Smashing Bottles

Sarah Pinsker

Tonight started out like most every summer night, with Mom pushing Mitchell and me out the door after dinner. The days in June are extra long, so we have to find a lot of stuff to do. My favorite game is the one where we smash bottles. We have to find them first, which I’m pretty good at, since, as Mom says, I am Comfortable with the Underside of Things. She doesn’t just say that because I’m small for my age. I was the one who told her that somebody had written on the bottom of the kitchen table with a green marker, and she didn’t even ask if I was the one who did it. She lowered herself down beneath the table with me, and we lay on our backs and I pointed out all the things that people had written – not just the green, but other colored markers and pencil and crayons – and also that Mitchell sometimes sticks his gum to the table, since there was gum in the corner by where he sits, and also under his chair. He wouldn’t speak to me for a week, but Mom said it was good detective work and he was just mad at being caught.
…..We find bottles all over the park, not just underneath things. We only take the empty ones. Mitchell says that truckers pee in bottles so they don’t have to stop driving and then they toss them out of their trucks. Those are the plastic ones with the caps still on. You might be able to fool some other kid by telling her that those are full of apple juice, but not me. We’re looking for glass, anyway.
…..When we have enough bottles, we divide them up. Then, we throw them. Mitchell is four years older than me, so there aren’t too many things I can do better than him, but I have better aim than he does. He says I’ll be the first girl Major League pitcher someday and that makes me try to throw harder and faster. If I pitch the bottles at the side of a house, they make a different noise than if I throw them at the iron fence that surrounds the playground. The metal frame for the swing set makes a different sound too, and the concrete that everything is sunk into. There’s a different sound for everything. A bottle breaking sounds mighty, like it’s got something at stake, like it needs to make the most sound it possibly can in its last second as a bottle. After it’s done being a bottle, it’s just more broken glass, but we pick the pieces up and lay them out on the concrete and then we find rocks and grind the pieces even smaller. You can spend a lot of time smashing things if you try.
…..Sometimes this one cop stops his car to yell at us when we’re breaking things. He always asks us why we’re messing up a nice playground. We look around. The slide is dented and the swings are still there but a couple of months ago somebody swung them around and around the top bar until they were all wrapped round up top and didn’t hang down at all. Mitchell shimmied up and unwrapped them, but then somebody did it again and the swings have been stuck like that ever since. The policeman looks again at the playground and then at us, and he sighs and drives away. That’s how it usually happens, but sometimes it’s different. Last Tuesday there were two policewomen, not the usual guy at all. The two new cops made their sirens go and then they told us to go back to the house and get a broom and clean up the glass, and they waited while we went home and came back with a broom. There was a lot of glass. We had to start all over again on Wednesday.
…..When there aren’t many bottles, like tonight, we play hide and seek. Mitchell is better than me at hiding and seeking. I think it’s because he’s older. He has longer legs to go faster, and he’s not afraid to go away from me to hide better. I’ll find him three or four blocks away, if I find him at all. He hides in all kinds of places he isn’t allowed, places where I won’t even go look for him.
…..Tonight, it was his turn to hide first, and peeking didn’t do any good because I saw him turn the corner. I counted to fifty, then walked in the direction I had seen him go. I only needed to go about half a block around the corner before I figured out which house he had gone into. I’m not stupid. There were boards over all of the windows, but the corner of one of the boards was all pried up where it wasn’t before. Also, he had left his Coke can outside on the stoop to encourage me; I could tell it was his because it was still cold.
…..I stood outside and yelled into the pried-up corner.
…..“I found you!”
…..“You have to find me all the way,” he said, his voice a loud whisper coming from somewhere in that deep empty house.
…..I knew he wanted me to come in, but then I thought about the rats in the basement, and the pigeons living on the top floor, and I wondered what was keeping them from starting a war for the middle floors, and maybe they had already, and I wondered who won, and I just didn’t want to go in and find out.
…..So I gave up and went home. Mom was lying flat on her back on the couch when I walked in. She still had her pink scrubs on. She had one arm over her face, and I thought at first she was asleep with the TV on, but when I tried to curl up on top of her she rolled me right off and propped me back to a standing position.
…..“April, you know you and Mitchell are supposed to stick together,” she said, smoothing my hair.
…..So I went back to the playground and waited for him. I looked around for bottles but I still couldn’t find any, so I practiced running up the slide until he came back. When he came walking around the corner, still swigging his soda, I scrambled up the slide again so I’d be taller than him when he got there.
…..He looked mad at first. “I said you had to find me all the way!”
…..“I wanted to, but I thought there might be rats. Were there rats?”
…..He shrugged. “Maybe, but why do you have to be so chicken about it?”
…..“I’m seven,” I said. “I can be chicken if I want. Anyway, Mom says there’s nothing chicken in hating rats.”
…..“I guess.”
…..“Say it,” I said, looking down on him from the top of the slide. “Say I’m not chicken just because I hate rats.”
…..He sighed. “You’re not chicken just because you hate rats.”
…..“And I don’t cheat.”
…..“And you don’t cheat.”
…..We glared at each other for a minute, then he grinned and fished in his pocket for something. His hand came out with a small glass jar, the kind that baby food comes in.
…..He came around the side of the slide and handed it up to me.
…..“I bet you can’t hit the sign from there.” The sign was a metal sign on the playground fence. On the other side it said “Closed Dusk to Dawn” but on this side it didn’t say anything.
…..I stood up. I struggled with my windup a bit on the small platform I was standing on, but I managed. The jar exploded when it hit the sign.
…..Mitchell clapped and hooted. He climbed up the slide and squeezed in next to me on the platform up top. He put his arm around my shoulders for a second, then ran back down instead of scooting. The slide groaned to say he was too big for it. I told myself to remember to practice running down the slide as well as running up it.
…..“It’s your turn to hide,” he said. “Please, please, please don’t hide in the bushes again.”
…..When it’s my turn to hide, I like to be able to see him still. To me it’s part of Sticking Together. He says I peek whether I’m the hider or the seeker. It’s hide and seek, not hide and peek, he says, but I can’t help it. What if he just left me there? He always knows when to come out, but I’m not sure I do. I might be the lost and found that stays lost. When he finds me he usually calls me a baby and tells me that next time I have to go farther and hide better, and I promise, and I want to, but then next time comes, and I hide behind the trash cans again, or in the bushes next to the playground.
…..That’s where I hid tonight, in the bushes next to the playground. I figured he had told me not to hide there, so he wouldn’t think I would actually do it. There were some old candy wrappers under there with me, and a Nestea can, and a Bud Light bottle, which I reached over for and drew closer to me, so I could remember to smash it later. There was a black cat under there with me too, and it hissed at me when I climbed in but I told it we could share, and then it just stared at me with squinty yellow eyes but kept still and quiet, so I stared back squinty-eyed and then tried to be still and quiet too.
…..I could see Mitchell up against the wall at the other side of the playground. He had his eyes pressed into the bend of his left arm, his arm leaning on the wall, his body leaning on his arm. He still had his soda in his right hand, hanging loose by his side. Everything about him said that he was Not Cheating, because he hated if I said he was. He wasn’t a cheat, but he always found me so fast I had to say something, so sometimes I said that. I could hear him counting from the other end of the playground. His voice echoed off the concrete so it sounded like he was all over the place. In another ten seconds, he would uncurl his arm and look around, and turn his head sideways to listen, and then he would find me.
…..Except there were big kids coming across the playground, and I didn’t know who they were. They weren’t from our block, which was two blocks away, and they weren’t from either of the ones in between, since we knew all those kids. They didn’t go to school with us, either. They looked like they might even be sixth graders, which made them a little bigger than Mitchell and a lot bigger than me. There were two of them. One of them was tall and skinny and the second one was shorter but strong-fat looking, like a football lineman. They were both wearing giant white tee shirts, which made the skinny boy look even skinnier and taller and the shorter one look even wider. I couldn’t see their faces from where I was, but they crossed the playground like they owned it, heading straight for Mitchell.
…..They were on him just as he finished counting. He uncurled his arm and turned halfway and then the two of them had him pinned against the wall, each holding a shoulder. His Coke dropped from his hand and landed on end but some sloshed out and spilled in his shoe and the can tipped itself over and then rolled a little ways from him and the rest of the Coke spilled out on the ground and drained away like it was looking for a place to hide too. I could hear the boys’ voices now too, echoing off the concrete.
…..“You got money?” asked the taller one.
…..“No,” Mitchell said, all quiet so I had to strain to hear him.
…..“If you ain’t got no money, where you get the Coke?”
…..“From my house,” Mitchell said, which was true, but the boy just laughed. I don’t think they believed him and anyhow he did have money, because he had found thirty-eight cents in the alley earlier when we were looking for bottles. One of them patted Mitchell’s pockets down and felt the clink of the coins rubbing each other.
…..“I thought he said he got no money,” the tall boy said to his friend.
…..Then the boy punched Mitchell in the stomach, and he threw up, just like that. They were still holding his shoulders, so it got on his shirt and on the arm of the fat one, who made a disgusted face and wiped it on the tall guy, who made a disgusted face and punched his friend in the arm, but not hard like he had punched Mitchell.
…..I knew something really bad was happening. Mitchell hates throwing up worse than anything in the whole world. When he’s sick he moans and curls in a ball on the bathroom floor and lets Mom hold him like he’s little. He says it comes out his nose too, sometimes, and it burns, and that’s why he cries. He was crying a little now too, and they were calling him a baby, but now they were holding him with straight arms to keep him farther away from them since he was covered in throw up. The one who wasn’t holding him started kicking him. I think they forgot about the money because he was trying to get his hands in his pockets but they weren’t letting him, and then he was on the ground.
…..I knew I had to do something, but I knew I was a Chicken and a Baby and I only play hide and peek, and I liked hiding in the bushes like a squinty-eyed cat.
…..But I couldn’t see Mitchell anymore, because they were standing over him, and I didn’t think I could run fast enough to get away and get Mom. I’m not tall and I’m not fast and I’m not big and I’m not brave. Then I realized that the one thing I do have is better aim than Mitchell. I reached for the Bud Light bottle, and the cat glared at me but this time he didn’t hiss, and I thought maybe he thought sometimes a Person Has to Take Action, which is what Mom says when she means for one of us to get something done.
…..I crawled out of my bush backward and stayed low and quiet and crept along the side of the playground hiding behind the bushes the whole way, getting closer. I could hear Mitchell crying and the other boys laughing. I was close enough.
…..When we’re smashing, sometimes, for just a second, I’m not the one throwing. Sometimes I’m the bottle, making the most noise I possibly can in my last second as a bottle. That’s what it was like tonight. I was the Major League pitcher as the bottle left my hand. I was strong and sure. And then I was the bottle, flying through the air, whistling, brave and mighty. I connected with the back of the tall boy’s head, and I made a sound like I had everything at stake. I made the most noise I possibly could in my last moment as a bottle, and then I was brown glass against a boy’s head, and there was bright red blood, and then I was a million shattered pieces, and then I was nothing.
…..I don’t remember running home, even though I know everything that came before and after that. I remember hiding under the table because it felt safer there. I remember wishing that we had a longer tablecloth, so it could hide me better. I remember Mom getting down on her hands and knees and coming under there with me to find out what was the matter and then scrambling out so quickly that she picked up the table with her shoulder. A yellow mug fell to the floor when the table lifted, and the handle broke off. I remember reaching out for the two pieces, the mug and the handle, and drawing them close to me in my hiding place. I remember watching from beneath the tablecloth as Mom’s legs ran out the front door and a few minutes later as her legs came back in the door. She was carrying Mitchell like he was little; he whimpered like a puppy when she laid him on the couch. I remember sirens and Mom coming back under my table and telling me to go upstairs and stay there No Matter What, and me running upstairs and closing the door to her bedroom behind me and wondering if No Matter What meant for a while or forever.
…..Right now I’m leaning toward No Matter What meant forever, so I haven’t moved yet. I remember that for a minute I was mighty, and I try to hang onto that feeling. I tell myself it’s better to be a bottle than broken glass. I sit in the middle of the middle of my mother’s bed and close my eyes tight and try my best not to shatter.
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