Poppin

by Jeanne-Marie Fleming

Shamblen Studios

Scott pops a wheelie in the schoolyard. And another. We watch until Marky rides up, ridiculous, on a tricycle. We circle Marky and cheer. I like them — the boys, their jerky moves. Even Sal, who speaks Italian, and broke all of our pencils. In the classroom, he holds air till he’s purple. Girls smack his cheeks to pop the air out. Frank makes cartoon flipbooks at his desk and sells them. It’s like watching television. I want one. My friend and I have a milk carton home for our clay wormy. We care for Wormy, moving him, bending him, from this to that. Like Frank with his flipbooks, we still get our work done. I’m worried all the time. Waiting for boobs to pop. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but it may take a while. It may not happen, my brain says. At 2:30 the teacher has Marky at her desk, teaching him the words we all knew since first grade. Marky reads so slow. I sneak looks over my SRA card, and I’m sorry I do. I don’t want to hear. He sounds like a baby. He must hate this. I wish he knew how to read, but I also wish… Can’t she just stop? Marky is trying his best. How can he concentrate? Embarrassed. If I can hear him, everyone can. But we’re pretending we don’t. His voice gets quieter and quieter. The bell’s about to ring. He only ever gets the last few minutes of the day. I cover Wormy with the silver inside of a gum wrapper. The teacher lets Marky up. He slinks to his desk. Okay people, the teacher says. Marky puts his chair up and all the rest of us are packing papers into folders and getting ready. Chairs up, she says. BUZZ. Marky’s out, back on his trike. Outside, I pop in a chunk of gum. The gum is loaded. For the first time, I can blow a decent bubble. I really can’t snap and definitely can’t wiggle my ears, but I don’t even want to. Pop goes the weasel. Do all jack-in-the-boxes play the same song? The baby, Pat, is surprised every time. My other brothers run around shooting each other. “You’re dead,” is what they say all day. My father has a real gun. Once, we stopped at Dad’s precinct, and he put my sister, Veronica, and me in a jail cell. In the photo, we’re holding the bars, smiling with freckled noses and vacation-stained t-shirts. We’re smiling because we know we’ll never really go to jail. What my sister, Diane, does is gross; saliva bubbles between her lips. She sticks sewing pins under the skin of her palm. Sometimes, I race Dad and my two sisters and the little brothers, not the baby. Duh. My parents hate “duh.” They really hate it. I don’t know when I learned it, but now I can’t stop. Everything is just duh. You know, like, duh, I got it. Duh, stop telling me. Duh, the obvious. I am the fastest kid. I have the longest legs. But Dad wins, and he gloats. How, so fat, did he do it? He’s purple like a beet, a sliced beet from a can, out of breath, laughing at me because I came so close and lost. The brothers grab his legs; he falls on the grass with them. I take it like a sore loser. I wish I wasn’t a sore loser, but I am, every time. I try to hide my tears. Tears make it worse. When he races my two brothers, he lets them win. I am glad, at least, he didn’t do that with me. I let them win, too, at all kinds of things. They cry if they don’t. I don’t know why I cry. I am not a stupid baby. What’s wrong with me? Duh. Dad pants his breath, and he doesn’t stop. His hand on his chest; his heart about to pop. I am a good reader. I don’t even think about my brain for a second. What I think about is my body, my hair, my feet. My feet are big. Like mom’s. I look okay, but I have to fight for the blow dryer. Mom bought us a curling iron, and I burned my neck trying to look like Farrah Fawcett. Scott, who pops wheelies, said it was a hickey. What’s a hickey? I have no idea. My parents don’t know that Diane puts pins in her skin. Even though I yell “gross” every time. Diane does not have the brain I do. We all see it. It makes my parents angry every time. And her disgusting tongue bubbles — gross me out. She’s in trouble all the time, and I try to help her. I want her to do things right. I do everything right, so I am not in trouble. Getting in trouble is the thing that scares me most. You gotta do things right. Diane has a paper route. She has short legs and a tall stack of papers with a bungee on the back of her two-wheeler. My parents wanted her to be the first with a job, not counting babysitting. I help on weekends. The Sunday Long Island News Day has three inserts, and once we forgot to put coupon pages in. The people called up mad. The people give low tips. Like a quarter, but my parents say she is learning a valuable lesson. Sometimes, the bike tips over because all that weight on one tiny kickstand. Hard work is good for you, my parents say. My parents work hard. Having a family is work every minute. Second oldest, I have to work too, every minute. Sitting on the couch is lazy. We fold clothes and watch the Bradys because they are all good-looking and match our family: three boys, three girls, except there is no hitting. How the hell do they get Alice? I am Alice: making lunches, peeling potatoes and hanging laundry in the yard. Alice is nicer and in a better mood. She has Sam. If I am in a mood, my mother says, wipe that smirk off your face. If my father sees us on the couch watching the Bradys or the Partridges, he gets livid and tells us to get up and help our mother. He says, Off the boob tube. Diane’s in front of television the most. Gilligan’s Island. New York is where I’d rather be. Talkin’ bout my best friend. Meow, meow, meow meow. Kibbles. I guess we know most of the shows. She likes weird stuff. Planet of the Apes, Star Trek. We watched a movie late one night about a woman who was buried alive in a box and she had a tiny light on limited time. We watched the Blob, like, three times. And I hate it every time. We didn’t know the gum was loaded. I’m gonna pop that sonofabitch my father said and chased the boy who threw a snowball at our car. And to my brothers in the back seat fooling around, I am going to knock your two heads together. I wonder if Marky in my class ever had his head boxed into his brother’s. Dad doesn’t do it, but he scares us every time. I’ll pop you in the mouth if you talk like that again. Pop Tarts are a rare treat. We call them pop tots. Like no “r”, like you betta give me one. Hey, let go of my Eggo. Hey, Mikey likes it. Hay is for horses, my father says. Mom sends him outside to get the lawn done. He’s a big sweaty mess when he comes back in, in just his pants with grasses and flecks of leaves in his chest hairs. At the kitchen table. Diane squeezes his neck muscles for him. He wants me to squeeze his red, spotty back muscles, too. I tell him he’s gross. I grab his back fat, and I want to hurt him. That feels good, he says. You can see my white fingerprints in his skin, so sweaty and gross. We see him like this a lot. Half-naked. Unless he is going out the door to work or church. Sometimes, I look over at him in church, I see his gun under his suit jacket or on his calf, and I get a disturbed feeling, like why is he wearing his gun in church. Everyone on the block wants to pop a wheelie. I don’t. The girls don’t. It’s dumb. But I can ride with no hands, and that’s skill. After school, I follow MEK on bikes across town near her Catholic school. She buys us both ice cream cones. I feel grown up, far from home, but we start back because the sky is a smokey violet already. Over the peak of a footbridge, still holding a cone in one hand, I let my feet go. Suddenly, I am looking down, seeing my body in motion. I am the cat’s cradle and the silver spoon flying over the moon. I am Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Leaving on a jet plane. And then I’m coming up on the metal post at the bottom of the bridge, separating the two lanes. I can’t slow down, and I can’t steer. I hit the post and sail over the handlebars. I am knocked out and then crying. The bike is mangled. A walking couple in the now almost dark parking lot comes over and helps me up. Ice cream speckles my clothes. My elbow’s bleeding. My hip hurts. The man lifts my bike. He positions the front tire between his knees and straightens it. At home, I drop my bike in the yard and sneak in. My father is not home, and I quickly change my shirt, clean my arm. My mother is eating from a bag of cherries, unlike the bright red ones sometimes left in the bottom of a drink. They have pits, she says, and I watch her pop one in her mouth, chew. They are more delicious than any fruit I have ever tasted. Like, oh my God. Like seriously. I pop cherries in my mouth as I bring the forks to the table. Mom mashes the potatoes. I dab my elbow with a napkin. Is something wrong? She asks. I’m fine, I say. We suck hard and then spit the pits into our hands.

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Jeanne-Marie Fleming edits at Variant Literature Journal and writes across genres. She is the author of Write to Reach: Writing as Transformation. Her work is published in JMWW, The Los Angeles Review, BULL, Black Fork Review, Read 650, MER Literary, Writers Read, The Chronogram, and several anthologies. She holds an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.Ed from Long Island University. Additionally, she serves as a writing mentor for incarcerated citizens via Transforming Lives NY and resides in the Hudson Valley.