The Reform by Almondie Shampine
book 1 in The Modules Series
I arrived at the Fountain, the code name for the pond
behind our house, and waited, knowing Charlie would come. I touched the
C-shaped scar at my hairline in recalled memories of the first time I’d met
him. It had been an unusually warm day for the third week of June. Kadrin and I
had just graduated from second grade from a public school system that believed
recess and a kid-being-a-kid was a healthy part of growing up. It was our last
summer before the Reform. We were eight.
Kay had been doing her nails and wading her toes in the
water while I pretended to be a fish, her toes the bait. Two boys had come
across the Fountain and we’d instantly retaliated with war, throwing mud bombs
at them to keep them away. They’d retaliated with gravel bullets, and Charlie
had nailed me in the head with a rock, resulting in me getting stitches and my
now C-shaped scar.
It had been my last and my best last summer ever. We’d
battled it out over the Fountain the entire summer, and Charlie and I had
gradually become friends as his and my parents became friends. We’d become best
friends when we were told we couldn’t be friends anymore. See, my father once
having been a conspiracy theorist, and his Dad being retired military,
throughout our pretend war over the Fountain, they’d been the Military Scouts,
which Kay and I referred to as the Military Brats, and we’d been the Conspiracy
Renegades, trying to protect what was ours. All fun and games. But the changes
in the system had resulted in disagreements between our parents of whose best
interests the government had in mind.
Charlie and I had been meeting each other secretly since
that summer four years ago.
After waiting ten minutes, I became impatient and blew
the duck call like a rabid duck. I was just about to take a big risk at getting
in trouble, and just run to his house where I wasn’t allowed, when I heard the
duck call answering back.
Then, he was there. He stopped two feet in front of me.
Both of us were sweating and out of breath from running. It was awkward
standing there, looking at each other. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to
run into his arms and cry that I might not ever see him again, but I didn’t
know that for sure. Plus, I didn’t know if he wanted me to run into his arms,
if we were supposed to do that type of stuff, since I’d become a woman three
months ago, which is what mom called it.
Before I became a woman, or began puberty, which is what
we call it, there hadn’t been any awkwardness between Charles and me. I’d show
him my affection by punching him in the shoulder, tripping him, or hitting him
behind the knee with a stick. He’d show me his care for me by tousling my hair,
giving me indian burns and purple nurples. The purple nurples stopped abruptly
one day, once I’d begun developing, because it’d hurt so bad that I felt no
remorse in kicking him in between the legs. He’d crumpled to the ground. It’s
the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.
Except for now. He was crying now. I felt the heated
trickling wetness on my own cheeks and didn’t know if I had started crying first
or was crying because he was crying. He stepped toward me and reached out his
hand. I stepped toward him. He put his hand down. I wiped my face. He lifted the
bottom of his shirt and blew his nose into it, reminding me that I was becoming
a woman faster than he was becoming a man, and he was older than me.
“God, you’re disgusting.”
“What?” he said. “You didn’t exactly offer me a tissue.”
“Your shirt?
Really?”
“A lot better than wiping my snot on my arm like you
did.”
I looked at my arm and saw the streaks of tears and what
could have been snot. My face turned beat-red in humiliation. A woman would not
have done that, but I did it, automatically, without thinking. Perhaps I wasn’t
a woman yet, after all, like mom said. Excellent news!
All it took was me looking at him with a mischievous grin
before he began running, knowing what I had in mind. I began chasing him, my
arm outstretched, totally prepared to wipe my snot/tear arm all over his arm. I
caught up with him easily, my legs longer than his and capable of running
faster, and launched my body forward to tackle him to the ground. He surprised
me by side-stepping last moment and I landed with a Hmmmph on the ground. He
laughed, pointing his finger at me. I grabbed dirt in my hand and tossed it at
him, then tried scrambling to my feet. He grabbed my foot and I was down again.
This time on my back.
He fell on me, his knees on either side of my stomach,
and began doing the king kong hitting-of-his-chest that I hated so much. I
smeared my arm on his pants and yipped in joy. Then he looked down at his
shirt, where he’d blown his nose, and smiled at me, at the same time he went to
restrain my hands.
“No, no, don’t!” I screamed. “This is my favorite . . .
Stop!” It’s hard sounding serious when you can’t stop laughing. I got my hug
after all, as he crushed his belly and chest against mine, and wiped his
snot-shirt on mine.
I screamed in such disgust and whipped my shirt off and
stuffed it in his face. Then I went running toward the Fountain. He was still
trying to take his shirt off, running at a full run, when I surfaced. Then
screamed and went back under when he did his cannon ball routine and smacked
into the water. I jumped on his back and pushed on his head, trying to get it
to go under.
He flipped me over his shoulder and my back stung when it
hit the water. When did he get so strong? I continued into a reverse
somersault, grabbed mud from the bottom of the Fountain, then surfaced and
squashed it on his chest. He grabbed me into a bear hug and crushed me into his
chest, getting mud all over me. I was squirming and squealing for escape when I
noticed his silence. He kept his arms around me. I stopped squirming and looked
at him to see what was up. I followed his eyes and looked down at my chest, my
white sports bra now looking like it got pooped on.
“I’m sure it’ll wash out,” I said, not quite
understanding his silence. He then looked at me in the eyes, like he was
studying me. My forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my mouth, back to my eyes.
“What’s wrong? Do I have a booger on my face?” I said,
wiping my face with my arm again.
“You’re not a little girl anymore, Cat,” he said, his
voice sounding strange, deeper even. He pushed my hair behind my ear and
touched my c-shaped scar. Then he looked at my chest again, and just as the
horrifying reminder was surfacing in my brain, he pointed out, “You’re getting
boobs.”
I punched
him, not remembering ever being so mad at him. Granted, Kay and I would pick on
each other about it without getting embarrassed, and Charles had been my best
friend for 4 ½ years, we knew everything there was to know about each other,
and we were bluntly honest and talked about everything under the sun, but this
was just one of those things that a boy does
not talk to a girl about, best friends or not.
He fell in
the water and I went to shore, not caring if he drowned. I grabbed my shirt and
hurriedly put it back on, but of course it would get stuck on my head and I
wouldn’t be able to find the arm holes. He was walking to shore, holding his
bleeding nose, when I finally got it over my head and pulled down.
“Why’d you
do that, Cat?” he groaned, his voice nasally from holding his nose.
“Don’t call
me that. You can no longer call me Cat. My name is Catina and that is what you
will call me. And you are not to get within six feet of me, so stay over
there.”
He got
closer and I scrambled backward like he was going to tackle me or hit me back
or something. Instead, he grabbed his shirt and put it up against his nose.
“Okay,
Catina, why did you hit me? That really hurt.”
“Because you
were being a pervert and I’m going to hit you every time you start being a
pervert.”
“How was I
being a pervert? I simply pointed out the obvious.”
“Exactly,
the obvious. I don’t need some stupid boy telling me what I already know.”
“Wo, stupid
boy? Apparently you haven’t noticed, but I’m almost as smart as you, one, and
two, I’m no boy.”
“Yes you
are. You want to talk about boobs? You got so much baby fat still on you that
you’ve had boobs since you were born. You’re 13 years old and you haven’t even
started puberty yet. How messed up is that?”
“Stop it,
Cat. You’re only being mean to me because I embarrassed you. I’m sorry. I
didn’t mean to embarrass you. If you hadn’t hauled off and hit me, I was going
to tell you you’re beautiful.”
“Embarrassed?
Me? I don’t get embarrassed. I get revenge, which is exactly what I – What did
you say?”
“You’re not
the only one going through changes. I am too. It started a few months ago. One
day I was just this kid that did whatever I did, no matter how stupid it was,
and the more stupid it was the funnier it was anyway. All of a sudden, I’m
thinking about things I didn’t used to think about. I started not wanting to
get dressed in front of the guys in gym class, but then I also started looking
at the guys in gym class.”
“Oh my God,
Charlie, you’re gay,” I said.
“Not like
that, you idiot. What I mean is, I started noticing some of the changes in
them, too, and I knew they’d be looking at me, trying to figure it out. The locker
room went from smelling like regular boys to smelling like dirty sweaty socks
that haven’t been washed in six months. Then I realized something.”
Charlie
lifted his arm and showed me his armpit.
I
immediately covered my nose. “Put that away, Charlie. It’s you. You smell like
dirty socks.”
“No, look.”
“Do I really
have to?” I was almost whining. He really did stink.
“Yes, you
have to look. It’s only fair, because I looked at your boobs.”
I clenched
my hand into a fist.
“Just
sayin’, Catina.”
So I looked,
and what I found, besides the most horrible smell I’d almost ever encountered,
was hair under his arm, like my dad, except a lot less of it.
Holy heck,
this is what you get for being best friends with a boy. Everything that you’d
rather not know. I looked at it like it was a spider at any moment ready to
jump on me, but looking at his face, he was proud.
“Do you know
what this means, Cat?”
“That you
were less disgusting before?” I said, but I also knew he wasn’t the only one
who had begun to stink and now had to carry around deodorant like I carried bug
spray, and was sprouting hair in places not meant, but heck if I was going to
admit that to him.
He sidled up
closer to me. I moved away, just for him to follow.
“You can put
your arm down now,” I said.
“Oh yeah,”
he chuckled. Then he grabbed both of my hands in his. “We’re going to have a
serious moment, Cat.”
“I hate
having serious moments, Charlie.”
“I know you
do, but we have to. It’s almost noon. Those guys are coming back to take us
away and we have no idea where they’re taking us.”
That’s one
of the other things I liked about Charlie. His logic always made sense. He
didn’t use the same logic of other people, like, ‘Because I said so.’ And he
didn’t sugar-coat anything. He just said it, plain and simple, even brutal at
times, like he was missing some kind of filter. Like what had just happened a
few moments ago. Where I wanted to not think about what was about to happen,
I’d come here to talk about just that. Charlie was the person I wanted to face
my reality with, not just play out fantasies like war.
“One of the
Recruiters is a female, you know.”
“You’re
kidding.” We laughed.
“Everything’s
changing, Cat.”
“You don’t
have to remind me.” I watched a butterfly move from one flower to the next.
“Will you
look at me, please? I can’t do this if you’re not looking at me. We can’t be
friends anymore, Cat.”
It was like
the time he hit me in the stomach with the baseball bat, except instead of a
baseball bat, it was a cannon ball.
“Fine, if
that’s the way you want things to be, then that’s how it’ll be. I’ll probably
never see you again anyway, and I really just don’t care.” My stupid voice
cracked at the end, giving evidence to me getting emotional and that he’d hurt
me. This angered me and I pushed him away from me.
“Stop it.
Let me finish. Cat!”
“No!” I
hollered and took off through the woods, nearly blinded by the tears. This was
the absolute worst day of my life. Strangers showed up at our house telling us
they’re taking us away from our home, and now my best friend was betraying me,
just when I’d really started to like him, in a different way than I’d liked him
before, when I was still trying to figure it all out.
“Cat, Wait!”
“Goodbye,
Charles,” I said, knowing he’d never be able to catch me, knowing I wouldn’t
see him again, even if he changed his mind, but he did catch up to me, somehow
suddenly being able to run faster than me when I’ve always run faster than him
since I’ve known him. I was just beginning to scramble up the Tree (my fort),
when he grabbed my arm and whipped me around. I threw my arm back to hit him.
He crushed me against the tree. I began pummeling his back.
He kissed
me. Not the little boy kiss he’d given me when we were ten, playing truth or
dare with Kadrin and Willie, but a real kiss, like the movies. At first, I
squealed and tried getting leverage to hit him harder or push him off me,
because I didn’t understand and I didn’t like it. But then my face got really
hot and his lips felt cool against mine. It was the whole body feeling of
laying out in 98 degree heat, then jumping into cold water. Shocking, at first.
Then relieving. My body relaxed and I let him kiss me, all thoughts, questions,
and everything else always running around in my brain non-stop, taking a rest.
“Catina
Salsbury, you are the most stubborn girl I know.”
Kiss me,
then insult me. I pulled away, which wasn’t far, being as how I was crushed
against a tree.
“Let go of
me. Leave me be,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound strong. It sounded beaten.
“The reason
I said we couldn’t be friends anymore is because you are becoming a woman and I
am becoming a man.”
I opened my
mouth to say something, so he clamped his hand over my mouth. He yelled over my
muffled squeals, “So I was thinking we should be boyfriend and girlfriend
instead.”
I stopped
squealing at boyfriend, so girlfriend echoed throughout the woods. For once, I
couldn’t say anything.
“Will you be
my girlfriend, Catina?”
He opened
his hand, and in his palm was a ring, made of twine, that he’d made himself.
“I have one
too,” he said, and showed me his right hand, the twine wrapped around his
middle finger.
I wanted to
be excited and happy and thinking this was the best day of my life. Instead, I
was thinking about 1200 hours, the guy with bulging eyes, the woman who peed
standing up, Mom crying on the floor, Dad probably drooling in the kitchen over
uneaten breakfast from this morning, Kadrin smiling like she was better than me
and knew more than me about what was about to happen.
Being taken
away from Mom and Dad, from home, from being Charles’ next door neighbor, from
the Fountain, the Tree, the Hill, the Stone, the Graveyard, and from Charlie.
Crying, I snatched the ring from his hand, kissed him hard on the lips, and
took off toward what was no longer going to be my home and everything I’d ever
known. About 100 feet away, I turned back only once, to see him still standing
there, smiling at me, and I thought I saw what looked like the sun glinting off
tears on his own left cheek. He blew me a kiss, and a gush of wind suddenly
seized my hair and blew it back. I turned and ran the rest of the way to the
house.
Click on this link to get the entire Modules Series for Free July 4th, 5th, 6th, 2018. Or go to www.amazon.com/author/almondieshampine
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