She watches.
The tissue floats up higher than a tissue should and then she blinks and it’s gone. She blinks and it’s not a tissue anymore but a white dove. It’s a white dove-bird and it’s flying around in a circle above their heads. It’s a white dove and it’s singing, singing, singing.
Her hands clap. Her heart races. She reaches up and it lands on her finger. A bird, on her finger! This is the best day in her whole life.
Her smile cannot be stopped even if this boy is a stranger.
“It’s magic,” she whispers.
He scoots over, reaches out a finger and strokes the bird on its neck. She does it too. The feathers are ruffle-y and they are harder and softer than she imagined. Harder and softer doesn’t make sense but that’s how the bird is.
“How did you do that?” Becca asks the boy.
He smells like peanut butter. Becca loves peanut butter. She loves birds. She loves birds and peanut butter and big, big trees.
“Faith,” he says.
Faith
Faith?
What is faith?
faith
Faith is a big word even though it’s only five letters and Becca is not sure really what it means. But she likes the bird. She likes the bird and how it soars around in the sky.
“Let’s name him Faith. Okay?” she suggests.
“Okay.” The boy stretches his arms way above his head like he’s a tree. “Good name.”
“It’s a girl name, though.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t have to be.”
Bird wings sometimes are quiet and you can’t hear them. Bird wings are strong and don’t break when people are mean to them, not like arms. Bird wings carry the birds away, anywhere they want to go. They just lift up and they fly.
Faith does that. He nods his head and he goes, wings all spread out, beak proud and high. He ascends. He goes into the leaves and all the orange and all the color and then Becca can’t see him anymore. He must be in the sky.
becca goes home
He walks her home even though she doesn’t want to go there. She walks slower and slower the closer they get, but she has to go home, because if she’s late that’s bad, so bad.
They skip over the cracks on the sidewalks.
“Step on a crack, you break your mother’s back,” she says, which she thinks is a dumb thing to say and she bites her lip, but he doesn’t say she’s dumb after she has said it, so she stops biting her lip.
Instead, he says, “Do you ever want to break your mother’s back?”
She tells him the truth, which is no.
They keep walking.
“You’re nice,” he says.
She blushes. She wonders if he likes her-likes her. She hopes he doesn’t because she’s too young for boyfriends. Her mom says, “No boyfriends until you’re sixteen.”
“We should be friends,” he says.
She lifts up her eyebrows, and takes a big breath, because that isn’t a likes me-likes me thing to say. “Okay.”
He grabs her hand and squeezes it in a nice way. “Okay.”
They turn onto her street. She stops walking. Her house is just another two blocks. Her chest hurts and every time she tries to breathe, it hurts all around her ribs. She breathes in. She breathes out. She breathes in.
the shoelaces
“It’s okay,” he says.
He stands in front of her.
“We’re friends,” he says. “Breathe in.”
She tries to say something, but it feels stuck, the words.
He holds her hands and smiles at her. He has peanut butter on his cheek.
Her stomach growls and she grabs another acorn.
His eyes light up, “Are you hungry? I have a sandwich.”
He reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a mushed-up sandwich. It’s her favorite kind, peanut butter and raspberry jelly. They sit on the curb and she splits the sandwich in two, so that they both have half. She licks her fingers; it’s so good.
She checks his shoelaces. They are still tied.
Cars drive by.
No one sees them, but that’s okay, because she’s with him.
her arm
She wipes the back of her mouth with her hand. “I’m scared to go home.”
The peanut butter must have unstuck the words somehow. Now they bounce around on the sidewalk. She holds her head up and tries to be brave.
He nods. “It’s scary there.”
A UPS truck drives by. “Yeah.”
She fiddles with the acorn in her pocket. They’re almost the same size, and they’re made the same, part smooth, part rough. They slide against her fingers and her sweater falls off her shoulder and shows her arm because she has a sleeveless shirt on under it, because nobody’s done the wash in a long time. She does it. But they don’t have any detergent anymore. Her mom says she’ll get it sometime, but Becca doesn’t think sometime is coming soon.
She yanks her sweater back up really quick, but it’s not quick enough because he’s seen the bruises on her arm. Five of them, shaped like her mother’s fingers wrap all the way around like an iron cuff or a fancy tattoo.
A bunch of boy-men drive by. Music screams out the open windows. The boy-men scream along with it.
Becca hauls in a breath and holds it there. If he saw her arm, he will not be her friend. If he saw, he’ll call the police, maybe. Or, he’ll think she’s bad. Or, he’ll run away. She counts to ten and tries to calm down the way her teacher says to do. She stares at her shoes. Her laces are still tied, too. That means she won’t trip. Maybe he didn’t see.
She knows he did.
She starts counting again. One. Two. Three. Four.
“It’s okay,” he says, finally. “I used to get those too.”
almost home
Her body shakes like it always-always does when she’s almost home and she feels bad because this laughing boy isn’t laughing any more. Instead, his face goes worried. Instead, his fingers move tighter around hers.
“I’ll be close by, you know,” he says as they start walking again.
“You will?”
“Yeah, I’ll be really close the whole time.”
“Really?”
He gives a little squeeze. He kicks a stone. “Really.”
She kicks the stone back. He kicks it again. It’s a good gray stone, just a little curve. It makes a nice noise when you kick it. Sometimes kicking is fun. Maybe that’s why her mother does it.
She nudges the stone with her toe and passes it to him because she doesn’t feel like kicking any more. “I like being your friend.”
“Good. Me too.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you like being my friend?” She blocks the stone from falling off the sidewalk and into the road.
“Because you’re cute and you’re funny and you like trees and birds and because you are a good girl, Becca. I like you because you are a good girl,” he says, smiling.