Age:
Middle School
Reading Level: 3.9
Chapter 1
Tommy Ann is standing in front of a green Chevy. It doesn’t have a muffler. At least that is how I remember it. And somehow, this is how I have marked that memory. But I am skipping ahead. Let me go back a bit.
Tommy Ann’s house is the one with the red shutters. Many cats wander in and out, wriggling through the holes in the screen door. Her mother’s angry poodle, dirty and runny-eyed, barks at me when I knock on the door. I speak through the screen like it’s a confessional. “Can Tommy Ann come out to play?”
Hearing my voice, she emerges into the summer afternoon. She is holding the red rubber ball, ready for a game.
Chapter 2
Tommy Ann is a head taller than me. She is even taller than my stepbrother. She always wears glasses. Sometimes one corner is taped where the hinge often breaks. Her clothes don’t fit well. She is the youngest in her family, the last girl in a family of girls. So she roams around in her sisters’ hand-me-down clothes. They don’t cover her wrists or ankles.
All of her sisters have boyfriends, even the overweight, boring ones. And like her sisters, Tommy Ann is not pretty. She’s not even close to pretty, with her penny-colored hair and freckles. When she smiles, I see a hound tooth poking out from a gum. But she has a power though. There’s something special about it. Maybe I was the only one lucky enough to recognize it. I am the lucky one.
Chapter 3
She twirls her marching girl’s baton and hurls it through the blue Ohio sky. Never afraid, she looks up in search of its metal flash. She catches the rod easily as it falls back to Earth.
We build a fort among the weeds of her backyard. She speaks in a watery voice. “No boys allowed.” The point of the hound tooth is visible when she grins. The fort shelters us from my brothers and their friends. We sit across from each other beneath a curtain of honeysuckle. We live together here. Our home is made from the flat rocks of a creek bed and hollowed out earth. We recline and stare through the maze of branches, listening to the honeybees come and go.
Tommy Ann leads me to the squares we’ve drawn with white chalk. I stand in my box, and she stands in hers. Outside her house, I can smell cabbage boiling.
She bounces the rubber ball to me. I catch it and toss it back. It is the red rubber ball of the Catholic school yard, from the eighth grade gym. She bounces it to one of the Galivan twins. Meanness radiates from their blond heads. The game goes on and on. The wind rushing down our gently sloping street, Sturdy Avenue, tells us when it’s time to quit for the day.