Page 4 of Fall From Grace

“Quick, the giant mutant spiders are right behind us!” Noah screamed.

I looked behind him and gasped. “Noah, duck!” He did and I sighed in relief. “It almost had you.”

He jumped right next to me, knocking into me. He grabbed my arms and I his as we twisted around each other to keep our balance. “I got you, Miss Priss,” he said to me in a princely tone that had us bursting out in laughter.

“Grace!” Mom yelled, snapping me out of our game.

Noah jerked his hands from me and stepped away quickly. He suddenly looked nervous, tugging on his dirty shirt, and looking down and around, anywhere but at my mom as she stared him down.

“Mom, this is my friend Noah,” I told her quickly, not wanting him to feel uncomfortable and look so unlike that confident boy I had first met.

“How’d you make a friend when we’ve only been here two days?” she asked me curiously. “So, you live around here, Noah?” She looked to him.

He finally met her eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s great.” Mom gave him a smile. “You’ll have to introduce us,” his face paled at her words, “but, Grace, you can’t just run off into the woods like that. It’s dangerous,” Mom cautioned.

“Mom, Noah knows his way around.”

She sighed. “I’m sure he does.” Mom looked at him again. “Noah, would you like to come in and eat with us?”

Something about the shine in his eyes and the hard swallow I watched slide down his throat told me he liked the idea, but he still looked hesitant. “Umm…”

“Do you need to go ask your parents?” Mom asked about his parents again.

He straightened quickly. “No, they won’t mind.”

He ate with us that night. I’d never seen someone eat so much food. I smiled proudly that day, thinking his appetite was because of Mom’s cooking until he left, and Mom stood by the door watching him dart over toward the trailers.

That night, I listened in on my parents as she told Dad about Noah. “I know how dirty a kid can get while playing outside during the summer, but Steven, he looked as if he hadn’t had a bath or a decent meal in God knows how long. And as soon as he saw me, he started fidgeting with his clothes like he was used to grown-ups commenting about how dirty they were and was self-conscious.” Mom sighed. “It bothered me.”

“Don’t think too much of it,” Dad told her. “You’re making assumptions when he might just bethatdirty from playing outside, unlike you thought.”

Mom’s voice softened, “You’re right, I do tend to get ahead of myself.”

I heard Dad kiss Mom’s forehead and slipped back upstairs into my room from the hallway where I was peeping outside their door.

Only Mom hadn’t been wrong that day. Noah’s parents were far different from mine.

2

Grace age 6

Noah age 7

Girls are frustrating, I don’t understand them… But Grace isn’t so bad. She’s super girly when it comes to things like bugs and stuff, but she’s not afraid to have fun and get dirty even in the ugly dresses she wears… I guess it’s not too ugly because she’s not bad to look at and the longer we stay in the sun, the more freckles she wakes up to the next day. I like her freckles, even the gap in her teeth… Grace is pretty, I suppose… looking at her… I sort of understand why adults want to kiss and touch.

I wish she wasn’t so nosy, though.

I’m embarrassed and I don’t like to feel that way. I don’t want her to find out about the house I live in. The parents I was born to. The way my Dad gave Mom the drugs she wanted that slowly chipped away at her life. I don’t want her to find out how unimportant I am, not when she looks at me like I can show her anything…

I’m not needed, perhaps I’m not loved more than a drug in this family. She doesn’t need to know that though.

N.P.

The next day, and the one after that, and every hour of daylight that summer, Noah came to play with me. He became my friend within a day’s time, but the extent of what we became rapidly grew with age, and even though it started out innocent, it couldn’t stay that way.

When he came back over that next day, I was so surprised to see that his hair wasn’t brown like I had originally thought. Now that it was washed, it was blond. He wore the same clothes he did the day before, though, and I still wore dresses. Mom cooked for us every day, often scolding us for sneaking off into the hills when she told us not to. Noah behaved around Mom and Dad, always. It was when he was alone with me that he let his cheekiness show.