Annie pushed herself backwards, sweaty palms on the harsh wood of the Imagination Station. She licked her teeth which tasted of orange mush from a lunch of goldfish and apple juice, and felt the skins of halved grapes wedged in-between them. A splinter pierced her pinky, and she pulled her hand away. The wood stuck out of her flesh like a sword, and tender, red skin throbbed around it. Her shoulders struck the wall at the end of the tunnel. The contact sent shudders through the planks, reaching the rubber-coated soles of children’s shoes who ran above her.
Ready or not, here I come! Someone shouted, to everyone else who couldn’t shout back.
She settled into her hiding place, wooden planks around her on all sides. Her small chest rose and fell as she breathed in the lingering morning dew, a periwinkle bow hung lopsided from her strawberry hair. Outside the walls, there was a moat that the enemy couldn’t cross, and a veil of magic that shielded her from their vision. She was safe in the castle, a rustic and elegant structure set apart from the flaking, yellow, plastic slides and apple red monkey bars that the other kids conquered. The guards were standing just outside with their shining armor of metal plates, arms crossed and swords through their sheaths, looking out for bad guys. And yet, Billy had run right past them. Annie startled as his green eyes popped into her vision, finding hers from the far end of the tunnel. His hands breached the entrance, fingers gripping the inside of its wooden frame.
I’m gonna get you, Billy said. His cheeks were flushed from play, and his blonde hair, brown with dirt, sweat, and more dirt, clung to his forehead. His shirt was booger yellow with a grey dinosaur egg half cracked open.
We’re not playing tag, Billy, go hide! Annie said. It was her spot, not his.
Billy grinned, and moved his hands and knees to clamber closer to her. There were some boys who liked to tease the girls, they would pull on their pigtails and call them names, sometimes until they cried. Really, it was an excuse to feel their hair, to touch their skin. But not Billy, Billy knew what kissing was. He puckered his lips and made a sucking sound that was wet and airy.
Annie felt her stomach clench and her neck go hot. Kissing happened when you fell in love, and kissing was how her parents had made her as a baby. Her Aunt Claire always told her that you should only kiss if you were in proper love. And this didn’t seem like proper love, she thought.
She didn’t want to be like Sara, like Jess. Billy had kissed Sara during a game of tag, and Jess while waiting for the teacher to come back from the bathroom during story time. Sara cried, and ran to tell the lunch monitor, and Jess pursed her lips like they were coated in sour lemon, spit on the ground, and shouted, gross!
Billy knew that girls liked to be kissed because he watched through his bedroom window when his mom came home from her dates. Most days, she would come home from work in her long black skirt and button up top, blue, gray, or white, and start a dinner of microwaved lasagna or instant mashed potatoes or ramen. They’d eat, just the two of them, on small stands in front of the television, watching a reality show where fat people tried to lose weight, gain confidence, and find love in just a few months. His mom would say, Fat chance! and giggle in a way that made his shoulders tense. Billy didn’t get it, but he laughed too, because it lifted the corners of her mouth into a lopsided sort of grin.
When Billy’s mom went on dates, she smiled differently. He caught glimpses of it when she opened the door and greeted her men. It was straight and wide, brighter and lighter. He wondered where the men came from, why his mom seemed to like them all so much more than she liked him.
Date nights are once a week, sometimes two. His mom would spend hours in front of the mirror, the bright lights over the bathroom sink illuminating every wrinkle that she tried so hard to erase. Bottles full of beige, pink, and black sprawled across the counter and powder rained down from the brushes that she patted on her face like she was angry with it. Billy liked to watch her from his bedroom while he played with his cars.
Every so often, she would look at him and say, Doesn’t mamma look pretty, Billy? And when he said yes, she’d nod approvingly and that made him feel something warm in his tummy.
When she left, she would lock the door behind her, and Billy would be alone. His mom said 8-year-olds didn’t need babysitters, and Billy agreed, he was no baby. If Billy was a baby, he wouldn’t be able to build a tower of Legos like the one soaring above him now, so high that he couldn’t see the top until he stood on the kitchen table. He’d drive his remote-control car right into the bottom of it and watch it crash. He’d build it up and crash it, and build and crash, and then, he’d pick up every piece and throw it back in the box so he wouldn’t hurt mom’s feet when she got home.
He knew she was coming home when he heard the sound of a car turning up his driveway, and saw the headlights decorate the walls in wide, soft beams of light. In his bedroom, he’d run to the windowsill, and wedge his toes in-between the drawers of the dresser below it to watch his mom with her date.
The first time Billy saw his Mom getting kissed, he was positioned in exactly this way. The man had big hands with curly black hair on his knuckles that he wrapped around the back of her neck, and used to pull her in. He looked so large next to her, and for a moment, Billy felt a pang in his chest. It looked like he might be hurting her, like he could swallow her whole if he wanted. But when they parted, his mom was smiling, and they kissed again, and again, his mom leaning on the door of the car and disappearing into this man who consumed her.
When they moved to come inside, Billy jumped into bed and covered himself head to toe with his blankets. He closed his eyes tight and pretended to be asleep, in case she wanted to check, even though she never checked. Their footsteps moved swiftly up the stairs, and the door next to his swung open and shut. He pressed his ear against the wall and could hear the bed creaking, and his mom moaning, yes, yes, yes. In the morning, she made him a freshly fried egg on toast. His mom was always in a good mood after being kissed, whether the man looked like a bear, or a green bean, or the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz.
And so, Billy crawled closer to the girl huddled in the corner of the tunnel, holding her right pinky in her left hand, looking at him with wide eyes and long lashes. As he came closer, Annie could feel the skin around the splinter swelling.
Annie liked to look at the books that her aunt left out on the kitchen table when she stayed with them. The ones with the princes in royal-looking suits and swords in their belts, and the fair maidens with milky skin and draping skirts. They were always kissing on the cover, with a regal castle, shimmering gold in the background, or with a statuesque white horse waiting to carry them to their happy-ever-after.
She never knew when Aunt Claire was going to come by, but when she did, she stayed for weeks and so did her narrow eyes and taut cheeks. Her Dad told her, Aunt Claire needs us, she’s lonely. And you could use some womanly company, too. Annie knew that womanly was something that her Dad was not, because he said so. It must have to do with long hair and lipstick; those were two things that Aunt Claire had that Dad did not.
Aunt Claire would brush her hair, then braid it, pulling tightly at the strands closest to the bottom of her neck while she watched a reality television show about how to fall in love in a week. She would tsk at the people who flirted with the wrong partners, drank too much red wine, and got into arguments that Annie couldn’t follow.
Aunt Claire also liked to drink wine, but only the kind that looked almost yellow. She told Annie that people who drank red wine were trash, and you could recognize them by the stained teeth and crusted lips. Sometimes, Annie walked up close to the TV and examined the smiles of the women on screen, but she could never see the red on their teeth or flakes falling from chapped lips.
Your mom was one of those, Aunt Claire would say, she’d turn into a floozy half-way through the bottle.
Annie knew that being a floozy was bad from the way that Aunt Claire’s mouth turned into a snarl, like the chihuahua next door when he was about to bite. She shook her head, took a sip of her white wine, and raised her pointer finger to wag in Annie’s direction.
She knew that Aunt Claire was about to tell her about proper love. Dates, waiting for marriage. Waiting for what, Annie didn’t quite know, no one had told her exactly what she was waiting for.
Sometimes, Annie wondered where her mom was, if she was with the other floozies somewhere. She certainly was not in attendance at the Halloween parade, or the Mother’s Day pizza party, and she did not pick her up from school with pretzels, or braid her hair in the morning before school, like the other moms did.
When she asked her Dad, he said, I don’t know where she is, Annie-bannanie, but you have the best parts of her and the best parts of me. So, Annie looked in the mirror and tried to decide which parts of herself were the best parts. She thought maybe her hair, which didn’t get frizzy that often, and maybe her eyelashes, which were longer than the other kids. But were these her Dad’s parts or her Mom’s parts? And what about the worst parts? Maybe, she thought, if her mom were a floozy, she’d become one too.
Dad walked into the den once during a lecture of Aunt Claire’s, her voice had been getting louder and louder, her finger wagging harder and harder. Annie worried it would fly off and go straight into her eye, and she wouldn’t be able to stop it because Aunt Claire had come so close. The air between them had begun to smell sour, stale. Annie understood now why Aunt Claire only drank white wine. If it had been red, she imagined, her aunt’s teeth would be coated in a film like dried blood.
Dad grabbed Annie by the hand and said, Its bedtime, swiftly pulling her away from Aunt Claire, who gave her attention right back to the TV.
As he drew the covers around her in bed, and smoothed the hair on her forehead back towards her pillow, he said to her, Aunt Claire is having a difficult time with some adult things, she doesn’t always know what she’s saying.
To Annie, it seemed that she did know what she was saying. She seemed to know a lot, actually. She would often lift up the books she brought, and tap the cover, the way her teachers did when saying something important. See the ring on the finger, Annie? You can behave however you want with your husband when you have that on your hand.
Annie knew that Aunt Claire had a ring too, but now she wore it on a chain around her neck, and a second, thicker one, hung with it. She would often hold on to the rings, tightly in her fist, as though someone were about to snatch it from her. Annie imagined that Aunt Claire was a magician. One day she would grip it so tightly that it would disappear into thin air, and she would have to pull it out of someone’s ear and say, ta-da!
Annie wished that she could do magic, that she could point her finger, and wag it at Billy, or squeeze him between her hands and make him disappear. But she couldn’t, so she clenched her fists instead, fingernails digging into her skin, splinter diving deeper into her flesh, and she watched Billy crawl towards her knee after knee, his weight slamming into the shaky boards encasing them.
She peered through the slats of the Imagination Station, and saw the blue sky, cotton clouds, a yellow slide that shed ribbons of plastic onto the wet mulch. She saw kids running around in the grass which glistened with morning dew and slowly wet their socks, but her guards in silver armor were gone.
Billy closed his eyes as he reached her, lips puckered, his weight shifting onto his hands and he rocked his body forwards to close the distance between them. His lips were flaking and crusty on the edges from the salt of his sweat, and she thought she could see a dab of grape jelly in the corner of his mouth. It moved closer with him. She kicked her legs forward, and they hit the hard caps of his knees. Billy’s head and shoulders jolted forwards as his legs fell out from beneath him. The jelly from his lips slipped and landed on her pink shorts, seeping into the threads and staining them purple. She let out a scream that rose from her body and stayed in the air until he had gone, scrambling backwards through the tunnel and shouting for the monitor. He was going to tell.