Summer Melody

Chapter 1 - Jane

Call me Eeyore, Jane thought as she trudged down the sidewalk on her way home. Nice day, if you liked that sunshine sort of thing. The last day of school always made her feel hopeless. Not that she liked eighth grade all that much, but at least it was something to do in this town where the year’s highlight was the Pink-and-Green Parade, with the villagers all dressing in their Izod polos and sauntering down Main Street for the tourists. Summer's perky sunshininess annoyed her; it was just a cover-up for sweat and discomfort. With no job and no access to air conditioning or a pool, Jane looked forward to the next three months with all the enthusiasm of a dog being taken to the vet.

Jane's hair fell into her face as she kicked at the pebbles on the concrete. They skittered like raindrops down the long hill. A group of boys from the middle school was twenty paces ahead. Random syllables floating back in her direction suggested that they were not exactly debating quantum physics. Concentrating all her powers of wallflower-enhanced invisibility, Jane watched as they hooted and high-fived one another. One of them had probably farted.

The boys stopped in front of a small bungalow where a child about five or six years old was playing on the porch. Jane knelt down and pretended to tie her shoe so that she did not have to overtake them. Her t-shirt, two sizes too big, grazed the sidewalk. She didn’t know why the boys had stopped, but she knew this house. This kid was always on the porch, oblivious to the rest of the world, lining stuff up in perfectly straight lines. Some days, it was cars. Some days, it was blocks. Today, it was cars. The boy sat cross-legged on the floorboards, bangs in his eyes. There was something not right about him, doughy, like a loaf of bread not completely baked through.

"Hey, kid," one of the boys yelled. The child continued to move his cars back and forth, back and forth. He didn’t look up.

"Yo, retard! I'm talking to you!"

Still the boy ignored them. No, he wasn't ignoring them: it was as if they did not really exist for him, so there was nothing to ignore.

Jane, still kneeling, picked at a scab on her ankle. Just leave him alone. She contemplated turning back and walking the long way home, but figured she'd draw more attention that way than if she simply stayed put. And attention was the last thing she wanted from these morons. They might be a couple years younger than her, but everyone knew about them. They were the guys who had played keep-away with that blind kid’s cane until a teacher finally stopped them.

One of the boys picked up a pebble and chucked it at the child. Its aim was true, glancing off the boy's cheek. Now the boy looked up, puzzled and in pain, but he made no sound.

Jane could see a deep red bead forming on his cheek. "Goddammit." She stood and rushed at the six boys, arms curled up to her chest and her hands balled in fists, yelling what she hoped was a frightening war cry. The boys turned, and with grim faces, began moving toward her like a tidal wave. Just before she collided with them, the two in the middle grinned and moved aside to create a gap. With nothing to slow her momentum – like, say, a body – she tripped on a sidewalk crack and fell hard, landing on her hands and knees.

"You assholes!" Her voice quavered as she stood up. "Beating up on a little kid – ooh, you're cool. I should call the cops." She walked right up to the biggest boy and pushed him with hands scraped and raw from the sidewalk. "You wanna hit a girl, too?"

The boys backed off with their hands raised in mock surrender. "Whatever," the largest one laughed. They started back down the sidewalk, swarming like bees. As they walked off, one of them said, "It's good that retards stick together." They started a solidarity round of arm-punching.

Jane stood guard over the porch until they disappeared, trembling from the adrenalin, her hands and knees stinging. Then she turned to the house and the boy, who had returned his attention to his cars. A thin stripe of blood trickled down his face.