Melissa Benton Barker
Krystle and Emi sit on a cement wall watching the boys play basketball at the weedy courts next to the playground, down the hill from where Krystle lives with her mom and brother in the old apartments, and with her dad too, when he’s not out at sea. Max and Tyler shoot hoops while Max’s little brother, Clyde, rides his rusty bike around the court. Krystle only comes up to Emi’s shoulder. They are thirteen, an age that splits friends right down the middle and stacks them on the side of the boobs or the babies.
The ball slaps the court, over and over.
“Do you think they see us?” says Emi.
Krystle is afraid she might be a baby. She doesn’t feel like a baby but her body tells a different story, she’s all rib and bone where she should be soft, her nipples pasted flat like buttons.
Clyde swooshes by on his bike. Tyler shoots but the ball runs around the rim and Max gets the rebound.
“They see us,” Krystle lies.
This morning Krystle dug into the sandy bottom of her mom’s purse, slipped two Camels out of the pack and shoved them into her jacket pocket. Now she puts one between her lips without lighting it, because she doesn’t have matches or a lighter.
“Would you rather someone hate you, or not know you?” Emi says.
Emi asks those kinds of questions. She’ll poke around underneath while ignoring the obvious; she’ll push people into places they’re not sure they want to go. The unlit cigarette dangles from Krystle’s mouth like she’s a spy. She has no idea that this makes her look even younger! Her hip cocked, arms folded, her hair squeezed into a high ponytail.
Clyde cycles by so close they can feel the wind of him, but who cares, he’s only ten.
Krystle offers the second cigarette to Emi.
“You know the one time I came home smelling like smoke?” says Emi. “My dad made me smoke a whole pack of cigarettes as punishment! He sat there and watched me! He said there was no way I would smoke again after that.”
“That’s crazy,” says Krystle.
She knows Emi is lying.
“It burned a hole in my lung,” says Emi. “I probably have lung cancer.” Emi coughs dramatically. She coughs until she falls off the wall and then she lays there on her back, her hair climbing the weeds and her boobs jiggling with each cough like they have their own ideas about everything.
The boys don’t look up. The boys have their own ideas about everything too.
Emi’s cough turns into laughter. She laughs and coughs, there on the ground, her boobs jiggling and now her stomach too, her bare stomach where her shirt rides up, jiggling.
“What about you?” says Krystle to Emi-the-puddle.
“What about me what?” says Emi, but her laugh stops and her eyes narrow.
On the court, Max shoves Tyler. Krystle wonders if they will fight. Max is a fighter, so sometimes they do.
Emi pushes up onto her elbows.
“What?” she repeats. “What about me what?”
“Would you rather someone hate you, or not know you?”
Krystle doesn’t tell Emi that a week ago, after Emi went home, Krystle came back to the court and Max was hooping alone and Max asked her if she wanted to take a walk with him. But he didn’t walk next to her. She had to follow him, like it was a coincidence, like they weren’t really together. They ended up in a tunnel in the little kids’ playground, and Max asked her to lift up her shirt, and she doesn’t know why but she did it.
“That’s my question,” says Emi.
“No but obviously,” says Krystle, “you should answer, because you’ve thought about it.”
Max has Tyler by the throat. Krystle has seen this kind of thing before. Clyde, on his bike, flies in circles like a whirlpool. He’s seen it too.
All of them have seen all of it before.
In the tunnel, Max said: “I still can’t tell.”
Krystle thought she knew what he meant. She couldn’t tell either. He was so close, she could almost feel his breath on her. She wanted to feel it and she almost could.
Max pressed his finger to her nipple. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
She thought he was going to ask if she was a girl or a baby but she was close, because he asked the kind of question that a person asks about a baby.
Emi stands and leans against the wall.
“Fine,” says Krystle. The truth is, she wants to give her answer. “I would want someone to hate me,” she says.
Krystle made up a story—just for herself—that she’d scratched Max’s eyes out back in that tunnel, and now Max couldn’t see anymore. Now Max’s eyeballs were rolling around somewhere in the dirt like bloody marbles. Krystle bit most of his fingers off too, back in the tunnel. They were salty. Now Krystle is a cannibal, and a vampire. Now there’s something molten inside her.
The truth was, she’d walked home alone. Later she saw Max riding his bike with Mika Anderson standing on the pegs, holding onto his shoulders. Mika with her long face and her Barbie-doll hair, and Max able to see everything just fine.
The truth was also that Krystle could still feel his thumbprint on her nipple.
Max lived in the old apartments right above Krystle. His father yelled, a lot like Krystle’s father. That crumbly old building was nothing but a janky chorus of yelling. One time, on her way home, Krystle saw Max’s dad shove Max into the elevator of their apartment building. Max tripped and Krystle slowed down so that the door would close before they noticed her.
All kinds of things can happen and all kinds of things will.
Krystle knew Max, and she hated him. And she hoped he hated her too.
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Melissa Benton Barker’s flash fiction chapbook. Beauty Queen, is available at Bottlecap Press. Her stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Ohio with her family.