Splinter

We’re not allowed to leave the yard, even when the other kids are playing in the wooded triangle everyone calls the island right across the street because ticks, our mom says, cars, teenagers, glass, so we watch from the back gate, which is warped shut and too high to see over but we take turns standing on the middle crossboard gripping disintegrating pickets and we can see everything, almost, one-third of everything, one at a time, like when Nicky D’Angelo says dare me to go in the sewer? and the other kids say yeah so he does and they run away cackling, but we stand at the gate and wait for Nicky to climb out and we wait some more and then our mom says dinnertime and we look at each other, it’s almost dark and we don’t know what to do, Nicky isn’t really a friend, his family lives way down the hill behind the Shell station and they go to a different school and they’re wild, our mom says, they’re all wild, we guess you’d have to be wild to climb down the sewer but still we could tell someone, we should, and then the back door bangs open and she yells now! so we go inside with splinters in our palms and choke down canned corn and bloody cube steaks, thinking of Nicky out there in the dark, Nicky in the sewer, no one watching or waiting for him anymore. No one mentions him again. And later, much later, thirty or forty years later, we’ll look him up on Facebook and see that he goes by Nick now and he’s living in Florida, he’s living, which means he must have climbed out, maybe when we were switching places on the gate, maybe after we went inside, and we should feel better, we should, but we don’t.