Crushed, in 1976

When I was in second grade, a brown-haired girl named Camille moved into our neighborhood. Unlike anyone else’s eyes, her green eyes confused me and yanked at my blood. Sometimes this confusion and yanking was pleasant, like a secret they shared only with me. Other times it felt like a dangerously large gumdrop I’d accidentally swallowed. Still other times, the most confusing times, it felt like both at once, which hurt and made me angry, but in a way new to me. It wasn’t how I’d gotten hurt and angry when my best friend tore up my homework right before the teacher picked it up. It was something else, more like a balloon filling with hot water behind my face.

As a toddler, Camille had fallen into a campfire and burned her left arm, leaving a wide scar from her elbow to her wrist. Its middle was smooth and shiny, like a wet beach ball, but its edges were ropy and knotted. Once when the balloon filled too much and too quickly, pushing past my aching jaw and down my throat, I told her that her arm looked like rubber, and I called her Goodyear, which I knew was the name of the rubber tires on my parents’ Volkswagen Rabbit. She had done nothing to deserve this, not that there was anything she could have ever possibly done that would have caused her to deserve this. I said those words, but I didn’t understand why. For a moment, the heat and pressure of the balloon eased, but when she ran inside with tears leaking from her beautiful green eyes, leaving me alone in her front yard on a hot summer day, it filled again, but this time it sealed my nose and mouth shut, just like the time at recess when I fell from the monkey bars and landed hard on my back, leaving me helpless and unable to breathe, staring at the pure blue of a Texas sky.