Get a Life - Bonnie Smetts

It stung like a bee’d stung me when she said it. Sissy’s standing there with the sun shining through her white air like she’s got a light inside of her. I want to touch her hair and get a tiny bit of that light. But I know after the past week, that light’s not coming from the same place it used to.

“Get a life, Rawling. I want to hang with Jackson and you’re just acting like my Grand’s when it comes to that.” Sissy said that and then it been like I’d been hit in the head and was going down to the red dirt were standing on. I see her shining face turn to a dark and cloudy mess.

I’d convinced her to come down to the creek with me one last time before she’s gotta go back home up north to her daddy’s. We’d started the summer with the light and the laughing and eating oranges down here in the creek. And now I’m looking at somebody who’d turned into a lantern with no light.

I splash the water around me where I’m sitting. “I can’t believe you’re saying that. Don’t you see what Jackson’s doing to you? He’s gonna press you to do something, you know what he’s asking, just because he’s says if you don’t, he’s gonna do it with Charlene when you go home.” I try to tell her what’s sitting right in front of her.

“Rawling, you’re lying.” Sissy looks right at me from her spot on the rock. She won’t even come and sit with me in the creek one last time. “He said he loved me.”

Now I’m up and stomping around in the water, splashing water toward her and beginning to yell. “Sissy, I love you. Your Grand’s love you and maybe your daddy loves you. Jackson’s not loving you. I swear if you’d been from Nordeen, you’d know what in godsname is going on here.”

She’s crying.

“Did you ask him how many times he’d ever said that?” And then I feel old, like I’m a million years old. There’s my shiny friend looking so tired and all wadded up like a Kleenex but I can’t just let that snake of a boy take something from my friend.

Sissy got up from the rock. She was gone, running back toward the Grand’s house. And that’s all I had for a goodbye. She didn’t come riding her red bike over to get me the next day. I knew she wouldn’t be doing that day after because that’s the she’s supposed to be going back home to her daddy in Chicago. I always mentioned Chicago when I introduced Sissy to anybody we’d meet in Nordeen. Made me seem like I got Chicago in me.