The Turnaround Point

Jill noticed the boy turn around on his bike at the same time each night; not on weekends but during the school week. Now that it was early May she sometimes stayed out on the front porch with a glass of wine until past eight and only went inside when it got chilly. She and Steve and Shannon lived on the corner of a two-way stop that didn’t see much traffic, and it was pleasant to sit and take in the fresh air. With Shannon doing homework upstairs, it felt like going off duty for the night.

The boy looked about seventeen, two years older than Shannon—Shannon, her daughter, was a freshman in high school. Jill didn’t recognize him but she supposed he and Shannon went to the same school. He was a tall kid with floppy black bangs. Some Tyler or Noah or Jake. She wondered if Shannon knew him. Shannon was well-liked in school and had many friends, boys and girls.

When Jill was a kid, girls didn’t hang out with boys and boys didn’t hang out with girls. Too much social self-consciousness—you didn’t want people to think you were dating (unless you were). Nowadays kids didn’t seem to care about things like that; you could hang out with anyone and it didn’t necessarily mean anything. There didn’t seem to be the same differentiation between boys and girls; Jill would go to school events and see boys wearing eyeliner and fingernail polish and girls in plain white Hanes t-shirts and ripped jeans.

Jill wasn’t sure she liked it. But she kept her thoughts to herself.

“Have you seen that boy before?” she asked Steve on the porch one night. Sometimes he sat with her and sometimes he didn’t. It was more her routine than his.

“Who?”

“The one who just turned around at the corner. He comes out here every night on his bike.” He looked at her: nothing. “I just think it’s so strange how he always turns around in the same place.”

“You’ve got to turn around somewhere.”

“Yeah, but why here? Why always here? I’m not saying I care,” she added. Steve wasn’t observant like her. He generally accepted the plain facts of life.

“I don’t think it would’ve even occurred to me to notice. But you sit out here more than I do,” he said.

She gazed across the front yard. “He must be a classmate of Shannon’s. I guess it’s not so strange. You just wonder how people fall into certain habits—at least I do.”

It was one of the things she prided herself on—not just her curiosity, but the way she noticed things most people did not. Her daughter had an English teacher who liked showing the class video montages—crowd scenes, two or three second clips of people on subways or filing into sports stadiums—and then asked them to remember details based on memory and not on notes. The man in the green parka has a silver watch. The little girl’s right shoelace is untied. Shannon didn’t see the point—“What’s that got to do with reading?”—but it interested Jill. She wished they would’ve done things like that when she was in high school, creative things, thinking-outside-the-box type things. Not just spelling tests and vocabulary quizzes.

“But that’s what reading is,” Jill tried explaining to Shannon, who wasn’t a bad student but sometimes let herself be distracted by friends. “Noticing things, those little details. Being an observant person.”

The girl shrugged. “I guess.”

“Not only reading but everything in life. I could spend all day just sitting on the front porch…”

“…watching Mr. Wilson move his sprinkler around the yard?”

“Well, that and… maybe not that exactly—maybe not just sitting on the porch but going to a busy public place like down at the Common by the Make Way for Ducklings statue and-”

“What’s the Make Way for Ducklings statue?”

They were having dinner, which was often the only time Jill saw her daughter during the week. “Oh, you know what it is. The book? Make Way for Ducklings? It’s the statue based on the children’s book. In Boston Common. You know, you’re just pretending not to know.”

“Oh.” Shannon took a bite of her mashed potatoes. “Right. Make Way for Ducklings.”

“I know you know this book. I used to read it to you when you were little.”

Shannon’s eyes went round. “Okay, Mom.”

“You’d remember if I showed it to you.”

“I said okay. I remember it now.”

“You do? What was it about?” Jill asked. The challenge was always trying to find something to talk about.

“Uh… these ducks? And people are trying to get out of their way?”

Jill scooted forward in her seat. “Well, yes… essentially yes, but it’s really about a mother duck trying to take care of her ducklings while her husband is away—not her husband, I suppose, but her mate. The male duck. The male is off somewhere, and the mother has to child-rear the little ducks on her own. Oh and it all takes place in Boston Common, that’s why the statue. It’s actually a very complex story for a children’s book. It’s about single parenting and women having to function independently without their husbands.”

“I’m sure that aspect went over my head when I was… one.”

“You were older than one, you were three or four at least and it was one of your favorite books for me to read to you. I wonder where I packed it away.”

“Don’t look for it, please.”

Jill laughed; her daughter amused her sometimes, her flat sense of humor. “Oh Shannon, I won’t. It’s just funny, the things you remember and the things you forget.”

That was how their dinner conversations went—Jill would try to get something started, but it always felt like work. She wondered if being the mother of a teenage boy was any easier. Maybe it didn’t matter—maybe there wasn’t a difference. Maybe the differences were so small as to be insignificant. The essential challenge remained the same, girl or boy.

But she had a hard time believing it.

The boy with the floppy dark hair rides his bike every night after dinner. Not on weekends—weekends are for something else. On weekends he works his part-time job at Walmart where he stocks shelves until eleven when the store closes and his mom picks him up. He works the closing shift because he has homework and drum lessons and flag football in the mornings. He hates working at Walmart but he knows things like part-time jobs look good on college applications. Weirdos shop at Walmart—it’s where crazy people go to kill time. There’s a woman who comes in every night around nine and makes little kissy faces at him, which creeps him out. Even his co-workers are weird. There’s an older guy, probably college aged, who won’t lift a box without first suiting up into a back brace. He makes a big deal about it too, like “Look at me, I’m wearing a back brace, look how safe I’m being, why aren’t you wearing a back brace too?” The boy doesn’t know why it annoys him but it does. You don’t need to wear a back brace unless you’re lifting something really heavy, like fifty pounds; and even then you can get someone to help you or use a cart.

Walmart’s just a weird place in general. He knows for a fact people go there to jerk off in the bathroom. Like, what’s the attraction? He doesn’t understand people who jerk off in weird places. He wonders if it’s just Walmart or if people also jerk off in Target and Lowe’s and Home Depot. People go into these places and think they can do whatever because it’s just Walmart and the people who work there make minimum wage anyway, they don’t matter, they’re not even real people, they’re robots in blue vests without souls or inner existences—and it’s not just jerking off, they’ll take a shit and not flush the toilet and just walk away, and what kind of person does that, what kind of person takes a shit in the Walmart toilet and just leaves it there, what great point are you making, what statement? People are sick. People who shop at Walmart—particularly on weekends, particularly on Sunday nights right around dinner—are sick to the core, and they’re rude to the cashiers and stock boys, and most of them absolutely reek of body odor, and they do things like jerk off in the bathroom or take a shit and not flush it, and the only reason he’s still there after three months is because it looks good on college applications and he really wants to go to UMass Dartmouth to study criminal law.

So he only rides his bike on weeknights, and sometimes not even on Fridays if his boss at Walmart asks him to work an extra shift. The weekends are packed. He’s thinking about quitting the drum lessons, but his mom’s the kind of person who thinks once you’ve invested time and money into something you need to stick with it whether you’re still getting something out of it or not. Like, “I’ve been paying for those lessons for seven years and you’re not quitting now otherwise it’s all that money wasted.” What she doesn’t understand is, drums are only fun if you’re in a band, and he’s not in a band. It’s no fun just drumming along to your phone. He tried being in a band with Bryce Kelly, but Bryce only wanted to play twenty minute guitar solos and not learn any actual songs. The boy’s not even sure he likes his drum teacher anymore. He’s okay, but he used to be a lot nicer, and the boy wonders if the man has something going on in his personal life because he always looks so haunted when the boy turns up for his lesson, like something awful just happened to him in the other room—the boy can’t imagine what—and the teacher’s trying to keep it together and not let on until the lesson’s over. The boy’s told his mom this, but she just waves it off: “Get over it, you’re going.” It really eats up his Saturdays. And he’s getting sick of the songs his teacher makes him learn. It’s all classic rock, nothing after 1980. And they’re way too hard for him too. It’s one thing to try something challenging, but the boy’s just not good enough to play these songs in crazy time signatures by Yes and Genesis. After a while it just feels like work. The boy doesn’t even like that kind of music. It’s like, “That’s your thing, dude, not mine.”

Maybe if he can’t quit drums, his mom will let him drop flag football. There was a time way back in the stone age when he thought he might want to play real football, but his mom said, “You’re not going to play tackle football and wind up with a concussion, you’re playing flag football instead.” His mom sometimes misses the point. Flag football’s not the same as real football—it’s not just that there’s no tackling, it’s an entirely different culture. Girls play flag football and that’s fine because it’s just fundamentally different for them; but boys who play flag football all have the same thing in common, and it’s that their mom—and it’s always the mom, sorry but it’s true—doesn’t want them to get a concussion. And there’s nothing wrong with not wanting your son to get a concussion—that’s just being a concerned parent. But then don’t play it at all, please. Do something else with your Sunday mornings in Danvers. Don’t play this wimpified version where you have to wear day glo pull-off flags around your waist, and there’s no way to pull them off without doing this little girly thing with your hands, you can’t just plow into the other guy and bring him down, you almost have to slow up to get enough of a reach on the flag, and that looks girly—and not that there’s anything wrong with guys looking girly, but just not, please, when you’re playing competitive team sports, it’s just so wrong and his mother refuses to understand this.

By the time Monday morning rolls around, he’s almost happy to go back to school. He actually likes his classes, or at least he doesn’t mind them. Some kids hate school. They listen to their earbuds in class and sneak peeks at their phones and look for excuses to wander the halls until the period’s over. The boy would rather use his school time wisely, learn a marketable skill. He doesn’t want to work at Walmart for the rest of his life, flushing people’s toilets for them and breaking down boxes in the stockroom and chipping gum off the floors; he doesn’t want to wind up like that guy who thinks he’s hot shit because he wears a back brace. The boy’s too ambitious—he’s got too much self-respect. He wants to go to college—preferably UMass Dartmouth but he’d settle for Merrimack or Bridgewater State—so he can graduate and get a decent job that pays well, one that requires intelligence and hard work and rewards accordingly. He wants to be the kind of person who can drop two hundred dollars on a steak dinner and not think twice. And it’s not just about the money—he’s old enough to know that no one wants to date a guy with a dead-end job, let alone marry them.

No one wants to be with a loser. Not quality girls.

Girls like Shannon O’Brien.

The next time Jill saw the boy, she was ready with her camera. She felt a little like a sneak, but the boy would never know, and she’d delete it as soon as she showed it to her daughter. She just wanted to know if Shannon knew the boy, if he went to school with her, if she knew his name. It was just innocent, idle curiosity. She wanted to know why he turned around on his bike in front of her house every night.

And she couldn’t just ask him.

“It’s Jeremy Mitchell—why did you take his picture?” Shannon asked. Jill had come into her room to find her doing homework on her bed, nestled in with all the frilly pink and white pillows and stuffed animals she’d had since she was a kid.

“Just curious. Is he in your grade? I figured you might know him—you know everyone,” Jill said.

“Jeremy Mitchell’s, like, a junior. Juniors don’t hang out with freshmen. We’re not ‘good enough.’”

Jill tried explaining, but the story about the boy and his bike came out sounding weird, creepy even. Shannon found her mother’s amateur detective work embarrassing.

“And why are you so obsessed with this?” Shannon asked.

“I’m not obsessed with it. That’s putting it strongly. See? I’m deleting the picture right now. It’s gone. I just wondered if you knew anything about him.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Is he a nice boy? I guess I don’t mind a nice boy staring at my house.”

“I’m sure he’s not staring at it. You always think everything’s about you. We learned about it in my psychology class. It’s called-”

“I don’t care what it’s called. Something unflattering, I’m sure. But I’m not kidding, Shannon—it really is every night. I wonder if his parents know.”

“Don’t tell them,” Shannon said, pushing her homework aside.

“I won’t—don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you. But sit out there with me sometime, you’ll see.” Jill glanced over Shannon’s pile of school books. “Do you have a lot left to do?”

Shannon huffed. “Like three hours. But I’m not doing it all tonight. Some of it’s not due until Thursday. Why do our teachers give us so much homework?”

“If you think this is hard, wait until college,” Jill said, though she’d actually found college easier than high school. Some semesters she only actually had to go to class two days a week. But she wasn’t about to tell Shannon that. Shannon was a good student and a hard worker, but she tended to do better when the perceived expectations were high. You always had to ride her a little.

“What are you reading?” Jill asked, and Shannon held up her book. “Any good?” A shrug. “I don’t recognize any of the books you read for school. We read totally different books when I was your age. To Kill a Mockingbird, that was the big one in ninth grade, and Lord of the Flies.” Shannon’s blank expression suggested the names meant nothing to her. “At least you’re learning about different cultures. That’s good, even if I’ve never heard of any of these titles—and I think of myself as reasonably well read. But I suppose some of the books I read in school would be considered pretty dated these days. Taraji—is that a woman’s name?”

Shannon turned the book over to show the author’s photo on the back cover, and Jill nodded, pinned to the wall by the risk of inadvertently making a culturally insensitive remark.

The woman in the photo is wearing a brass hair clip. The girl holding the book bites her fingernails.

Feeling bored, Jill sat at Shannon’s desk, which Shannon rarely used, preferring to do her homework on her bed or down in the living room. “Are you still happy with your room?” she asked.

“Why?” asked Shannon, who’d gone back to answering math questions in her notebook.

“I just thought you might like to redo it someday. It’s been like this since you were ten. We could go shopping for new bed linens this weekend.” Shannon arched her eyebrow; maybe “bed linens” sounded lame or old-fashioned. “Not just bed linens—some pillows and a new rug for under your desk. This one looks so tatty.”

Shannon glanced around the room, as if picturing the possibilities. Then her eyes settled on Jill. “Mom?”

“Yes?”

“What’s Dad doing? Not that I’m getting rid of you. I just want to get this Algebra worksheet done before eight. I’m doing a group chat with Allie and Mariela.”

Jill took the hint and went back downstairs. When Shannon was younger they’d watch a movie together or play a board game after dinner—Catan was Shannon’s favorite—but now they all seemed to live in their own world. Jill tried being mature about it; she wouldn’t want Shannon to feel like she had to entertain her mother.

It was just hard when your kid got to be older and no longer looked to you for everything. No longer wanted to play Monopoly with you or watch the Pitch Perfect movies for the seventeenth time. No longer wanted to be seen in public with you when their friends were around. Jill tried not to let it get to her—Shannon was pleasant enough when it was just the three of them; but then Jill would be picking her up from a dance or a birthday party and Shannon would get that embarrassed look that made her cringe with hurt.

And soon there’d be boys, and she’d have to worry about sex and Shannon getting in trouble—or not even that, just falling too hard for a guy and letting it distract her from school. Jill worried about that most of all. She’d avoided having a boyfriend in high school and most of college; Steve had been pretty much her first, minus a couple of dumb mistakes.

Pouring herself a full glass of wine—Steve called it a “double wide”—she found him in the basement messing around on an electronic keyboard. He’d been interested in playing music when he was younger and still dabbled on occasion.

“Want to sit on the porch?” she called from halfway down the steps.

“In a bit. I’ve almost got this part worked out. Listen to this and tell me if you recognize it.” He played a blaring riff on the keyboard, but Jill couldn’t place it. He tried again, and she shook her head. “You don’t recognize that? I must have one of the chords wrong.”

“What are you trying to play?”

“‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin. You know it, you’ve heard it. It’s the one that goes-” He sang a bit, but it sounded less like Robert Plant than a cat asking for its food.

“Take a break and go back to it.”

“I can’t. I’ve been trying for twenty minutes. I am bound and determined to figure this out. I feel like I’ve just got one note wrong. I could look it up online but that’s cheating.”

He took a sip from his pint glass of beer and set it back down on the basement floor next to his leg.

“Careful or you’ll kick that over,” she said.

“I won’t. Why is this so hard? I know it’s A over D, then it goes up a half step, but then…” He ran through the lick it a frustrated hurry, then banged the keys. “It should be so easy. I can hear it but I can’t play it. I hate that!”

“Well don’t get upset about it. I’m going to be on the porch if you want to join me,” she said, starting to drift back up the stairs, closing the door on Steve’s pounding.

There’s a moment when all three family members are on separate floors, and you feel the space of the house and all that emptiness, like none of this ever happened.

Jill took her wine onto the porch, where the sky was a thick dark blue and the air cool. It was a sleepy street, mostly older couples whose kids had already gone off to college. She didn’t really know any of them. Living on the corner made her feel detached from the rest of the block.

Staring into her wine, she wondered if she drank too much. She sometimes felt it in the morning, but it was nothing two aspirin and a cup of black coffee couldn’t fix.

A sound of bicycle spokes made her look up, and she saw a blonde woman in pink spandex pedaling hard in the direction of the high school. Jill laughed to herself. It was stupid, but she’d almost been expecting the boy. Not expecting, but anticipating. You get used to something and you start to look forward to it, even if you don’t really care.

But the boy had already been by once tonight. She wouldn’t see him again until tomorrow.

The boy doesn’t do stunts on his bike. He’s not a daredevil type. When he rides his bike he sits proper in the seat and keeps both hands on the handlebars. He maintains good situational awareness and always signals for a turn. He doesn’t care if it makes him look like a dork.

He bikes to get out of the house. It’s more about distance than destination. But maybe he has a destination. At least he always turns around in the same place.

He takes different routes to get there, though. Sometimes he bikes past the strange Dunkin’ Donuts on Marble Road, which is strange because Marble is an otherwise residential street, so there’s just this one Dunkin’ Donuts in the middle of a block of houses, and he can’t decide if that’s cool or creepy or just weird. He doesn’t think he’d like to live next to a Dunkin’ Donuts. You have to get away from these places some of the time, Dunkin’ Donuts and Panera and Subway and Jersey Mike’s. They come to take over your life. He wants to live in the country when he gets older—not rural country but one of those suburbs well north of Boston like Topsfield or Rowley where the houses aren’t quite so crowded together and the roads are curvy not straight, and instead of seeing the neighbor’s house when you look out the window, there’s woods and maybe a private pond. Exurbs, they call them. An exurb is like a suburb, only farther out. Not quite real country—you can still get to things. You can still get to Panera if you want but it’s not always right around the corner, in your face, constantly there! there! there!

The boy knows you have to make good money to live that far from the city, and that’s why he wants to study and do well in school so he can go to UMass Dartmouth or Bridgewater State and get his degree in criminal law—that’s why he’s sticking it out at Walmart despite people jerking off in the bathroom and taking a shit and not flushing it, despite the creepy old lady who likes to blow him kisses and who once cornered him in Health and Beauty Aids and said, “Hey baby, can I ask you a question? Just come over here. That’s it, that’s good. Oo, look at you! You’re so handsome, baby. I bet you got a girlfriend somewhere. Yes, you do. I bet she’s waiting for you right now, handsome boy like you. Waiting for you in the parking lot. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s all a good thing. It’s good to have someone you can kiss and snuggle with. I’d kiss and snuggle with you. Uh-huh, real good. Not just mouth kisses either. I know how to kiss in all the good places,” all the while he tried to get away, losing her in Paper Goods only to run into her again all the way across the store in Toys, he endures it so he can put working at Walmart on his college application and maybe even write about it for his college essay: What is an experience you’ve had that required perseverance and hard work?

The boy’s mother believes in perseverance and hard work. She believes everyone should experience working an unskilled, minimum wage job; you need to find out what it’s like so you’ll know it’s not what you want to do for the rest of your life. Boy, he learned that lesson fast. And he hasn’t told her about half of what goes on. His mother’s pretty squeamish about those things. She’s a little naive, a little idealistic. It’s why she still makes him take drum lessons. She thinks you can do anything if you just stick with it, but it’s just not true. It’s demonstrably not true. He hasn’t really made any improvements on the drums in about two years. True, he’s better than when he started. He can keep time. He can play in 4/4, 3/4, 6/8. He’s not any good at it, but he can struggle through 5/4 and 7/4 and a few others. But he still can’t play the shit his teacher wants him to play. He still can’t play “The Black Page #1” by Frank Zappa. The whole thing is just so misguided—it’s not like he’s going to Berklee. It’s not like he’s ever going to play professionally. He doesn’t even want to be a musician. All he did was say one time when he was ten that he thought the drums were cool. And now he’s stuck. Stuck in his teacher’s basement studio every Saturday morning listlessly thumping along to Banco del Mutuo Soccorso while his teacher chokes back cold coffee and aims his thousand-yard stare at the rock posters peeling off the walls. The boy wants to tell him, “Look, I don’t know what happened to make you so unhappy lately. Maybe you got divorced or had a kid who died, though I’ve never seen anyone who looks like a wife or a kid in all these years of coming here. Maybe there’s something physically wrong with you, in which case I’m sorry. But you used to be a fun person. You used to make doing this fun. And now you look like you can’t wait for me to get out of your basement so you can go back to crying all day in a dark room. It’s really starting to erode my already minimal desire to play drums. And the last I checked, these lessons cost thirty dollars a session, so it’s not like my mom’s not paying you.”

But he doesn’t—he doesn’t say any of that. Because that’s not the kind of boy he is.

It’s the same with flag football. True fact: no one wants to be there. Not the players, not the coaches, not the refs—not even the women who sell mouth guards and water bottles at the games. The only people who believe in the whole painful exercise are the mothers in the stands, the women who want their sons to play football (because there’s some prestige in that) but don’t want them to get hurt. And the more they get into it, the more they cheer and cry out things like “Way to pull that flag, Taylor!” the more the boys on the field want to disappear. There’s something almost deliberately humiliating about it—Oedipal, or whatever. Maybe it’s not Oedipal. What’s the one with the castration? But it’s like these mothers want to turn their sons into coddled wimps. Even worse—they want to do it in public. They want to do it in front of other mothers who want to do the same thing. The worst was last season when the Komen Foundation signed on to be sponsors—why is the Komen Foundation sponsoring a boys’ flag football league?—and everyone had to wear pink shoes. Not that boys can’t wear pink, but please, there’s a time and place. Boys need to get dirty and wrestle in the mud and compete with other boys who want to beat the shit out of them. When you’re a boy, when you’re a male adolescent, your body’s like a cauldron of violent, uncontrolled energy. That’s what testosterone does to you. The moms might not like it, but there it is. And when you’re a male growing up being made to feel like there’s something wrong with you for wanting to get a little physical, wanting to get a little banged up—not only that, there’s something wrong with being a boy, because for decades and centuries men have been the oppressors, they’ve had the advantages no one else has and now it’s time to change all that, but if you’re a boy and you were born in 2008, you’ve never known a world in which you weren’t made to feel like the undeserving beneficiary of all these advantages you were born too late to enjoy, made to feel like there’s something about maleness that’s wrong and needs to be modified for the good of the world—then you wind up wanting to just quit flag football, not play football at all, not play any sports, not do anything, just vape THC in the boys’ room and stare into space during class passively resisting an educational system that has been historically designed to favor you, a boy.

At least that’s what the boy tries not to think as he rides his bike.

It was a warm and pleasant night in early June when Jill decided to take a little walk after dinner. Sitting on the porch meant drinking more wine than was good for her. She needed to walk more and drink less. Each glass was something like 120 calories—and that was a normal pour. Not a “double wide,” as Steve called it.

She’d been out for about twenty minutes when she felt like she’d done enough. Twenty minutes out meant twenty minutes back, and she wanted to be home before dark. She should’ve worn a reflective jacket, or one of those glow-in-the-dark bracelets. By now she’d gone ten blocks, which was more than plenty. Soon she’d be out of the neighborhood, and the suburban houses would give way to condo developments and apartment complexes and, eventually, the main commercial street with its 7-Eleven and CVS and Walmart.

Stopping at the corner of Palm and Chestnut Street—one of Shannon’s friends lived on Chestnut, but she couldn’t remember which one—Jill suddenly felt watched. She could sense her own profile, the back of her head: the way other people saw her. Maybe right now another woman was standing at the window of her house wondering why this person was lingering on the corner, why they’d chosen this particular house to turn around in front of and not another.

Or maybe Jill was the only person who wondered about things like that.

The house on the corner has a red door with white trim. The car parked out front is an orange Honda Fit.

Jill turned around. She went back the way she came.

When she got close to her block, she saw a bicyclist pedaling toward her. It was the boy with the floppy black hair, Jeremy Mitchell. She’d never seen this part before—only the stop at the corner, the moment’s pause, the decision to turn back. She couldn’t see the side of her house from where she sat on the front porch. Being out on the sidewalk gave her the more total view.

And what she saw from twenty steps away was the boy cycling alongside her house and staring with fixed interest up at the pink drapes in the window of Shannon’s bedroom on the second floor.

She called out, “Hey! Can I-”

The boy’s eyes widened—in alarm, it seemed—and he jerked his bike around and zipped back up the street. Jill hadn’t meant to startle him. She didn’t know what she’d meant to do. She had a question she wanted to ask him, but she didn’t know what it was.

The boy on the bicycle has a fragile constitution. The woman on the corner expects a lot of herself.

What details did you notice? Based on memory, not on notes.

June fattened into July, and then August. The boy never came back. She’d scared him off.

***

You can learn more about Michael Heppner by clicking onto this bio:  https://thievingmagpie.org/michael-heppner-bio/‎