Ron
Just lacing the roller skates was foreboding. I took the strand of one lace and the shred of the other and tied them together and sealed them with spit. The metal wheels were dinged and nicked by the lives of the three sisters who wore them before me. They rattled my presence as I came barreling down the hill on eight wheels of death to Ron's house.
He stood on the hillside, wrapped in bougainvillea, listening for the perfect metal scraping sidewalk moment , and threw a baseball bat at my head.
I caught it! Miracle! And lifted it high in my upstretched arms like a rifle or a trophy. My eyes and mouth froze into huge O's. Ron cheered and clapped as I raced on down the hill, up his driveway, and crashed on his front lawn, still holding the bat high I don't know why.
"You caught it! You caught it!" He was leaning out over the edge hanging onto a vine of fuscia flowers.
"You threw a bat at my head! You coulda killed me!" I got my wheels back under me and dumped the bat on a pile of tears.
"Yeah but you caught it! That was righteous!"
There once was a boy who wrapped himself in bougainvillea for me. Together we were prickly, scratchy, and magnificent in the sunshine.
A year later I told him those flowers spoke to me, and he believed me. After my family moved away his dad cut them down to reveal a graveyard of lost balls forgotten by time. Our friendship is a deep root buried there.
On the map it's a straight skateable line from my house to his.
In reality there are so many canyons to cross.
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