up. “Okay, do a quick block and sprint down the middle of the street.”
For the first time in my life I took my place on the line of scrimmage. The skinny teenager lined up across from me and when Taylor said “HIKE!” he tried to push me over, but I moved to the side and dashed down the street, turning just in time to see the ball sail far to my left and once more bounce off a car.
Back in the huddle, Taylor glared at me like I was supposed to catch anything he threw. “Sorry,” I said.
Little pug nose chimed in. “Get it to him this time, Taylor. I’ll block.”
I never got a look at the ball that hit me in the back of the head, and on the next play Taylor never saw the tag that got him before he could move. He stood panting in the huddle. His face was flushed bright red behind a spatter of freckles.
“You guys gotta block this time,” he growled.
“Yeah,” said Macek, “throw me the ball.”
Once more we gained no yards but I got my block, paying for it with scraped knees. The kid named Taylor growled some more, “You guys aren’t trying. We can beat these guys.”
We only allowed the skinny high schooler and his team two more touchdowns before parents started appearing at the doors of the houses calling the boys home. Soon, only Macek, Taylor, and I stood awkwardly in the middle of the street.
Macek was short and stocky with a brown crew cut. Taylor was nearly as tall as I was, with a pile of red hair to match his freckles. “So, you just move here or something?” he asked.
“Yeah, from Ninilchik, down on the peninsula.”
“You’re from Chickenshit?” Macek said. He laughed.
I laughed, too. “No, Na-nil-chik!”
“My dad took me fishin’ there once,” Taylor said. “It’s out in the boonies. I caught lots of king salmon there.”
“In the boonies with the loonies!” Macek added. Only he laughed this time and I winced.
I tried to picture Taylor on the banks of the Ninilchik River in a sweatshirt and hip boots, trudging out from his dad’s camper with a salmon rod in his hand. Maybe last summer, Harry and I had sold him some of the lures we salvaged from the snags in the river. Maybe we’d go this summer, Taylor and his dad and me, and I could show them where to catch the big ones and the places where the snags could steal your hooks.
“Where do you live now?” Macek asked.
“Hollywood Arms, those big green apartments across Hollywood Drive. We’re on the top floor.”
“Now there’s a dump for you. My dad calls it the ghetto.”
I was surprised at him talking that way, even if I didn’t know exactly what a ghetto was. “It’s not like I get to choose where I live.”
“Yeah, well you better watch out. ’Cause them people got nothin’ and they’ll rob ya blind. That’s what my dad says.”
Taylor jumped to my defense. “Your dad just says that. He’s never even been in those apartments.”
“Yeah and he wouldn’t be either.”
“You’re a jerk,” Taylor said, “and your dad doesn’t know crap.”
“Sure he does. He knows you!” Macek said. He was chomping on a wad of bubblegum and the juice bubbled out when he talked. He laughed.
“I know you are but what am I?” Taylor returned.
“Where do you guys live?” I asked, interrupting their silly argument.
“Mr. Know-It-All lives way down past the shopping center, and I live right there,” said Taylor, pointing to a blue house with a garage and chain-link fence. “Heck, we lived in the Spruce Tree Courts when we first moved here, and it was just as bad as the Arms. My dad kept having to go yell at the neighbors to quit playin’ their music so loud. He’d have kicked their butts if they had the guts to fight him.”
Silently, I thanked Taylor for getting me out of that one. I’d never had to fight a total stranger before, even though Macek didn’t look like he would be much of a fight. It would be a fearful sort of encounter without any kind of relationship to fall back on when it was over. I always thought hitting a stranger would be easier than a good friend like Harry, but it didn’t seem to work that way.
To think I was going to tell them how cool it was to live in an apartment, on the second floor yet, and we were going to get TV. Now I find out it’s not cool at all. I suddenly envied Macek and Taylor for their yards and houses and dads to tell them things, though I couldn’t remember my father ever telling me rotten things like that about other people.
I risked an invitation, “You guys want to come over and play on the bluff behind the apartments tomorrow? The alders are neat and we can climb around and stuff.” How bold I felt to invite, to assume, friendship with two guys I’d just met.
“I’m spendin’ the night at Macek’s here, so yeah, why not? If Macek isn’t afraid someone will rob him.” We laughed and Macek slugged Taylor in the shoulder.
I left my new-found pals to finish their fight alone and ran all the way home. I had found some friends, but the apartment looked shabby and worn out. Did I imagine faces glaring at me from every window? The three little girls I had seen earlier were still on the swings and I observed that two were black and one brown. I hadn’t noticed before.
A guilty relief filled me when I found a little white girl with a jack-o-lantern grin perched on the steps. She was dirty and lean, a deserted runt on the front porch. I smiled when she said hello and tried not to let her know that I was staring at her forehead. It was impossible not to stare: a lump stuck out of her forehead just above her eyes. The strangest nodule of skin and tissue that I had ever seen jutted from her head like a misplaced navel. A giant mole? No, more like a belly button, one that stuck out instead of in. She had an “outie” right in the middle of her forehead.
I climbed the steps refusing to look back, though I wanted to stare and even touch the weird magnetic oddness of it. Never in my life had I seen such an astonishing curiosity on anyone’s face. I announced it when I walked in the door. “Did you see that little girl with the belly button on her head?”
“Samuel!” Mom was stretched on the couch with a stack of official papers on her chest, looking tired and lonely.
“Well, Mom, she does.”
“I’m aware of that, but don’t you think it’s cruel to make fun of her?” Then her tone changed. “I can’t believe her mother can’t have that thing removed.”
“They live upstairs,” offered Mary, dancing to the radio as she set the tiny table for three. “Her mom’s a drunk, and worse, I bet.”
“Where on earth did you hear such a thing?”
“Mom, you can hear everything in this place. The way that woman talks, you better stuff cotton in Humpy’s ears when he goes to bed.”
“His name is Sam, and that will be just enough of that. I
