It was the first big snow of the year. We had a snow day from school. Lily and I decided to make a snow fort. We went up the street to the vacant lot where we often played. Of course, first we had to have a snowball fight. Then we thought, Let’s make two forts and we can bomb each other. So that’s what we did.
Just when I finished my fort, I had to run back home to go to the bathroom. I was in the bathroom when I felt something on my arm. I rolled up my sleeve. There was a bruise. I touched it. It hurt. But that wasn’t all. When I touched the bruise, it was like pressing a button. It spoke to me, one word. Lily! When I say it spoke to me, I don’t mean in the usual way. I didn’t hear the word. I felt it. But I felt that word as loud and clear as I had ever heard a word. And somehow just that—Lily!—told me she was in trouble.
I didn’t even roll down my sleeve or put my winter coat back on. I raced down the stairs and up the street. Before I got there I heard the screams. But they weren’t Lily’s. Then what I saw were two things: the roof of Lily’s fort was caved in, and Lily was sitting on top of somebody, mashing the kid’s face into the snow. The kid was screaming and flailing his arms and Lily was mashing away and riding the body like a bucking bronco. I didn’t have to be a genius to figure out the kid had to be Bump Stubbins.
So Bump finally manages to flail and scream his way loose, and he runs off a ways and turns and wipes his snowy face and splutters at Lily, “You’ll pay for this! Yer dead meat! Yer lucky I don’t hit girls. Yer lucky yer brother showed up! Yer luck—” Lily took a step toward him and he hightailed it outta there.
Lily had to stop laughing to tell me about it. She was inside her fort when suddenly she heard somebody yell, “Geronimo!” and the roof came crashing in on her, followed by Bump Stubbins. Bump seemed surprised to find somebody inside the fort he had just body-bombed, but he didn’t seem especially bothered. In fact, when he saw it was Lily, he smirked and said, “That’s for choking me.”
Big mistake.
Before Bump knew what happened, Lily was scrubbing the snow, and his face was the mop.
When we finished laughing, we squeezed into my fort for a while, but that was boring. So we had another snowball fight and headed home. Along the way I remembered my arm. I told her what happened in the bathroom, how I felt something and touched the bruise and sort of heard her name. “See,” I said. I showed her my arm. I boggled—the bruise was gone. She looked at me, like, Yeah, right. And then her eyes got wide at me. She yanked off her coat and rolled up her sleeve and there it was—same bruise, same spot—only now it was on her arm. She wonder-said, “That’s where he landed on me.”
We rolled down our sleeves and stared at each other and walked on.
“Look,” she said as we came to our porch. A pair of sandals was sitting by the front door. Sandals? In the snow?
“Who’s here?” I said.
We went inside. Lily saw him first. She screamed: “Poppy!”