One time after unsweetened Saturday tea a few weeks ago, Bahar and I found ourselves walking through Lake Marion Park, which was not the most direct route from Colonel Jenkins’s Diner to Bahar’s house, but it was a nice day, and she asked if I wanted to go that way.
Let me be clear, that’s not a crushy thing to do.
Right?
Everyone in Blue Creek went to Lake Marion Park, even people who I’m sure didn’t have crushes on each other. There was a swimming area for kids, and horseshoe pits and barbecues under shady trees and stuff like that, and it hadn’t yet gotten so hot that people shut themselves indoors all day long.
“It’s good that so many people come here. Otherwise this would be a perfect spot for my dad to take me on a garbage-eating expedition,” I said.
Bahar laughed.
I might explain that my father liked to take me survival camping with absolutely nothing, just to see if we could make it through a weekend living like animals and eating whatever we could find, which sometimes included bugs cooked in somebody else’s discarded beer can. And he pretty much forced me to go with him too, just like he occasionally forced me to wear the official Scottish kilt of Clan Abernathy on his randomly proclaimed “kilt days” at the golf course. Both of these things were intended to make me tougher and more manly—to grow up—but I don’t think either of us, Dad or me, got what he was hoping for out of kilts and camping.
It was the week before Blue Creek’s Flag Day parade, and school had just gotten out for the summer—for good, as far as I was concerned.
Enter the dancing spiders.
Bahar said, “Your dad does not make you eat garbage, Sam.”
I puffed up my chest like a lawyer delivering an emotional closing argument. “On the contrary, Bahar. It’s actually worse than garbage. He’s boiled creek water in somebody else’s used beer can to make it safe for drinking, if it’s even possible to wrap your head around that notion.”
We followed the path beside the lake as it veered off between the red clay diamonds where teams of kids played pickup baseball.
Bahar shook her head and said, “Ew.”
“To be honest, Dad’s toasted grasshoppers on a stick weren’t that bad. They kind of reminded me of an overdone corn dog at Colonel Jenkins’s, but I seriously cried actual tears when his boiled earthworms refused to be swallowed without a slimy fight.”
“Well, that’s still pretty brave, if you ask me,” she said.
I never in my life thought I was brave about anything.
I definitely was never brave about errant foul balls cutting through the sky like missiles while a bunch of boys screamed “Heads up!” at me, which is what happened just as I was feeling dizzy about Bahar telling me I was brave, which was also definitely not something that was crushy.
And the ball—a blazing line drive—would have hit me square in the face too, if it hadn’t been for Bahar grabbing my shoulder and pulling me down into a crouch, without even hesitating.
That ball was hit so hard, it would have knocked my head completely off my shoulders.
The kids who’d been playing ball ran over to the three-foot-tall chain-link fence that enclosed the outfield just as Bahar and I got back to our feet. Brenden Saltarello came trotting over from home plate holding a bat in his hands, apparently the boy who’d knocked the foul ball toward us; and Brody Bjork (a kid I distinctly disliked for having participated in trapping me inside a locker and causing an extreme episode of claustrophobia) rested his glove hand on top of the fence and said, “Ha! I guess all that ‘Pray for Sam’26 stuff paid off! She pretty much saved your face from getting an extra mouth, Well Boy!”
Then all the baseball kids in the field laughed and nudged each other, and said boy stuff about “Pray for Sam,” and “The Little Boy in the Well,” and other dumb27 middle-school-going-into-high-school boy things.
So if I had been feeling any level of boost at all from Bahar telling me she thought I was brave, it was gone in an instant of dread when I realized that the two of us should never have chosen this particular path to walk home.
“Gosh, I’m really sorry about that, Sam and Bahar. Are you guys okay?” Brenden asked. He was wearing a pink Princess Snugglewarm T-Shirt that had small wet circles of sweat around his neck and under his arms. No kid in Blue Creek would ever make fun of a guy like Brenden Saltarello for wearing a Princess Snugglewarm shirt, while I couldn’t not get made fun of by kids in Blue Creek, no matter what I wore, or said, or did.
It was all hopeless.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Bahar is just like my Betsy. She would have given you a heart transplant if you knocked my face off.”
And Brenden laughed, because Princess Snugglewarm fans just get things like that.
He nodded at Bahar and said, “Let’s get ’em, Betsy!” which was something Princess Snugglewarm would say to her unicorn spike just before stabbing some bad guy or another in the heart.
I walked back and picked up their stupid28 ball that had almost killed me. Brody Bjork pointed his glove up and fanned it open, a sign that he wanted me to throw it to him, but I tossed the ball to Brenden, who barehanded it and then popped it off the tip of his bat back to the pitcher’s mound.
26. “Pray for Sam” had been printed on a few thousand shirts during the time when I’d been trapped in a well for three days. Some people in Blue Creek still wore them, and every time I saw one or someone said “Pray for Sam,” I felt like running away and hiding.
27. (excuse me)
28. (excuse me)