11 YEARS AGO:
There she was.The most beautiful girl in the whole world was building a sandcastle. I couldn’t stop watching her smack more sand in her pink bucket. She was so much prettier than the picture I saw, even with her tongue sticking out to the side.
How come Micha got to pick through that book first? What made him so special? Just cause he was older didn’t mean he should get to do everything first. Just the other day Silas and I hunted down a ghost in my basement. Micha never did anything like that. He didn’t even believe in ghosts.
My brother was so dumb. Instead of picking a girl from the book, he picked some stupid one because he said she needed to be taught a lesson. Pfft. Why would he want to marry her just to give her a time out? Didn’t make sense to me.
Standing up on my tiptoes, I shielded my eyes from the sun so I could see the girl in the sandbox better. I was glad Micha didn’t pick her. She was so pretty, with big brown eyes like Bambi and freckles on her nose. I couldn’t see her freckles from here, but I saw them in the picture.
They reminded me of the connect the dots games in my coloring book. What kind of picture would her dots make? Maybe a crown. The sun did make her hair shine like waves of rubies. That’s what Mom called her red jewelry.
Huh? Could gems make waves?
That would be really cool if they could. It probably wouldn’t feel very good to dive into a river of diamonds – they were hard. I knew because Micha cut me with one of our mom’s bracelets. He got in trouble for that. Our dad took away his bike. Then he took away mine when he found out I threw a paperweight at Micha first.
That was a funny word. Paperweight. Why did anyone need to weigh down paper anyways? Yeah it fluttered in the wind, but how were you supposed to draw anything with a big rock in the way?
Rocks were dumb. They got in the way and hurt my feet when I tried to walk in the water at the hot springs. I bet diamonds wouldn’t do that. Besides, no one would go swimming in water made from diamonds. What kind of sound would that make?
The docks had a soft lapping sound, but the water at the bottom of the bluffs smacked hard off the rocks.Dumb rocks.Then there were the geysers. They boomed out great big streams of red water. Micha tried to tell me it was blood ‘cause there was a whale trapped underneath, but Silas and I looked and we didn’t see no whale.
Anyways, I really liked her hair.
“Hey.” Someone poked me in the back. “Are you gonna go, or what? You’re holding up the line.”
I turned around and eyed the girl’s long black hair. Micha had been following her around since we got to the park. I wasn’t sure why? I didn’t really care. I was just happy he was annoying someone else.
“Hello,” she sang and clapped her hands in front of my face, making me jar back a bit. “Go already.”
No girl was going to tell me what to do.
“This is my slide,” I spat and crossed my arms. “Go find another one.”
“You can’t own a slide,” she argued.
“Can so,” I argued back.
My dad said our family owned this whole townwhich meantthis slide was mine.
The little girl grumbled and rolled her eyes before trying to slip past me. But I stepped in her way. She didn’t like that. Her lips twisted in a frown while she glared up at me.
“You better move.”
I smiled back at her. “Make me.”
Her eyes got really small and her lips tightened, making them kind of pale, like when Mom put that skin colored cream all over her face. Girls did weird things. What was the point in putting stuff on if your face was already that color?
The girl puffed up her chest and crossed her arms. “Maybe I’ll just push you down the slide?”
That made me laugh. I was way bigger than her, and Micha was bigger than me and I couldn’t push him.
Speaking of Micha…
His head appeared at the top of the slide as he climbed up the ladder.
“Careful Mase, she’s a dog killer.”
That’s where I knew her from. She was here the other day looking for her dog. Micha said he was dead, but I didn’t find a body.
