What Isn't Allowed - Bonnie Smetts

We know what isn’t allowed. No running around the pool, no swimming after lunch, no playing in the field before sweeping the porch. But they don’t know what we do when we’re out of sight. They can’t know because they’re too old to know. They don’t see it.

They can’t look under the porch and see our fort. Our secret meeting place. Our clubhouse. We’ve gotten most of a book written under there. With pictures. And it’s part of the instructions to them when they realize we’re gone. Run away somewhere. We still need to figure that out. Betsy thinks we need suitcases. I think we need a plan about where we’re going before we need suitcases. But she’s not listening and she’s gone off to find the suitcases and wait until dark to bring them down under the porch.

“But we have to decide,” I say to her. “Where?”

“Disneyland,” she says. I know she doesn’t really want to go to Disneyland. We’re too old for that and besides that’s too…normal.

“Constantinople,” I say. I’ve been reading about far away places and that one sounds the best. I like the name. I see spires and domes, golden domes, I think.

“We can’t go that far, stupid.” Betsy thinks she knows so much. “You need a lot of money, and besides, they’re going to ask for our passports.”

And that’s how we started making passports. I stole my aunt’s from her desk. For some reason she showed it to me one day. And I saw her slip it back into the third drawer down on the right. And so I snuck in there and pulled it out of that drawer.

But I had to slip it under her messy pile of books for awhile because she came in and I was almost caught. “Auntie, I need a pen, a red pen. You know they’re asking us to write stories now.” I told a good lie. And so she dug up a pen from the pile on her desk.

She gave me a blue one and a black one, too. And we’re using those to make our passports. Right now we’re stealing pictures from the photo albums for our pictures. The next thing I need is a blade, a sharp blade so that I can cut our pictures into nice squares just like this picture of Auntie that must have been taken five hundred years ago. I like how she wrote her name.

“Look, we have to write like this,” I say to Betsy. This time she takes a look and doesn’t say that she knows more about this anybody on the earth. OK. That’s what she said. We’ve been practicing making our names like Auntie’s. But I don’t think we can.
And that’s when I decide to ask Auntie how she writes so nicely. And I think that was when she looked at me and said, “Louise, what are you up to this time?”