Sixteen
Peter
Then
She appeared in my life like a splash of color—arms outstretched toward heaven, sitting crisscross applesauce on top of the climbing dome in the school playground.
Strands of her fire-red hair lifted off her head in every direction, her ponytail mused and littered with woodchips.
Her purple shirt and green pants reminded me of Barney the dinosaur and made the brown freckles pop off her arms.
I worried she’d fall through the bars. But she didn’t look worried. A soft smile rested on her face as the breeze picked up, whipping the baggy t-shirt around her torso.
“What are you doing?”
She startled out of her sun-trance and dropped her arms as she blinked a few times. “Huh?”
“What are you doing up there?” I asked again, raising my voice a bit.
She looked down at me, the blue in her irises plucked out of the clear sky behind her head. “Just trying to catch the sun.”
I stifled a laugh. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because my mom said the sun is bad for me.”
Confused, a frown pulled into my brow. “Doesn’t that mean you should stay away from it?” Judging by her milky white skin, I figured she’d burn up like my baby sister, Jackie, did.
“It doesn’t mean anything.” The girl shrugged. “How could a big old sun that has been there forever and keeps us warm and makes plants grow be bad for me?”
“Maybe because it’s hot?”
She scoffed. “It’s not that hot.”
“I don’t know. Twenty-seven million degrees is pretty hot.”
She rolled her eyes like that was stupid. “Have they put a thermal thingy on the sun?”
She meant thermometer, and I almost corrected her, but then I realized she had a point. How did they come up with that number? I’d have to ask Dad. “So, what do you plan to do with it?”
“With what?”
“The sun.” A smile pulled into my cheeks. “Once you catch it.”
The girl laughed so hard—a crazy, forced cackle—that she lost her balance and her butt slipped off the metal hexagon where she was perched and fell through the bars.
I lurched forward to help her but she caught herself with her elbows in the nick of time, still laughing like a hyena.
“I didn’t mean the actual sun.” She groaned as she pulled herself up. “I meant the sun’s rays.”
I laughed too. “That makes more sense.”
“Although, if I could catch the sun, I definitely would. I would take it straight home to my mom and show her so she wouldn’t be afraid of it anymore.”
I shrugged, glancing over my head, which the blazing August sky immediately punished my eyes for. Blinking a few times, I said, “Maybe you can reach it. You just got to climb a little higher.”
Her gaze narrowed at me, like she was trying to sort out if I was joking or not. I was joking, but oddly, that wasn’t the conclusion she drew. Suddenly nodding as if she’d made up her mind she smacked her lips and her gaze swept over the playground. “You’re right.”
Her search stopped on the highest red and green plastic spiral slide that stood a good five feet or so higher than her current spot. Limber as a monkey, she braced her palms against the bars and dropped to the ground, chips skittering beneath her light up Barbie tennis-shoes.
“Come on!” She yelled and waved for me to follow her. “I’m gonna need some help.”
Sarah
I slipped into the back seat of the two-door Ford truck and squeezed in sideways behind the passenger’s seat.
Shoving my backpack to the floor, I rummaged around for my water bottle.
Mom had a phone to her ear, talking to someone about work stuff.
She didn’t look at me through the rearview mirror, hardly even acknowledged I’d entered the car.
By seven years old, I knew I wanted more out of life than my mom had.
Maybe I just didn’t understand the ways of adults, but all she did was take phone calls for some sort of sales company and serve meals to my dad in the living room.
Dad wasn’t very nice to her and she seemed so sad all the time.
No matter what she did, she chewed her lip to the point that it bled sometimes.
She never went anywhere. Never wore any of her pretty dresses.
She hardly even smiled.
If I thought about it too hard, it made me want to cry for her. But Mom got mad at me when I cried because it disturbed Dad. So whenever I felt that funny lump in my throat, I made up a game to play with myself or closed my eyes and went somewhere in my imagination.
The entire ten minute drive, she talked endlessly on the phone as I pretended to be a silent prisoner, planning an escape from the bad guys at a red light.
But then I thought of the boy at recess today who helped me try to catch the sun.
I thought he was silly, helping me dream up higher places to go, but our progression of weird suggestions turned into a game.
He said I could sneak up on the roof of the school.
Or climb Pike’s Peak in Estes Park.
Or ride a ferris wheel at the fair.
Or go to Paris and visit the Eiffel Tower.
I wanted to do all those things, but as I looked in the rearview mirror at my mom’s pinched lips and the wrinkles around her eyes, I knew that would never happen.
Every summer, my friends went on vacation or had lake days and family excursions, which I had to hear all about when they biked by my front yard, but my family never went anywhere.
The boy gave me fun ideas to imagine though and I liked him for that. I wished I could remember his name. I was so caught up in the silliness of catching the sun that his name went in one ear and out the other. And when the bell rang, he disappeared.
My thoughts were interrupted by my stomach growling for food.
Mom hung up the phone with ten seconds left to go, flipping on her blinker for our driveway. When she dropped her cell phone in the cup holder, she sighed and murmured without looking in the mirror, “Sarah, Dad is sleeping. Don’t wake him up, okay?”
By this point, I knew what to do so I didn’t know why she bothered.
But I said, “okay” and ran to the house.
Inside the front door was our dimly lit living room, a tan floral couch, and an orange-brown recliner where my father sat.
A crumbled bag of chips and a few beer cans littered the end table beside him, and his mouth hung ajar, low snores rising over the ruckus of the Rockies game on our big screen TV.
He stirred as I made my way across the room.
In my chest, my heart beat loudly. So loudly I wondered if I’d accidentally wake him up.
Tiptoeing past him, I darted up the stars and stopped at Tonya’s open door.
“Hey,” I said.
She laid on her mattress on her belly, lightly kicking her feet as she skimmed through a magazine.
She hummed a response and didn’t look up.
I waited for her to act like she was happy to see me, but I figured I’d die of starvation before that happened, so I went to my room, flung off my clothes and jumped in the shower, liking the way the hot water stung the slight sun burn on my arms and cheeks.
Mom gave me talk after talk about how sensitive my skin was and how real cancer was and how silly I looked with bright red cheeks and how my Dad didn’t like seeing me burned up and on and on. But I didn’t care. The hot marks on my skin made me smile.
Thankfully, Mom didn’t even notice my burns.
Probably because she never actually looked at me.
Neither did Dad. Or Tonya. But I was used to it.
And that made me think about the boy again. How he was the only person who’d actually looked at me today. And I hoped I would see him tomorrow.