The Bounce House

"You look so ugly," I told her.

5 years old, lollipop in mouth, her face painted like a cat's face. My stepsister, Kiara, stopped smiling. She ran off and bumbled into the bounce house with the rest of the kids.

Awe, that was mean, she looks so cute!" said a girl 3 years my senior. Years later, we would become lifelong friends. But for now, I resented what she just said. All I wanted was to grab a Hershey's bar and eat by myself in the bathroom stall. So I waddled back to the cafeteria. I left all those other kids who were running around in the event hall and raising hell in the bounce house.

My step sister loved to have her face painted like a tiger. It's always pleasant to pretend to be someone that you're not. I never had my face painted.

I did like the bounce house, though. There was a large slide that went into it. You could climb up one way to get to the top, then slide 20 meters down. You had to be careful not to fall down into someone, or in a way that would cramp your hands or feet. Or neck. Once you were in, you were in it with 10 other kids. And then you were all bouncing, up and down, up and down. We would look up to the rubber ceiling and see how far up we could go. In the bounce house, we were free to bounce around however we wanted. No parents ever entered the bounce house.

And so it went. With every passing year, whether it was at someone else's party or my very own, there would always be the bounce house. Each new bounce house had a different form. Sometimes it resembled a mush room, sometimes a jungle, sometimes a castle. Regardless, it was a place to reach for the rubber ceiling, which we imagined was the starry sky. A place where we attempted to backflip, to front flip, to bang our backs against the walls, to call each other names and to test each other's limits. To be unapologetically ourselves, because, as I said, no parents never entered the bounce house.

Which is what makes the bounce house so lethal.

What we couldn't foresee was that with every passing year, our ability to bounce as high would dwindle. As we grew older, our feet would become more planted on the ground. And we found that we couldn't bounce anymore. The nasty comments that people throw at us would stick. There soon grew pain that couldn't be shaken off. We were forced to look inside ourselves. Before I knew it, I couldn't lift myself off the ground if my life depended on it.

One day, at our Church's annual summer fundraiser, I found out that I could no longer enter the bounce house. No, the slot with which to enter was very small, and I could not get my arms through. All those years of stuffing my face with sweets has finally caught up to me, and I was too fat to enter. Kiara was watching, wide-eyed, and told me, "you are too big for the bounce house now, Malorie." She neither smiled nor frowned with that statement. But I knew her, very well, and I knew that the look on her face screamed triumph. And then she hurried inside.

She was the only one in the bounce house that day. The other kids were out at the recently opened cotton candy stand. I knew I was going to get the last laugh. I always did. Calmly, I walked over to the engine powering the bounce house and I turned it off. That day I deflated the bounce house. As the bounce house died slowly, I watched with a sickening pleasure as it trapped my step-sister inside. But, for some reason, I couldn't stay there very long. I quickly bought some cotton candy for myself. All the while an ugly feeling grew in the pit of my stomach.

Did she even try to escape?

As the bounce house was deflating, and the adults began to notice, they encircled it, stomped on it, and finally wrapped it up. Perhaps the kids didn't want to play in the bounce house anymore, they thought. I stood there, watching, as the adults rolled up the castle that once held the sky, and lugged it into the big battered pickup truck.

Not once did I get my face painted. After that "mistake," I couldn't, anyways, because my family would never live to see another fundraiser again.

Some kids will never need their faces painted; they are already animals.