Mr. Green, Report to the Office Please

.I.

“Alright,” said Chelsea, holding up the baseball bat, “you say that the pinky finger is useless, but just look at this...” she took a few swings, flaunting how comfortable she was with a bat in her hands, “and now watch the difference when I adjust my pinky a little...” and she took a few more quick, effortless swings, me on the grass below her staring up to the sun. Everything was tinted purple because I was wearing sunglasses, including Chelsea’s skin and the river a few meters away.

When Chelsea’s aluminum bat swung over my head, the sun would be blocked out, and a little gust of wind would hit me right in the face as her skirt swayed a little higher up her thighs. It made me forget about the discussion we were having about getting your fingers chopped off, which had led to the whole ‘pinky finger’ debate; whether or not the pinky finger was even worth the palm space. Of course it is, but Chelsea liked to take things seriously, and she was a little dull as well so sometimes we would have conversations twice in a row. She was eighteen, but she’d flunked twice and was only a sophomore in high school.

“Hey, we’ll all die with a big swing, do you know that?” said Chelsea, who stopped swinging suddenly and held the bat limply at her side. I had no idea what she meant, but now I think I do. Anyway, she flopped down on the ground with me, splattering her clothes with mud and grass-staining her revealed panties. “That’ll be hard to wash out,” I said, and she smiled and handed me her bat. “Not as hard as you think, Seb,” said Chelsea, standing up and pulling them down.

My stomach gasped; there was only that short, flimsy skirt that separated her naked skin and the humid near-summer air. There was this weird, nice aroma when Chelsea dangled her grass-streaked underwear in front of me. They looked so small and delicate, and brand new if not for the grass streaks. My grip tightened on the aluminum bat, sticky with my sweat. “It was hot out anyway,” Chelsea remarked offhandedly. I watched with purple vision as she skipped to the edge of the river and plunged her panties in, like she really meant to wash them. I heard her repeating ‘We’ll all die with a big swing’ as she scrubbed her underwear clean. Chelsea attracted me a lot, but scared me sometimes. I was only twelve. Maybe that wasn’t the greatest age to get involved with older women.

Suddenly she broke her bizarre mantra. “When do you get out of school, Seb?” she yelled from the river.

“June third.”

“Wow, that’s earlier than we get out,” she replied. I couldn’t stop staring at her as she bent over to lift her panties out of the water and squeeze them, the hem of her skirt coming up too high, letting me see a little of... “We don’t get out until the fifteenth, or I don’t, anyway,” Chelsea continued. “Why?” I managed to ask, beginning to choke a little. I knew why, but I think I was hoping that she would look at me, that she would realize what she was doing to me. “I’m in special ed, and I’ve missed a lot of school, so they said that they’d make me stay longer,” she explained. “They know that I come here to the river every day after during lunch and talk to you, Seb,” she muttered. I didn’t care what any highschool special ed teacher thought about me. I didn’t care what Chelsea thought about me, either.

I let the bat drop to the ground, and looked away from Chelsea’s skirt. Sometimes I still wonder why I hung out with her; it wasn’t just to see her take off her panties, or to watch her mature, curvy body under her mismatched clothes. Maybe Chelsea made me feel older and smarter, because she was nearly twenty herself and stupid. I didn’t think any of that back then. I just knew that I liked her a lot.

“We should get back to class,” I said, looking up at the sun; lunchtime was nearly over. When I looked over at Chelsea, I saw her skirt flip up as she pulled her damp panties back up her dark legs. “‘Kay,” she agreed, and obediently skipped behind me, like a dog or something. I was surprised because normally Chelsea stuck around by the river and ditched school for the rest of the day. After tucking my purple sunglasses away in my shorts pocket, I checked my watch, which flashed painfully in my face with an intense reflection of the sun.

“You’ve practically missed your math period,” I said. My lunch period was Chelsea’s math period. “Right, let’s walk faster,” said Chelsea, slowing down. I rolled my eyes and she giggled, pulling at my arm. “I already missed first hour today,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “but good thing you stopped by my house and woke me up before I missed second period too.” I usually stopped by Chelsea’s house when I walked to school to check if she was awake. Her parents were never around, and the door was always unlocked. Part of me was glad that I didn’t know her mom and dad.

Chelsea stopped suddenly and gasped. “What?” I said, quickly turning around. “My bat!” she cried, brining her hands up to her face, “It’s all the way back there! And I’m so bad at running in these shoes!” she looked down at her flip flops.

“Okay, you get to school, I’ll get your bat,” I decided, quickly tying up my laces and sprinting to the river. “Thank you, Sebastiaaaaan,” she yelled after me, skipping off to school.

It felt like the atmosphere was sucking all the moisture out of my skin as I ran all the faster to the river on my spindly, twelve-year-old legs. I’d heard that really good runners got what was called ‘runner’s high’ when they ran really fast for a long time, and I wanted to achieve that, to show my classmates and Chelsea that I could be good at sports if I wanted to. But the heat was just too much, and I slowed to a stop when the river came back into view. Sure enough, the aluminum bat glinted in the intense sun near its bank.

Chelsea was gone when I looked behind me. Probably skipping in the halls, I figured, full of pride that I had covered that much distance in such a short time. No one was around; I stretched out my legs and arms, then got into runner’s position.

“Ready...” I hummed in my throat. A cicada buzzed far away. “Set...” I tensed up all my joints, from my fingers to my ankles. “...Go!” I yelled and shot off, nearly tripping over myself but regaining balance, the bat bouncing in my sight. I blindly ran as fast as I could.

To this day, I’m not sure what possessed me...maybe the heat of May, or the lingering buzz of seeing Chelsea take off her panties, or that I was being pretty bad ass for a seventh grader by skipping class, but I dove for the bat while running the fastest that I can ever remember going in my life, even now. Flying past my target, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me, and why I would jump while running so fast. Then, I hit water.

The river was shallow, and I flew in chin first, head dunked underwater and face rolling over the pebbles and jagged rocks of the river floor. I began to taste coppery blood under the water, and I realized that my lip was split wide open, same situation with my knees and palms. The side of my right hand skidded and dragged through the rocks as I began to drift up and along the river, and as I flipped over to take in air and look up at the sun, it pulled through a sand patch. Concealed beneath the sand was a broken bottle.

“Agh!” I yelled to no one, flailing to my feet in the river, ripping my right hand through the water and examining the damage; a large wedge of sandy glass had made a gash down my pinky and had gotten lodged at its base. I yanked it out. “Shit!” I screamed at the pain. My finger couldn’t move; it was numb and covered in blood that was running down my arm and into the water, where it diluted and disappeared. There were still some slivers of glass embedded in my skin, and I realized that my shoes had fallen off and were floating down the river.

I didn’t know what to attend to first; dying pinky finger or floating shoes. I chose shoes, and bustled through the water as fast as I could toward them, before they got sucked up into a bigger current. No one was around, and even if a car drove by on the distant gravel road, the river was obscured by bushes and trees in this area. I held my right hand gently against my chest as I stretched my free arm out to grab a shoe, and then after snatching it I reached out for the other. It was out of reach. Rightly so, I was afraid to jump for it, and the shoe floated off into a bigger branch of the river.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Jesus Chrst, holy God in heaven and hell, bloody angels shit fuck piss,” I swore. That phrase I’d picked up from Chelsea, who’s nonsensical, needlessly offensive religious cussing made me laugh and cheered me up. I guess I said it more out of habit than humor, though. Nothing about the situation was funny to me.

With my numb hand bleeding down my shirt, I waded back to the shore, where I stuck my shoe in my mouth and used my left hand to pull my body up the slope of gravel and rocks. Once I made it to the top, I was alarmed at how far away the school was, and that Chelsea’s aluminum bat was nowhere in sight. Not in the glare of the sun or in the new grass.

I swore a long list while making my way back to the road. “Holy fuck, shit, shit, damn it sonofabitch, dead dog fucking whores...” etc., that’s the gist of it that I can remember. But while sticking a bloody, still useable middle finger up at God, I prayed to him that I wouldn’t bleed to death on the way back to the school and die in the unknown area by the river, carrying one shoe in my left and covered in blood.

After a while it was just too hard to swear. My lip pulsed with pain, and the fear I felt raised my blood pressure, fluid gushing out of my lip and pinky. I was worried that the blood wouldn’t coagulate and I would bleed to death a runs length away from the school. I was worried that I would die out there in the grass, and my body would rot away at double speed in the humidity of late May, and there would be nothing left of me but the smell of decay and the slivers of glass still in my pinky.

Of course I wouldn’t die out there, and my blood coagulated at long last, but I feel that I was justified in freaking out. Twelve year old kids tend to be a little more sensitive than full grown adults, right? I thought of Chelsea and schoolwork to get my mind off the blood that was staining my white tee shirt.

There weren’t even birds in the sky, I noticed, looking up into the deep, cloudless blue. I could almost see the stars, the sky was so deep that day. The sun made my eyes hurt, so I looked down at my dripping legs and walked faster, the river and the gravel road now far away and the school an easy target.

“There you are, Seb!”

My head shot up to Chelsea sitting right where I left her, but this time she had a cardboard box full of CapriSun juice packs, and she’d sucked down four, I noticed, that she’d arranged in a pile beside her. Chelsea briefly looked at the blood covering my mouth, chin and torso. “You want a wild cherry or an orange?” she yelled from her spot. I sighed, and my breath flew over the gash in my lip and it throbbed a little. “Wow, Seb, lookit all that blood...” she marveled as I came closer.

Chelsea threw me a Wild Cherry, and it hit me in the stomach and fell to the grass. I exaggerated bending over and picked it up with the forefinger and thumb of my right hand, to show Chelsea that I was in a lot of pain and that my pinky was swollen and cut deeply lengthwise. She didn’t react how I wanted her to. “Hey, wipe off that blood before you drink it,” she said, as I sat down beside her in the soft green grass. I pouted at her.

“Oh, fine, I’ll do it,” she huffed, jamming the straw into the pack and handing it to me. I pouted again. “Hold it for me?” I pleaded. “No way!” Chelsea giggled, grabbing another juice pack from the box and throwing her finished one into the pile with the rest. So I pouted more while I held the pack myself.

It was quiet for a while; we were a ways away from the school, in the outfield of a baseball diamond that noone used anymore because there was a newer, prettier one on the other side of the building. It was a weird baseball diamond, the sort that was just there, that just existed. I thought it was too bad that noone played there, because it marked the edge of the school’s property, and had been the first thing built in this town, besides the bar, for recreation. Chelsea loved it because whenever she went there, she could be all alone with her bat and softballs, and she could practice ‘til the sun went down. Plus it was far away from the school, and teachers or truancy officers couldn’t look out the windows and say, ‘There’s those two weirdos, that 7th grader and that retarded high schooler,’ then come out to get us. That is, if they actually cared about a 7th grader and a “retard”.

“So didja get my bat, Seb?” asked Chelsea earnestly. I wonder what she was thinking; I didn’t have the bat with me. Did she think that I hid it somewhere?

“No, I’m sorry,” I apologized, but I only half meant it. Even though the injuries were my fault, they were still there because Chelsea had asked me to get her damn aluminum bat.

“You did see it, right?”

“Yeah,” I replied, then provided detail. “It was shining in the sun. Silver and stuff.”

“Oh...” Chelsea thought for a while. “You didn’t get it on your way back because of your hand and stuff, right?”

She looked worried about me. Her face made me want to lie and say ‘yes’, because I didn’t want to tell Chelsea that her precious bat was nowhere to be seen as I crawled out of the river. But I’d begun to feel very guilty, so I told the truth. “No, I didn’t see it on my way back.”

“Oh...” she sighed, melancholically sipping her wild cherry juice pack.

“It must have been hidden in the grass, I’m sure it’s still there,” I offered. She wasn’t affected, just staring off into space. She then threw her half-finished juice pack into the air, and it flew a far distance before landing into the baseball diamond. “Nice throw,” I said under my breath. Especially for a juice pack.

Grass tickled my neck when I laid down next to her, the CapriSun cardboard box between us, still full of juice packs. I tossed my empty over Chelsea and onto the pile beside her before grabbing a full orange-flavored pack. Juice from my old pack had sprinkled onto her stomach. She looked at it, then pulled the hem of her shirt up to her mouth to suck it off, bare belly and, I saw, braless.

“Chelsea...” I protested, knowing she was doing this for me. She giggled, her tiny breasts out of sight in the shadow of her dark blue shirt. I wasn’t really in the mood, but I couldn’t look away. She stretched her arms until the shirt had bunched up around her neck.

“Hey Seb,” she said, and I tried to look at her face but failed...maybe because of her naked breasts, but probably because I knew that she had her simple, sheep-like brown eyes on me, and those made me feel like I was taking advantage of a kid or something. Her body was that of an underdeveloped-eighteen-year old, but her mind...it was younger than mine, sometimes, and sometimes it was more mature than an adult’s. Right then it seemed very young. “What?” I finally replied. “Why don’t you ever try to touch me or anything?”

My eyes jumped into hers. A trap. A question that I didn’t know the answer to. “I...I don’t get it,” I said. “You know, like when I have my shirt like this, or when I took off my panties...why didn’t you touch me? Or even try to touch me?” I was quiet, and looked away from her childlike eyes and her naked chest to stare up into the sun. I took out my purple shades, cracked and wet from when I fell into the river, but still in surprisingly good shape. The world became bathed in purple, and the color calmed me down.

“Because...I don’t know.”

“Aren’t I sexy enough?” she asked, every syllable choppy and stressed. Chelsea thought like a kid, and talked like a kid...but she looked like a breastless woman, and she went to high school, even if she was held back for two years. I was confused and speechless when she asked that. Half of me said ‘Yeah, are you kidding?’, and the other half said...well...

“You...uh...”

“Is it because I don’t have big tits?”

“No...it’s just...” I fumbled, stumbling over my own words.

“Because you can touch me, if you want to.”

I wanted to. Child’s mind, sheep eyes or not, I wanted to really bad. Chelsea leaned over the CapriSun cardboard box, her shirt still up to her neck, offering her chest to me like someone would offer a caviar or cucumbers or something. “I don’t want to,” I angrily lied, and flipped away from her to stare into the purple-tinted grass. She sighed, and in my head I could see her torso heaving with her lungs. Afraid that she would force herself on me or something, I curled up into a fetal position until I heard Chelsea move away from me and back into her grass patch, pulling down her shirt.

For some reason, it only just occurred to me to ask her: “Why aren’t you in school?” I waited for her answer, but it took a while. I heard her breathing, and slurping on yet another juice box. “Chelsea,” I demanded, and flipped over to face her. She was silent, looking away from me.

“I wanted to wait for you,” she said slowly. For the first time all day, I felt a breeze weave through my hair, and I saw it go through Chelsea’s hair too. It shone a deep inky black in the sun. “Why did you want to wait for me..?” I asked hesitantly. She looked down. I could only see the back of her head. Then she turned around and gave me the full blast of her sheep eyes, her dark face in the sun.

“I like you a lot, Sebastian.”

I like you too, Chelsea, I replied in my head as I looked back up to the sun and grabbed the last juice pack.

-

A vein throbbed in Mr. Heinlein’s head. Chelsea wiggled in the seat next to me, getting impatient with the stuffy room and the itchy fiber of the chairs rubbing up against her thighs. It amazed me that Mr. Heinlein could resist Chelsea’s legs. It was my experience that most men couldn’t, especially men in the schoolboard.

“I am very confused, Mr. Milne,” Heinlein said. He was the vice principal. I glanced at his nametag; ‘Derek Kelso Heinlein’. I’d heard boys in Chelsea’s grade call him ‘Kelly’ or ‘Didi’, or ‘faggot’. I was a sheltered kid, as far as 7th-grade-boys go, and I didn’t need many friends, so I didn’t know what faggot meant. I’d asked Chelsea before, and neither did she. “Mr. Milne,” Heinlein repeated, and I snapped out of my daze. “I asked you a question.”

“What?”

“Why have you been behaving this way? You’ve been missing classes, and the classes you do attend you never pay attention,” Heinlein sighed, leaning back in his cushy swivel chair. I shrugged. Chelsea stopped wiggling and looked at me, with a bandage on my lip and my pinky wrapped up in gauze. My shoes were an old pair that the nurse gave me from the Lost and Found. Heinlein shifted his focus from me to her, and I shot him a look that dared him; that dared him to say what he was thinking. ‘Why are you hanging out with this retard, Mr. Milne, when you used to be such a model student?’. Instead he said, “Is it because Chelsea here is distracting you from your academic career, Mr. Milne?” I shook my head, even though I could have said ‘yes’, because I knew that he was at least half right, and I think Chelsea knew, too.

Heinlein would always address boys as ‘Mr. So-and-so’, but for girls, he called them by their first names. “Chelsea,” said Heinlein, still staring at her, making her uncomfortable, “I understand that school isn’t as important to you as it is– or was– to Mr. Milne, but that doesn’t mean that you can take opportunity away from him.”

I couldn’t believe that Heinlein was talking to Chelsea that way. I clenched my fists as far as they would clench, even though my right fist wasn’t as threatening as it could have been, thanks to my gauze-wrapped pinky. Chelsea glanced at them quick, and so did Heinlein, and he backed off. “Well,” he concluded, “whatever the reason, Mr. Milne, I expect better from you. From both of you,” and he glanced at Chelsea before swiveling around and dismissing us.

The hallways were empty. Only the echoing voices of teenagers several hallways away could be heard. “Man, Seb,” sighed Chelsea, exhausted after we left the office. I grunted in agreement. “He’s a real asshole,” I said, “a real...a real faggot.”

“What’s a faggot?”

I sighed. “I don’t really know.”

“I think I actually do,” Chelsea mumbled, and stopped walking to think. I did too. “Oh yeah! It means a homo! My dad says that all the time,” she said loudly. Noone was around to hear her, and I was glad. “What class do you have next?” I asked, so that Chelsea didn’t have to talk more about her dad. “Um...I don’t know, I think I have reading in the special ed classroom.” I nodded. It was the last period of the day, and I was considering skipping it just to show Heinlein that I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whoever I wanted, but changed my mind. Chelsea liked her reading class, and if she wouldn’t skip with me, then I wouldn’t skip at all.

“Alright, I’ll see you later,” I said, and Chelsea waved and skipped to the west wing of the school to her class. I kept walking forward down the shiny hallway, bypassing a janitor’s broom on the way, preparing myself to get chewed out by the teacher and stared at by classmates who I only knew by name. Comfort came to me with the sound of Chelsea’s happy skipping, far off down a separate hallway.

-

The final bell rang. I was the last to leave the classroom like I was the last to enter it, and I found myself in the middle of a cloud of 7th graders all rushing to their buses. “Move it, Milne,” said some wannabe jock kid named Felix, who was too skinny and weak to be good at sports but had a bad attitude and reputation, and would probably grow to seven feet and two hundred sixty pounds like his older brother had. There was no other choice for me than to glare at Felix’s back. “See you tomorrow, Milne!” chirped a girl named Doe, who was sort of an outcast thanks to her new-age parents, and who had always sort of had a crush on me. I gave her a nod, and thought about how Chelsea was the only person in the school who called me by my first name.

Down the hallway, above the gleaming heads of middle and high schoolers, I could practically see the heat outside; armed with nothing but a backpack slung over my shoulder, I was terrified to leave the controlled climate of the school to enter the oven outside the building’s doors.

Every so often, someone I didn’t know would run by and yell, “See ya, Milne!” and I would only wave at their backs as they hustled by me. In retrospect, I could have been a lot more popular than I was in 7th grade, if I hadn’t of been such a self-pitying guy.

Chelsea was waiting for me outside the doors, and she offered me a pack of M&M’s. People around us shot glances, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what they were thinking and asking each other: ‘Is he her brother?’ ‘No, he’s European lookin’, she’s a Native American or Mexican or something.’ ‘Are they cousins? What are they?’. But Chelsea was oblivious to them, and for her sake, I pretended to be as well.

“Don’t you have to go home today?” I asked her. She shook her head. “I don’t want to. Let’s go to the river and look for my bat,” she proposed, and I sighed. “You’re parents will get angry at you. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No...but I don’t feel like going home today.”

“Why not?”

“Because. Let’s go to the river, it’s not so far away. You can even run there, remember? Come on!” and she darted off over the green hill, the edge of the school’s property, out of sight. I began to run after her. “Wait up!” I yelled when I got to the top of the hill, “My finger’s injured, remember?” I reminded her, and held up my hand. “How does that have anything to do with running? Hurry up, Seb!” Chelsea yelled back as she dashed across the paved street and through several lawns. The gravel road was a while away, even when you trespassed on lawns. “Chelsea...” I groaned under my breath, but jogged on anyway.

Several minutes later I caught up to her, panting and sweating up a storm. “I’ve gotta pee, Seb,” she complained. There weren’t any trees around yet. “Hold it until we get to the river,” I said calmly. She shook her head like a child. “Just stand in front of me, okay?” she pleaded, “I have to go really really bad...” Of course I gave in. “Fine,” I said, and turned around as she pulled down her panties for the second time that day. She made me hold them for her. They still had grass stains on them. We were standing in the middle of somebody’s pasture, surrounded by miles of nothing but grass and sun.

For a while I didn’t hear anything. “Are you okay?” I asked, and then I felt a warmth soak into my socks. I jumped up, Chelsea laughing maniacally. I turned around to see her positioned like a dog, peeing where I had been standing. “What the hell?” I yelled, trying to kick the pee off of my foot, but only getting rid of a few drops, the rest soaking into a filling up my shoe. “I was marking my territory,” laughed Chelsea like a maniac, scooting around in the grass to dry off. She was a dog, a child and a woman all at once. I swore under my breath at her. “These aren’t even my shoes...the nurse dug them out of the lost and found for me...”

It was weird and maybe disgusting, but I got a strong buzz while we continued to the bridge with Chelsea leaning against me, spinning her grass-stained panties around on her forefinger. I could barely stand her touching me I was so buzzed up. “Your pants,” she murmured into my ear. I didn’t want to look down, knowing what I would see. “It’s pretty big, Seb, I can tell,” she whispered. I gasped in my throat and pulled my shirt down.

“Jeez, is that stuff all you can think about?” I asked her, the words barely escaping my throat. Chelsea shrugged. “I like thinking about that stuff with you around,” she said, “I like you a lot, Seb...” and she kissed my ear. I jumped away, and she laughed louder and longer. I could see the gravel road off in the distance, and beyond that, I saw the river, shining in the May light. “Are you ready?” asked Chelsea, stopping. “What?” I asked her, my foot squishing and smelling of her urine. “To race again! I have all of my energy back!” she exclaimed. Chelsea said ‘energy’ slowly and deliberately; “en-ur-jee”. “I don’t feel like it, I’m tired,” I protested. “It’s too hot, we should just walk...”

“But it’ll make your foot drier,” she pointed out, “and it’ll put some meat on those bones.” That made me smile, and she giggled. “See, you’re in a better mood now! Let’s run!” she kneeled into runners’ position. I gave in to her demands again, and mirrored her kneel, embarrassingly remembering when I did this to go get Chelsea’s aluminum bat earlier. “Ready...” she began. “Set...” I said. And we both cried, “GO!” and shot off through the field toward the gravel road.

I was leading, Chelsea was leading...I let Chelsea lead because her skirt flipped all the way up her waist and gave me full view, and then I ran in front of her again. It was a challenge, and I thought that we were evenly matched, until Chelsea suddenly broke out into her full speed and left me in the dust. She’d been going easy on me all along.

“Not good enough, Seb,” she scolded jokingly, sweating buckets but hardly panting, smoothing down her skirt near the edge of the river. I was practically having a heart attack. “I bet if you practice, you’ll beat me next time,” Chelsea laughed, sliding down the bank into the river. “Where did your shoes go?” I asked her, and she shrugged. “I dunno. I kicked them off before we started racing. I lost my bat, and now I lost my shoes,” she smiled, shooting me with guilt. “I’ll look for the bat now,” I said, and started walking along the river, my eyes darting into every patch of grass, searching for a glint of silver.

High above in the blue sky, the sun continued to move west. Chelsea splashed alongside me in the river, searching for her bat in the water, while I continued to comb the grass on land, smiling to myself every time she stumbled, or shrieked at a bug or fish or something.

“Sebastian!” she squealed, flipping a rock over with her bare foot and darting away from a flitting crawfish, “It’s a tiny little lobster!” I abandoned my search on land to play Chelsea’s hero in the water. Like in an old Kung-Fu movie, I plunged my left hand into the riverbed and expertly pulled out the crawfish, twitching and snatching at me with its claws.

“Practically harmless,” I said, proud of myself as Chelsea marveled at my mad skills. Then the crawfish caught my thumb and pinched down on it. “Shit!” I yelled, and Chelsea laughed as I flung the ugly thing into the air and to the other end of the river. “You got rid of him good, Seb,” Chelsea told me, grabbing my hand. “Now you’ve got a useless thumb and a useless pinky. One on the left, one on the right.”

“The thumb isn’t that bad, just a crawfish,” I argued, humiliated in front of a girl. For some reason it didn’t make a huge difference in my ego if Chelsea beat me in a race or could throw twice as far as I could, but when I got hurt in front of her, I felt like such a child. When the crawfish pinched me, I didn’t feel like a teenager or an adult, which was how I usually felt around Chelsea, but like the hairless, gangly twelve-year-old I was. Embarrassed and awkward.

She could see all this swimming in my face back then, and Chelsea knew what to do when a little boy felt like a little boy and not a man. While we were standing there in the river, she took my nipped thumb and put it in her mouth. I shuddered, and pulled down my shirt, but it didn’t matter; she knew.

It was such a bizarre feeling, to have my thumb in her mouth. My hand and arm went limp, and my knees buckled. “Hey...” I weakly protested, even though it was the central best thing I’d felt all day. She stared right through me, hollow, thoughtless brown eyes focused entirely on my face, slow-motion mind and hot, small mouth concentrating entirely on my thumb. “Do you like this?” she asked me, my finger in her mouth, my feet in ankle-high rushing water. I nodded dumbly. Chelsea continued, her spit running down my finger and onto my palm, leaking out the corners of her pink mouth and onto her brown chin.

My body jolted, and I toppled from the knees up, my thumb popping out from Chelsea’s moist lips. She gasped at me. “Seb? Are you okay?”

I was more than okay, but I felt tired, a familiar buzz returning to my body and energizing me. The water was high enough to drain into my ear canal, so I sat up. Chelsea kneeled beside me, and smiled while looking into my eyes. I smiled back. “Wow,” she whispered just for me, “that was some home run, huh, Seb?”

-

After washing my shorts off in the water, with Chelsea modestly turned away from me, giggling, we started looking for the aluminum bat again. I would glance down at my thumb, at the minuscule little nip that the crawfish had made. It wasn’t even close to bleeding. Chelsea did much more damage to me than that mini lobster ever could. I climbed back up into the grass and continued my search, sometimes tripping over little rocks or roots, but never Chelsea’s bat.

Glowing grass blades were brushed with orange as the sun set even lower over the horizon. I wanted to pretend I didn’t notice, but I knew better, and I knew what could happen to Chelsea if she wasn’t home on time.

“We should get going,” I yelled down river, where she was casually flipping rocks and kicking at leaves drifting downstream. “But I don’t want to!” she yelled back, and began to spin, looking up at the sky. “Come on, we have to go,” I insisted, “you know that we can’t stay here forever. There’s school tomorrow.”

“Yeah, and then it’s Friday!”

“I know. So the faster you get home, the faster it’ll be Friday, right?”

“Um...” Chelsea puzzled over it for a while. “Okay! How about we come here after school?”

“Sure,” I agreed, impatient to go. The sun seemed to be setting in fast-forward, but Chelsea seemed to be stuck in her own time zone. Her cheer echoed through the banks of the river and the field. “Alright! I can’t wait for Friday.”

She proposed a race, but I turned her down. “Suit yourself, Seb,” Chelsea whistled, and skipped far ahead of me, grabbing her flip-flops on the way and spinning them around on her fingers, black hair damp and flying everywhere. I ran my right hand through my own hair, feeling my gauze-d pinky through the strands and on my scalp, thinking of Chelsea and her bat.

As you can see, it's pretty lengthy for a first chapter. I don't really want to get an exclusive beta, just because I like to leave my work open to public critique, so if you have suggestions for separation please leave them in a convenient little review bubble.

The title is actually code, but I can't tell you what it means quite yet because it would ruin a big plot twist later on. Yeah, I know, why am I working on this side project when I've got other stuff to do? Answer: I want to see if I can write a story. Not just a little thrown together yarn, but like...a story, where you care about the characters as people and not as characters in a book. And that there's the concept behind this baby :)

FOR THOSE SCROLLING DOWN AND READING THIS FIRST:

This is a pretty gritty one, so heads up people, because the ride doesn't get any easier here on out.