Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

“Nice try, but there’s no base,” the boy said.

She screamed, frightened and gleeful.

He fired the ball in a perfect spiral. She managed to dodge it. After she was clear of it, she realized she should have grabbed it out of the air and chased after him. She could hear Tommy in her head coaching her, telling her she had just as much right to get it and pelt him good. She didn’t know where the ball had gone. She didn’t know where the boy had gone either, but she suspected he had the ball again.

There was more tiptoeing around. She wanted to say she was done. All she had wanted to do to begin with was jump across the well and be done with it. That he had stopped her from doing so made her angry, especially now that there had been a slight break in the attack. A reprieve to consider her options. She thought about it and decided she was done with him and even said so, but the boy only laughed, and when he did, she saw that he had somehow climbed up on top of the bulldozer and was looming over her, his arm cocked back.

“You can’t jump that pit,” he said, pointing in front of them.

“I was about to,” she said.

She could hear Tommy telling her to run away.

“There’s no way,” the boy said. “I couldn’t even do it.”

“So,” she said. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Then do it,” he said.

“I don’t feel like it now.”

“Because you can’t.”

“You wish.”

“You wish.”

“I could jump that thing with my eyes closed,” she said.

There was a part of her that believed it, too. She had taken ballet on and off over the last few years, when her parents had extra money for the lessons, and she had been told she was a natural. If only you had started her out sooner, she remembered hearing the instructor tell her mother.

“You’re a joke,” the boy said.

He had not brought down his arm, and the ball in silhouette looked for a moment like another head that had grown out of his shoulder. Teagan shuddered.

“Come on then,” he said. “We don’t have all day.”

“For what?” she said.

“Try to jump over it,” he said.

She laughed.

“Why are you laughing?” he said.

“Because I know what you’re gonna do.”

Now the boy was the one laughing. “I won’t,” he added.

“I know you will. The moment I jump, you’re gonna throw it at me.”

“I’m telling you I won’t.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Yeah, right nothing.”

She looked at him, trying to gauge his expression, but she could see only the faint outline of his face and, beside it, the shadowy second head that had grown more ominous in the evening light.

“Don’t be a pussy,” he said.

“I’m not a pussy,” she said.

“Yes, you are.”

She looked at the well and then at him high atop the bulldozer, and she nodded but didn’t say anything. She walked nonchalantly back to where she had been to begin with, before he had shown up and hit her with the ball. She placed her shoes against the belt track and leaned forward, placing her fingertips onto the tamped dirt.

She took a breath and held it.

She could feel her heart beating wildly now. Not for this boy or for the dare or for the well itself. She remembered the time she was in ballet class, and the parents had been told they could come into the studio and observe. Against the mirrored walls, the parents sat on the floor with their shoes off, looking oddly out of place, while the young girls stood at one end of the room preparing to run and leap, one by one, over an imaginary puddle on the floor. Teagan had been singled out by the instructor to demonstrate.

She herself wanted to be an instructor one day. A teacher of some sort. But her heart had been tearing through itself at that moment, and she did not dare look at her mother or her father, and definitely not at Tommy. She was fearful of losing any concentration she had.

With all that she could summon, she’d sprinted elegantly as she had been taught and first lifted her right leg straight and pushed with the back left up to where, like a pair of scissors opening, she cut her figure into the air.

She told herself she could do that again.

Not the form so much as the sheer leap itself. She could do it easily, and so without any more thought, she pushed hard and took off toward the well that wasn’t a well. It was just a hole in the ground. It would be easy to jump. It would not crumble on the other side where her foot would come down. His laughter chased after her, but she didn’t care now. She was going to do it, she knew.

She leapt free, but once in the air, she felt something graze by her. It threw her off. Just briefly. She was too surprised to scream. Her front foot landed at the edge, which then collapsed.

She thought she could hear someone calling her name up above, but it wasn’t her name exactly. It was crying that was meant to be her name. Everything smelled wet, and above it, the sound of someone hurt, a sadness falling on top of her.

When she closed her eyes, she could hear it and when she opened her eyes, expecting to hear it again, it ceased, as did the square of the sky, and her head, wet as the smell of wetness, began to warm and then burn. Everything she knew became ashes in her mouth. For the rest of her life she would be able to taste the hint of this day but its memory would have long vanished like a failed fuse.

By the time Shoe made it home to his brother’s after work, the others had already eaten and cleaned the dishes and gone about the rest of their