BIKES PART 2
There were older kids too, but you usually didn’t see them. I guess they stayed at home. Or kept to themselves, up on the second floor of a haunted, old playhouse overlooking the Townhouse entrance. The smoke from their cigarettes billowing from the window up there. That’s how you knew they were inside, even when you didn’t see them. Sitting on the floor together. Up where the bad words they drew on the walls got even badder.
Sometimes their heads would stick out of the windows. Their hair was always bushy and uncombed. They all had freckles. Even from a distance you could tell their teeth were bad. Even with their mouths closed they couldn’t keep this secret. You could see the tooth decay in their eyes. Glinting and yellow. Making their eyes seem as they too would one day rot right out of their sockets.
I’d been in the playhouse once. It was made of wood and would creak under your feet as you walked up the staircase. My grandmother had brought me here to wait for her as she went door to door in the Townhouse. Collecting money to bring an end to heart attacks and strokes, like she would do every summer. Saving the world as I stared at the words f*ck and c*cks*cker carved into the wall. Not knowing what they meant, but fascinated by how all of those letters looked together. How they must have sounded once spit through teeth.
I was lucky that there had been no one up here. I knew what the younger kids could do to me, call me names, run after me, throw rocks. But not the older ones who smoked and knew words I didn’t. Words that made me think of the pointed ends of penknives and breath that smelled like cigarettes. Words I couldn’t let my grandmother know I’d seen as I waited for her, surrounded by them. Written all the way up to the ceiling.
“Hey you! You don’t live here!”
A boy my age with a bowl cut and squinty eyes had seen me in the window. The same window all those other bad heads would poke out of and that I would see whenever riding past on my bike. He stood below me and was looking up. Was with an old woman, who I knew you were never supposed to be seen by. The person these kids were working for whenever they chased me from the Townhouses. The Landlady, Mrs. MacDonald.
“Get out! No one said you could go in there!”
My grandmother was far away, but I could still see her standing on a doorstep, collecting loose change. Knew where to run to as the boy with the bowl cut began whistling between his fingers. Calling to all the others who had been hiding up in trees. Who were willing to jump out of bedroom windows to join his pursuit of me, their ears bleeding from the homemade piercings I’d interrupted. Some shirtless. Some without pants. Their hands now full of rocks and me running across the courtyard. The sound of dogs set free and their screaming growing ever nearer the closer I got to my grandmother, who for a moment seemed not to recognize this boy being chased. Not understanding what terrible thing I could have done to bring such bad attention to myself.
Running out of breath, I now knew how to use the words I had learned that day in the playhouse. But also knew I could never say them, as my grandmother looked at me like a stranger, running from children who were still spilling out from windows everywhere. The punishment not only for trespassing, but for reading things I shouldn’t have. The secret codes of older kids who, if I got myself caught, I would never grow up to be. Or swear alongside of.