not long after that I heard what happened to her. I remember I was sitting playing guitar in the living room, and I heard the phone ring. I heard my ma back in the bathroom crying, then she called me back to the door, said she had something she needed to tell me. Casey and her boyfriend had just died in a car crash when they was leaving school. I didn't react, I just went back and started playing guitar again. My ma thought it was strange that I took the news that way. I heard her talking about it to some people on the phone a few times. But I was on a lot of antidepressants at the time, so maybe it sank in but I just didn't have much to think about it. Plus I hadn't been close to her in years.
If I was about eleven, Casey was about twelve because she was a few months older than me. That was around the time they started dropping me off at the top of the gravel road she lived down, and I'd walk down to her house. It was probably early fall since it was still warm, and it was getting dark, and when I got there, she was sitting on the ground out at the edge of the frontyard. She told me to sit down next to her, so I did.
She had a little hollow stick with a hole that went all the way through it and a pack of matches, and she was holding the stick like a cigarette and blowing smoke through it. I was sitting there just watching her do it, it was kind of interesting to me. It seems now like it must have been late summer, because the way the dark looked and the way things smelled was like summer. And she was being real quiet, she hardly said anything for a while.
I watched her blow smoke out of that stick. The way she was doing it was like it was having the effect of a cigarette, she looked calm, but like something dark was going on in her that was bothering her. Across the dirty, narrow road was a field of yellow grass that kind of glowed white in the little bit of light that was left. And beyond that was a few houses, but they was way off in the distance, it was almost too dark to see them.
A few times she would say things, like asking me questions then wouldn't say anything in reply to my answers. She was still blowing off that stick, it was darker and darker, but I could still see her and the stick and the smoke.
She said, "Did you miss me while I was gone?"
"I don't know," I said. "You won't very long."
"I know," she said in a quiet voice, almost like she was about to sigh but didn't, and took another draw on the stick and blew out more smoke.
I just kept sitting there waiting for her to ask me another question. The field was gone off in the dark, but I could still see her and my arms and legs as I leaned down on my side.
"We go back to school soon," she said in that quiet voice again.
"Yep," I said.
"I wonder if we'll be in the same class this time," she said. She didn't look at me when she said any of this stuff, she looked ahead like she was thinking about something else, or about other things. Every once in a while she'd open the matchbook and get another one out and light it to put to the stick.
"I don't know," I said.
"I don't know either." This time she did sigh, and almost looked like she didn't know I was there. I looked at her face and something about the way her eyes was looked silly and fake to me.
"What have you been doing while I was gone?" she kind of asked, kind of just said out loud.
"Somebody broke our old bottles," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I went down to our base and looked, and they was all broke. Every one of 'em. C.W. said Joseph said he done it, but I think Frankie and Kyle mighta done it," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I don't know why Joseph would break 'em, he was collecting 'em too," I told her.
The expression on her face hadn't changed one time since I'd been sitting there. There was still that blank-like look on her face, and that silly look in her eyes. I'd later become more familiar with that look, because it's a way a girl starts looking when she thinks she's doing something you don't like. Casey seemed to be looking that way because she was sitting out where her family couldn't see her, and she was smoking that stick like it was a cigarette. It felt too silly to be real to me. I felt the kind of way I felt when kids was doing things that they would end up getting in trouble over if they got caught, the kind of feeling I felt when I was just about ten or eleven and imagined whatever was going on was like a crime being committed. It gave me a dark, surreal feeling, like something too real was happening that was interrupting the story I lived in.
"I don't think I can do that kid stuff much longer," she said, looking off into the dark road but kind of downward, and like she wanted to smile but didn't think it was appropriate.
I didn't say anything. I knew she was having silly thoughts, and I felt embarrassed and a little nervous.
She was holding the stick to the ground and there wasn't any smoke coming off it anymore, I could feel that she was still concentrating on it and consciously drew strength from having it with her. I felt these things because of that silly look on her face.
"I met a boy when I was in Louisiana," she said. She'd went down there and stayed a week, this was the first time I'd seen her since she was back. "His name was Ricky and we fell in love. We knew I was going to have to leave and we was never going to see each other again. So on the last day I was there, we did it. And I don't regret it at all." She was shaking her head No as she said the last part.
"He was thirteen. He lived on the road my aunt lives on," she said. When I think about it now, I think it's funny she said "He was" and "He lived" since she'd only just seen him a little more than a week before.
She kept the silly look on her face, but now the smile was coming out a little more. It seemed she'd needed to get it off her chest, and the way she was acting, I felt like she just needed me there to tell me about her and the boy, and that I wasn't much more than a child to her now. She was done with my kid stuff and now she had to smoke a stick pretending it was a cigarette.
I don't remember anything else about that night. It didn't have much effect on me. I wasn't jealous or anything, I'd known her since as far as I could remember, she was my cousin and she felt kind of like a sister. I wasn't mad or disturbed or confused or anything. It wasn't a big deal to me, so I forgot about it. It didn't change anything about the way I saw her or acted around her.
Then on the Friday before school started, we used to go back to school in September back then, Casey called me to come over her house, and she had excitement in her voice that was a lot different from the last time. I had planned on going vampire hunting that weekend, me and C.W. had made some stakes with the sander in his papa's shop, and I had a backpack full of stuff I'd got together for my vampire hunting kit. Though C.W. had to go down to his dad's in North Carolina every other weekend, and that was one of those times. I planned on going in the woods and hunting by myself, but now Casey was real excited and was like she was begging me to come over. I asked her if we could go vampire hunting, and she said we would do whatever I wanted, she just wanted me to come over.
When my ma dropped me off at the top of the road, Casey came out from behind the old out of business store that set there. She had a goofy look on her face, and when my ma was gone this other girl we knew named Tara walked from behind the store smoking a cigarette and handed Casey one that was already lighted. They stepped around from behind the store and back moving their legs around kind of like they was dancing and smoking them cigarettes like they'd been doing it a hundred years. I sat my backpack on the ground and was getting ready to sit down, but Casey said we had to get going.
I looked at Tara and asked if she was going vampire hunting too. "Yeah. We're all goin'," Casey said. Then we started down the road. "We're going this way," Casey said when we was about to come on her driveway, then we went right through the woods by the edge of the road and walked down past the houses across from her house and behind the field.
Tara came singing some song that I didn't know. Both of them kept giggling to each other, and I was thinking it was very unlikely that we was actually going vampire hunting, but we were going down in the woods and that was fine. I'd been back in those woods in front of Casey's house a few times, but not much deep in them. Mostly I'd just been on the dirt road that went down the far left side of the field. I'd been down there a few times with Casey, I'd gone to Felipe's house one time and Stuart's house a couple times, and one time we went to somebody's house I didn't know: Casey had acted like she knew the person that lived in the house, but when we knocked on the door, the man didn't act like he knew us. We went inside and stood in his kitchen, I really don't remember much about it anymore. He went down the hallway to another room for some reason and told us to wait there in the kitchen, but when he was gone a few seconds, Casey grabbed an apple off the counter and said "Run," and we ran out of the house and back up the dirt road. We ran about five minutes till we was out of sight of the house then we stopped by the side of the road and rested, I don't think I'd ever run that fast or with such intensity before. I was real nervous, and Casey was looking up the road and holding the apple and kept laughing. I kept feeling nervous standing there so I sat down in the red mud by the trees. "You just get up, we gotta go," she said. I kept on sitting there. I started playing with some sticks and rocks. Somehow I cut myself. There was something sharp on one of the rocks I picked up and it cut my hand and I started bleeding. It reminded me of the time I sat near the back of the bus with two high schoolers, one of them was a girl with blonde hair that I had had a crush on a few years ago. She was a lot older than me, and I remember she caught the bus a little ways down from the store at the top of Casey's road. She and this boy sat with me on the bus, people would cut the seats open and hide cigarettes and sometimes even beer cans in them. One time the blonde girl cut the boy's hand with something, they was always talking stuff to me, older high schooler stuff, and laughing about it. He was like, "See how mean women is," and held his bleeding hand up. When I cut my hand I started feeling like I had done something bad, and I saw Casey standing there with that apple she stole, then I just started crying and took off running up the road. I heard her saying something behind me, making fun of me or something, and I just kept running. I got to her house and called home. I didn't even see her again before I went home.
We was going down through the woods and was behind or on the side of the houses that was on that dirt road. I didn't care much what they were laughing and carrying on about. I wanted to go vampire hunting and was going to do it whatever they thought. It annoyed me when people didn't take what I wanted to do seriously, but they could do what they wanted. I always knew what my days were about, I always had plans and did whatever I needed to do. But I always liked it better when I had people doing things with me. It was better when there was just two of us, sometimes three if it was me, C.W. and Joseph, but mostly if there was more than two, two would gang up and make fun of the other one. When we was wrestling, I always got double teamed when Frankie was around. I always had to take on two people at one time, and it was like that when I wanted to hunt for fairies or vampires, if Frankie or Kyle or somebody like that was around, they'd all turn on me, because Frankie and Kyle always wanted to play football or something. Everybody wanted to do what I was doing if it was just us. But I'd do whatever I wanted to do anyway, even when I had to fight and stuff.
I'd did a lot of hunting that summer, some with C.W., but mostly on my own. When my ma would go to Winn-Dixie at night, I'd sit in the car and get a mirror out of my bag and hold it in front of me when suspicious looking people went by to see if they cast a reflection. I remember I was behind the store next to C.W.'s grandma's house one night and I heard somebody moving around in the woods back there. It was dark and I crept alongside the tall bushes till I got close to the woods, but I couldn't see in the woods. It sounded like a person walking though. Then a bat flew out. I watched it fly away up over the store. I figured it was a vampire that turned into a bat. I told C.W. about it, and we were nervous the next few nights. I would stay over his grandma's house one night, then he'd stay with me at my house the next night. We'd stay out to eleven or midnight hiding by the bushes at the store or in one of our yards, looking out in case the vampire was going to come back for me. It never came for me, but I never forgot the threat was possible.
I had a mirror with a handle that was my grandma's and sat back on the dresser by the bathroom, it looked like crystal on the handle and around the sides of the glass. The handle spiralled or wrapped, tucked in smooth then sticking out till it got up to the part around the mirror glass that was on both sides where it was just smooth around all of it. One time it got broke in the bag somehow and there was a crack down the middle of the glass on one side. Breaking a mirror was unlucky, so I felt it was a bad idea to keep a broken mirror in my vampire hunting kit, but it was a special mirror. I remember my ma being mad about it when I told her it was broke, but I felt I had to tell her about it because I was already in bad enough luck, I wanted to tell on myself and hoped that would be something good. I found a smaller mirror that I added to my bag, but I kept the mirror with the handle in there.
But me and Tara and Casey was walking farther down in the woods than I'd been around there before. Tara was the one that had brought the cigarettes. They didn't ask me if I wanted one, and I didn't anyway, so that was all right. We came on this old house down there, it looked old and tore up kind of like the old barn back in the field next to Kyle's house. We went in there, or they did, when I saw there was somebody already in there, I stayed outside. I heard them all in there laughing, the windows was all broke out so I climbed up in one and jumped in. "Dude just came in the window." I heard a boy say. It was Tony that used to go to the high school. I remembered him, but he never rode our bus or anything, though I knew he lived somewhere down there. He used to go to the same schools we did, but then he started to go to some other school for some reason. He was older, about fourteen or fifteen. And there was some other boy in there that looked like the same age he was. They was laughing at me, but Tara and Casey didn't pay much attention to me now, there was two couches in the room and Casey sat down with Tony and Tara sat down with the other one, and they were smoking and kissing. The girls was laying over in their laps and they were making out, and I wasn't important anymore. They talked and laughed, and I said stuff about how I was down there looking for vampires and they laughed and sat there making out and saying things I don't remember now.
I went back out the window and came back in through it a few times. The boys kept laughing at me, but Tara and Casey was like they didn't know I was there anymore. They all would talk a little then they would sit making out and didn't say anything no matter what I was doing. They hardly paid attention to me at all after a while, I started feeling bored and kind of mad. There wasn't anything fun going on, and I was jumping around saying things and trying to be funny, but really I was mad. I don't know why Tara and Casey wanted me to come with them. But I was down there and that was all.
I didn't like talking about my vampire hunting kit very much. I didn't want to cheapen it. I had it and used it. But there wasn't anything to do or to talk about, and I wanted to get the others' attention so I started trying to get them to listen about what was in my bag. I got a little plastic baggy out of it and showed them my garlic spice, it seemed like something that would be funny to them, and I wanted them to laugh with me, though I took it serious too. I told them about my stakes and some of the other stuff I had in there, but they weren't interested in anything I was doing anymore. Tony and the other boy said things and laughed, they made jokes or sometimes just said things and laughed for no reason. Tara and Casey laid over across their laps, and both of them looked up at the boys they was with without saying anything, they listened and kind of smiled and just kept looking up at them with looks on their faces and they kind of looked dumb to me, like they weren't thinking much anything, just listening to the boys talk and waiting to start kissing again. The boys both held them around their waists and rubbed their stomachs under their shirts a little bit, but didn't touch them anywhere else. Sometimes they had their shirts up so high you could see their bras, Tony kept doing that with Casey, but he didn't do anything but rub her bare stomach and kiss her mouth.
They sat around on the couches kissing a long time. They never asked me to leave, I just sat down after a while with my legs crossed Indian style with my backpack on looking at the ground, saying comical things every once in a while.
"He looks lonely," Tony said about me, "you should tell him to go up to the house. I think Angela is there. If he wants somebody to play with." Angela was his little sister, about a year younger than me. She'd gone to my school, but she went to another school too now like her brother. If I was almost twelve, she would have been eleven I guess. She looked older then, because I remembered seeing her sometimes. I was mad and didn't say anything when Tony said that, I figured he was making fun of me, and he was. But looking back on it, I really should have pressed the issue, because Angela was good looking, she had dirty blonde hair and she had a body that could have passed for fourteen probably. She had blue eyes, I remember. And she had a pretty face. She was known to fool around with boys. And I remember Tony said too, "She's at the house by herself. She don't have nothin' to do, she's probably bored." I imagined her sitting up there watching TV, being bored. I imagined, though only a few seconds, how she'd react if I showed up there to talk to her. As far as I knew she didn't know me. I don't think we ever talked before. But I'd seen her around. But anyway, I didn't go see her. I should have, looking back on it.
But I was getting really bored. None of them seemed to care if I was there or not. They didn't seem to be going to do anything else but kiss. Casey had wanted me down there with them for some reason, she'd begged me to come over, and this is what she wanted me for, though I didn't know why. I talked about leaving on my own, they could stay but I was tired of being there. Casey said, "We better go. Cry Baby's gonna get lost without us." It was a stupid thing to say. We weren't far from her house really, I'd have to be retarded to not be able to find myself back. But I figured she worried I might go over to her house and say something to her parents or her sisters or something. She sat up like she was going to have to leave now because I wanted to go. "Why on't he just go?" Tara said. She was laying back on the other boy's lap, and I could tell she wanted to stay there. "Naw, we better go before he throws a fit," Casey said. Tara started to sit up too. Neither of the boys said anything, but I felt kind of bad. Seemed like lately everybody was using me as an excuse not to keep doing what they was having fun doing. But it really didn't matter to me, I was tired of being down there and just wanted to leave, no matter whether I went on by myself or not. Casey was on the couch but out of Tony's lap, she was rolling her shirt back down. Tara was still staring in the other boy's eyes with that almost blank look they both had had earlier. Maybe Tara could stay, I really didn't care. I was leaving anyway.
Casey sat on the couch smiling. She barely looked at me, but when she did she almost seemed a little embarrassed. I saw Tara sit up and look over at the couch Casey was on. "He might go crazy again," Tara said. "You know he beat me up a few years ago," she said. "What?" the other boy said and started laughing. "He beat me up bad," Tara said. "On the bus. He blacked my eyes and almost knocked my braces loose." I looked at her and the boys then I looked at Casey and she wasn't looking at anyone she was just kind of looking down. Tara was rolling her shirt down too and sitting up on the couch.
What she'd said about me had happened. It was last year on the bus. I'd always liked Tara, and she sometimes liked me back and sometimes didn't seem to. For a while I was sitting in the seat behind her with Joseph who was her cousin. I don't remember who was sitting with her, some girl, but Joseph wasn't there that day, and I had the seat to myself. Tara was wearing her cheerleading outfit, and I always thought she looked real good in it. It was cold and she was wearing gloves too. I was keeping on reaching through the side of the seat by the window tapping Tara's shoulder and she was getting mad about it. She turned around a few times and told me to stop but I wouldn't. I remember how her class would be out too when we had P.E. and I'd play on the bars next to the blacktop, and she'd come over there and swing on the bars with her friends. That day she went up and hung upside down on one of the bars in her cheerleader skirt and I could see all those brief things she wore over her underwear. She saw me watching her when she did it and was laughing at me. When we was on the bus I was attracted to her and the way her outfit felt when I touched it. She was wearing her cheerleading coat over top of it, but I'd felt it before and could kind of feel it through the coat. One time she turned around and slapped me with her gloved hand, then I stood up and just started punching her. I hit her under one of her eyes a bunch, then I hit her in the mouth and cut my knuckle on her braces. She was crying, and when I stopped for a few seconds she started saying, "Please, please stop." But then I started punching her again. Finally one of the high school boys behind me, a senior, I think it was Frankie's cousin, Dylan, yeah, I know it was, stood up and said something like, "That's enough," and pushed me back down in my seat. Tara was crying and I could hear her so I started laughing. I laughed real loud and was putting on a little. I could hear Dylan and some other people laughing too, and I remember seeing his face. After that time Tara wasn't allowed to come over my house anymore. I really didn't like her much anymore, but sometimes I thought about her, and wished we could like each other again. We still talked, and she always just talked about me hitting her like a joke.
They didn't seem interested in that anyway. We left after that. I don't remember what we did after we left the old house. Me and Casey kept going over each other's houses, and I saw Tara at school and on the bus and sometimes around Casey's house and other places. Tara had real bright blonde hair, like it was glowing sometimes when she was in the sun. Her eyes were blue, she was a little girl, people made fun of her sometimes because of how skinny she was. But she was real confident around people and flirted with boys all the time. She used to flirt with me too when we was alone, she liked older more popular boys though, they were the kinds of boys she had as her boyfriend. Most of the time she'd hold your hand and rub over your chest and shoulders and stuff even in front of other people, and people would say they was going to tell her boyfriend, but she'd just laugh.
Casey used to want to touch me sometimes, like she was just playing. She'd grab me like she wanted to wrestle then she'd pinch me between the legs or on the butt. Girls always did stuff like that to any boy they was with, even if they was related to them. Both her and Tara would touch Joseph like that too though he was littler than us, like six or seven. That's the kind of stuff they wanted to do as they got older, they wanted to play the Kissing Game where you had to tackle somebody to the ground and when they was on their backs you'd kiss their mouth. Everybody let themselves get tackled down and moved their faces around like they was trying to guard their lips but the other one always got them on the lips. Most of us that came around would play it when we was eleven or twelve, and the girls my age would kiss the littler boys too. There weren't any younger or older girls, so I just would play against Casey and Tara and their friends. None of their friends was very pretty, but I liked playing against Tara. I would never let her tackle me though, she could never get me, but I'd take her down easy and kiss her mouth real hard that sometimes she got mad, and she'd say that she didn't want to play against me anymore.
We only had a summer after that, and next year we was in high school and Tara and Casey didn't come around anymore. They only would hang out with the older high schoolers then. After I was in high school a few years, C.W. and Joseph's parents didn't like them playing with me much since I was older, and they didn't see why I didn't want to have friends my age, and when I did, they didn't want C.W. and Joseph playing with them. Frankie and Kyle didn't come around much after I got new friends either. I went from wrestling and playing in the woods with the girls and my younger friends to playing music with my high school friends. Casey never talked to me but one more time that I can remember. She was working at the video arcade in the mall, and one day me and my ma passed her when she was leaving, and she talked to us for a few minutes, but mostly to my ma. I didn't say much to her.
Not long after that I heard what happened to her. I remember I was sitting playing guitar in the living room, and I heard the phone ring. I heard my ma back in the bathroom crying, then she called me back to the door, said she had something she needed to tell me. Casey and her boyfriend had just died in a car crash when they was leaving school. I didn't react, I just went back and started playing guitar again. My ma thought it was strange that I took the news that way. I heard her talking about it to some people on the phone a few times. But I was on a lot of antidepressants at the time, so maybe it sank in but I just didn't have much to think about it. Plus I hadn't been close to her in years.
