by Janet Leigh
~
We lived in a rural suburb of Dallas, Texas, called Sunnyside. Most of the people in my town were farmers or drove the twenty-minute commute to Dallas to work behind a desk. Although most of the houses in Sunnyside sat on a few acres, there was a small section of town that consisted of a neighborhood with single-family brick houses and two streets of townhouses. I lived on Rollingwood Court in one of the townhouses.
Our town was small. There was a Baptist church, my dad’s feed store, and an Exxon gas station out by the highway. We had an elementary and middle school but didn’t have a high school. Eli and I drove ten miles into the neighboring city of Mesquite to go to school. Mesquite was mostly a blue-collar town famous for the rodeo. Cowboys came from across the nation to compete at the Resistol Arena, made famous by cowboy Neal Gay. Going from a small country school to the jam-packed halls of my high school was a big adjustment. Luckily my brother, Eli, was the quarterback of the football team. This earned me a little respect from a few of the bullies and immediate friendships with popular girls trying to climb the social ladder by dating Eli. My older sister, Melody, was a very talented dancer, so she had a scholarship to an arts magnet school in Dallas and didn’t have to put up with the riffraff from my high school. She graduated last year and went on to study dance at what my relatives referred to as “some fancy-schmancy school in New York City.”
Eli spent his summers working in my dad’s store and saved up enough money to buy a car. He had just turned eighteen, and I thought he was pretty full of himself, but I loved his car, a 1992 dark-blue Ford Mustang GT.
The Mustang had originally belonged to Mr. Schwartz, who lived down the street. Mr. Schwartz had been saving the car for his son, Zach. However, Zach marched to the beat of his own drum. He dropped out of high school, joined a rock band, and drove a rusted 1972 Volkswagen bus that was missing the back door and had floor-to-ceiling purple shag carpet. Zach told his dad Mustangs were for pussies and took off with his band for LA.
Mr. Schwartz upgraded to a new Mercedes and sold the Mustang to my brother. The car oozed coolness. Eli replaced the radio and the muffler. The speakers thumped so hard, it felt like the bass was beating right through your heart and coming out your ears. We listened to U2 on the way to school. My brother’s taste in music was fine with me. We both thought the old rock was good, and we usually agreed on most top-forty hits. Eli practiced football after school, so I usually rode home with my best friend, Jake.
Jacob McCoy was tall, and lean from running track, and he had big, brown puppy-dog eyes. His sandy-brown hair hung low over one eye. He had huge dimples, and all the girls thought he was “sooo cute!” I thought he was “just Jake.”
In fourth grade he asked if I stuffed my bra, and I politely socked him in the nose. Both of us were sent to the principal’s office and served detention for a week together. We became fast friends. He told me he thought I had a great right hook. I thought he didn’t want his friends to know he was taken down by a girl. Besides, in fourth grade all the other boys threw rocks at me, so it was nice having one on my team.
Jake drove a black Jeep Wrangler, which only enhanced his status as a chick magnet. Every day after school, I had to walk through a nest of cheerleaders to get to my ride.
“Honestly, Jake, why don’t you just pick one?” I would ask pretty much on a daily basis.
“I like keeping my options open,” would be his response. “If one is busy, I can just call another.” Like any one of them would be too busy for Jake.
I told Jake about my gift on the way home. He parked in front of my townhouse. Our house was connected on either side by an adjoining townhouse. The entire neighborhood was made up of rows of four townhouses joined together. Every three years there was a big meeting to decide what color to paint the houses so they would all match. My mom called this “the battle of the bullshit.” I overheard her tell my dad she would rather try to get Paula Dean to give up butter than argue with the neighbors. This year we were painted a nice olive green. I thought it covered the ugly mustard yellow from the previous painting very well. As we walked in the front door and through the kitchen, I could see the outhouse beyond the sliding-glass door hovering over the small set of patio furniture on the back porch.
“Cool,” Jake said as he grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket my dad kept on the counter in the kitchen. Fruit was always kept in arm’s reach in case we needed a “healthy snack,” as Dad would say. What he didn’t know was my mom hid a stash of Ding Dongs in the laundry room.
We went out the sliding door and into the backyard. “My great-grandma had one of these—we used to play hide-and-seek in it,” Jake said as he opened the outhouse door. “Radical, two seats.” He stepped inside.
“Jake, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said cautiously.
“Oh come on, it’s kind of like being in a tree house.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. We both sat down on the bench, being careful to straddle the holes. I noticed there were two small handles on either side of the seat. I didn’t remember seeing them before, but I grabbed hold just in case the ground decided to have another quake. Jake closed the door.
“Jake, it’s dark in here,” I protested.
“Yeah,” he said with a mouth full of apple and scooted closer to me. “Do you know what people do in the dark?” he asked, dropping his voice really low. But before I could figure out why he was acting so strangely, the ground began to rumble and the entire outhouse began to shake. The door flew open. I had a death grip on the handles. Jake was catapulted across the yard. The apple he had been eating went flying from his hand like it was shot out of a twenty-two-barrel shotgun and smashed into the sliding-glass door. There was a loud crack, and the glass promptly shattered into a million tiny pieces.
“Oh damn, what happened?” Jake asked, choking out bits of apple.
I scrambled out of the outhouse. “Are you all right?” I asked, helping Jake to his feet. We looked back at the outhouse. The door was once again shut, and I swear the little moon was smiling at us. Mom came running to the back door.
“Mother Mary Francis, what in God’s name happened?” Mom, having been raised Catholic, always started calling out the saints when there was some kind of excitement.
“Um, we had an accident?” I half asked, hoping not to get in trouble.
“With an apple,” Jake added.
“Well, next time you are going to play baseball with an apple, do it in the front yard,” Mom scolded.
I didn’t see the need to try to explain what really happened. Jake and I cleaned up the glass and promised to work at my dad’s store to pay for the damage. Jake thought it must have been some kind of instability in the ground under the outhouse. I thought the thing was possessed, and I didn’t want to get near it again.
