one dumb girl and one mean boy

It’s funny how a body can think she knows herself and suddenly one day some little thing happens and all at once she finds herself a stranger. All in all, I would say that moment–when I was so high up in that Digger pine and already upset over my part in the murder of that innocent hawk baby–was a poor time to learn that I was scared of high places. Ben told me once, when I asked him how come he’s still afraid of snakes and thunderstorms even though he’s all grown up, that there’s some fears we leave behind when we get older, but there’s enough things we learn to be afraid of to keep us from gettin’ too full of ourselves.

Apparently God above must’ve decided at that unfortunate time that I was a little too full of myself and at that very moment he smote me with a fear of heights. Of all things. And then He sent the devil himself to rescue me.

It was that boy from across the creek, the one who ran away when I said hello. I recognized him by his lily-livered scent–well, that and the weird black hair that hung long and straight to his shoulders. He came walking up to the bottom of the tree, looked up, and didn’t even try to hide his lousy grin when he saw me holding on for dear life.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Harumph,” I said.

“What are you crying for?” he said, and pushed his hair out of his face, probably so I could see that lousy grin a little better. I looked away, but then my eyes fell on that cracked egg and I felt those stupid tears welling up in my eyes all over again.

He followed my eyes to the broken shell on the ground. “It’s just an egg.”

How could he be so cold-hearted? “There’s a hawk baby in that egg, you meanie!”

“How would a hawk baby get inside a chicken egg?”

I looked down and sure enough it did look an awful lot like an ordinary chicken egg, but “What’s a chicken egg doin’ way out here?”

He shrugged. Not that I was looking at him, but I saw it out of the corner of my eye while I studied that egg.

“Probably that dog of yours snagged it out of the coop,” he said. “Or maybe a coyote.”

And I looked and I couldn’t deny it. That surely was a chicken egg and no baby hawk in it at all.

“Come on down now,” he said, and I just shook my head.

“Can’t,” I told him.

“Sure you can,” he said. “Just let go and I’ll catch you.”

Now it may seem, seeing as how I’m the one stuck in a tree crying about a cracked chicken egg, that I’m the dumb one, but I’m tellin’ you that boy must be dumb to think I was gonna jump out of that tree with nothin’ but his hands to catch me. I shook my head a little harder, in case he missed it the first time.

“C’mon,” he said. “Just take my hand.”

Maybe at this point, so as you’re not thinking that boy was 15 feet tall, I should admit that I hadn’t quite made it to the top of that tree. But it felt like it, it really did.

That’s when I remembered what had been said about this boy.

“What’s disturbin’ you anyway?” I asked him, and I watched his eyes glass over and his shoulders square up.

“Come down,” he said in a new voice, and it might have been Ben talking for the way my body just up and obeyed. Well, that boy did catch me, but whether he was any softer than the ground would’ve been I just can’t say. I rolled off of him and I ran all the way home without once looking back.