Living Up the Street Read Online Free Page A

and when he said it was time to go home I told him it was only three-thirty and that Mom wouldn’t get home until after four. Upset, he left with Debra tagging along in his shadow, but turned around before he was out of sight and said that he was going to get me. I played with Ronnie and sucked on a juice bar the coach had bought me, but left in a scramble when I discovered it was close to four.
    As I returned home, happy as a pup, Rick jumped out from under a neighbor’s hedge. “Now you’re gonna get it, punk.” His grin was mean and his eyes were narrowed like the Japanese I had seen on television that morning. Wrestling me to the ground, he scratched off my sunglasses, laughed a fake laugh, and ran away wearing them. Crying, and with my hands shading my brow, I rolled under the hedge Rick had jumped from because it was dark in there. The earth was cool and leaves stuck to my hair and T-shirt. I sat up Indian-style, squinting and calling for help, although no one came.
    I tried to move but a branch stabbed my back and ripped through my shirt, so I sat under the hedge calling out now and then, thinking that it was only a matter of time before I would go blind. An old woman with a shopping cart passed, and I called to her that I was going blind. She stopped, looked inside the hedge, her glasses slipping down from the bridge of her nose, and said, “Dear, I know just how you feel. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I can hardly make out where things are without my glasses.” She turned away and continued down the street.
    I started crying because I knew that when Mother discovered me under the hedge she would be mad. There would be no excuses. She would drag me home for a spanking while the neighbor kids watched.
    Finally, about an hour later, I heard my mother’s voice calling my name. I heard the clip-clop of my mother’s sandals, her stern voice: “Where are you,
Chango
?”
    “In the hedge, Mamma.”
    She bent down with her hands on her knees and squinted into the greenery. I squinted back and begged her not to hit me. Squatting, she waddled into the hedge, grabbed my wrist roughly, and tugged until I was standing up with my hands over my eyes. She fixed the sunglasses on my face and asked me what the hell I was doing in there.
    “I didn’t want to go blind. Rick took my sunglasses. They made me go to the playground,” I whimpered incoherently, spilling it all. Once home, Rick got a spanking and Mom was raising a belt to punish me when I pointed to my sunglasses and cried out that I might really go blind. She stopped, her lips pursed, and just wagged her finger at me and warned that I would get a double dose the next time I misbehaved.
    From the bedroom I could hear Rick whimpering into his pillow, “You’re gonna get it, punk!”
    One day the woman coach at the playground announced a crafts contest. The word went out in the morning when the kids gathered around her to hear what she had to say. Two kids sat in her lap while another played with her blond curls as she broke the contest into categories: Drawing, lanyard, clay, and macaroni. First place winners would receive baseball caps. We oohed and aahed. The second and third place winners would get certificates. We oohed and aahed again.
    “Now, kids, it’s important to be original,” she said. Someone asked what “original” meant.
    “You know, different.… You know, unique,” she answered, and emphasized the definition with her hands.
    I thought about this, and the next day for crafts period Icame to the playground with a Frostie root beer bottle. At the picnic table under the tree I spray-painted it gold, let it dry in the sun, and after smearing it with glue rolled it into a pie tin of peat moss which shimmered a mystical gold. Pleased thus far, I then glued macaroni noodles that I had painted red to the neck of the bottle.
    I worked in deep concentration as did the other kids, and when I finished I carried it very carefully to the game