Under the Radar
By Jacquie Cope
When the school bell rings at three o’clock, she’s out of her seat running to the playground, a smiling girl with twiggy legs and stringy hair, bruised shins, a wart on the toughened skin of her right knee, a secretive smile. Hungry, that’s how she is, a needy girl who wants play; just now she hangs upside down inside a metal, crisscrossed dome of monkey bars, her legs cinched so tight over the thin metal rail they hurt.
While she looks down at the black rubber underneath her, at the hanging and running bodies of the other kids who get to come and play in the yard after school every day, she plans the lie for her babysitter, the reason why she is late meeting her at the front of the school to walk the few blocks home—what took you so long, where were you?
She has lied before—when she rode her bike to the alley alone and not with a friend, when she struck a match and threw the blazing flame into the sink, when the boy across the street threw a rock at her face, maybe because of something she said that she didn’t mean to say, then told her mother that the cut on her cheek was from falling on the jungle gym. She accumulates secrets inside of her, each one locked tight like a pearl in a shell.
In the sky, a small flock of mourning doves stipple the telephone lines running along the street. At bedtime she will kiss her mother goodnight, and while her mother watches TV, she’ll curl up in a ball under her covers and hold her soft brown bear with one eye socket empty which she covered with a Band-Aid. She’ll smile her secret smile, alone and to herself, where her mother can’t see it to tell her she’ll smack it off her face.
THE END
Author Bio: Jacqueline Cope holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles, CA with her family.