A boy and a girl stand on opposite sides of falling-down 29th Street, where new construction means sheets of plywood covering broken windows. Nature dictates the local beautification projects: prickly vines twining through loose siding. Reclamation.
The preteens run this neighborhood, now that the adults have given up on it. These young ones herd themselves in groups of no fewer than five, no more than ten. The boy and the girl, emissaries of their respective packs, edge closer to the curb, apart from the others. They wait for me. Mine is the last car in a stream of traffic. I am what stands between them on this one-way street.
They were children too long ago, they are still children. Pink blush shades her pudgy dark cheeks. Her ladies own the south side of the street. They wear their jeans tight, their hair braided and piled like small, impenetrable mazes atop their heads. Their new bras and what's beneath strain against snug T-shirts. They tug the cotton prints away from their stomachs one moment, arching their backs the next.
The boy's Indiana Pacers jersey hangs loose (I think of the time I asked my sister-in-law for her fourteen-year-old's shirt size one Christmas: "He's either a Small Adult or a Large Child.") He hunkers on his corner with the males, their too-large clothing hiding collective bony elbows and knees. They tease the girls in that way particular to siblings and middle schoolers — love-infused gestures of hate in the form of shouted insults, crude hand signals, whatever can be expressed at a safe distance.. Their energy frightens adults, parents and teachers who are tired from life. The preteens will never be tired, even if they stay up all night when no one tells them to go to bed.
Sneakers dangle from telephone wires, the laces taut. I've read the newspaper articles. Police say the hanging shoes mean a drug house is near. On this street, it could be the one with the boarded windows, a black X spray-painted on either side of the front door, like the cartoon equivalent of dead eyes. Or the house eaten by fire, still charred around the edges, where children play tag on a dandelion-and-dirt front lawn.
The boy holds a bag in his hands. Before my car has even passed, he and the girl begin walking towards each other, quick but unhurried. I slow down out of safety, voyeurism, a growing sense of displacement. In the rearview I anticipate the handoff of meth, crack, whatever comes from these closed homes. A few yards from my rear bumper, the pair meets atop the dotted white line in the middle of the street. They touch hands briefly, then part as if dancing, pushing off one another, retreating to their own corners. In her hands, his offering: a bag of gummi worms, a fat sack of rainbow-hued candy, the bait.
Gummi worms laced with crack, my husband might joke over tonight's dinner. But I am still several miles from home. The kids are growing distant in my mirror. Behind me the street gives way to the ruined homes, and before the sky opens and expands in the small rectangle through which I view their lives, I see the pair of dirty sneakers hanging from the telephone wires. Maybe it's the work of some drug lord, spiting the police. Or maybe it was some Large Child or Small Adult, a kid willing to part with a bag of gummi worms, who launched his own shoes upward. A small sacrifice, if only to watch them fly, if only to see what might stick.
Sarah Layden's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Artful Dodge, Vestal Review, Contrary, Diet Soap, Hecale and 42opus. Her most recent nonfiction was published in Opium Magazine and Indianapolis Monthly, and her poems can be found in Tipton Poetry Journal and the upcoming anthology Just Like a Girl. She is working on a novel and teaches writing at IUPUI and Marian College in Indianapolis.