Wild - Writing Challenge Piece

The boy was wild.  Everybody could see it.

Grammy told me that boys like him were trouble.  He was arrested for spray painting the word fascists across the doors of the jailhouse.  He was also detained once for going after his daddy's truck with a baseball bat.

His daddy was a mean drunk, though.  I didn't ask what he'd done to deserve a broken windshield and a couple of dents in his hood.  I could imagine though, that it was something not very nice.

I turned twelve this summer, and he was seventeen.  I almost fell to my death the first time I found him, hiding in my tree house.  He was slumped up against the wall with a bloody nose and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.  The sight of him startled me, but I didn't scream or fall off the ladder like another sort of girl might have.  I almost did.

The curtains my Grammy sewed for the little windows were fluttering in a sudden, strong breeze.  It gusted between us for a minute like a ghost leaving earth.  Any amount of prickliness I felt towards him evaporated as soon as I got a good look at him.  He was cradling his arm against his body and there were streaks of dirt on his cheeks.  I could tell he'd been crying.

I didn't ask him what he was doing here.  I had a daddy who drank, too, and I'd been hiding away in this tree house since I was a baby.  It was hidden away from people who didn't want to look at you anyway.  Nobody wanted to see your black eye or broken arm.  You might as well make it easy on them and find a place where you were invisible.  That's what I thought.

I never thought I could want somebody else near to me, but I didn't mind.  He treated me like I was only a kid, but I could tell that he was a kid, too.


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This post is an entry at Trifecta Writing Challenge. The deal is that you have to write a piece using the third definition of a given word in 33 -333 words. You should give it a try, too and link up here. This week's word is wild.



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