you? Just five minutes! It wouldn’t do any good, just like it wouldn’t do any good to go running after the Child Catcher, begging for more time. So I sit here with a drenched raincoat sleeve from wiping down the condensation on my window. Helpless.
Judith breaks the hug first, picks up her suitcase, and walks down the brick path, the same brick path she’s walked down since she and Anne started school, the same brick path Sarah Green lines with begonias in the summer and chrysanthemums in the fall. She presses her yellow card up to the bus door, and it folds open. A few blurred shapes through the front windows tell me Judith isn’t the only pickup this morning—I can’t make any details out through the rain. But I don’t imagine there are many smiles in that bus today.
As the bus pulls away, I throw the car into reverse, back out onto the street, and pause. Even after the time change, darkness lies over our neighborhood like a dreary blanket, mostly thanks to the rain. My phone tells me it’s seven forty-five, enough time for me to make it to school before first period ends and my Q rating goes down another tenth of a point.
Fuck it, I think, and I drive in the opposite direction toward Sarah Green’s house, past the empty playground with its perfect layer of shredded tire rubber, undisturbed by the scuffs of Keds and Reeboks. Even in the wind and rain, the swings are as still as broken pendulums, and the metal slide is a dull gray, never having been polished by the bottoms of children. I don’t remember ever seeing a child inside the enclosure’s fence. Kids appear in the morning when the buses come, then in the late afternoon when the buses return. They hurry inside and bend over books until dinner. If they’re anything like Anne and Freddie, they eat like hungry soldiers in a mess hall, and bend over their books until bedtime. Most of them are bleached pale, even in the summer months.
Sometimes I think all of childhood has disappeared.
I stop the car in front of the Greens’ colonial. Sarah is on her knees, robe fallen open to expose a thin nightgown. She’s pulling out the mums she planted only a few weeks ago, fists digging into the earth, flinging mud and roots in every direction. A few clumps of dirt stick in her hair, and a smudge of brown mars her face when she tries to wipe away tears.
“Sarah?” I say, stepping out of my car. “What’s going on?”
She doesn’t raise her head, and she doesn’t answer me directly, only claws at the ground, shredding mums until the brick path is coated with a blanket of yellow petals, leaves, and dirt. “I hate this fucking color. I hate it.”
I’ve always liked yellow. It’s a happy color; neither tranquil nor overwhelming. Not in your face, like red, which only reminds me of danger and pain and evil. I think of the butter yellow curtains Malcolm and I hung in the nursery before Freddie was born, the gold of fresh straw they used to feed horses before the farms turned to housing developments, sunshiny yolks smiling up from a frying pan on lazy Sunday mornings.
All of a sudden, yellow is the ugliest color on Earth.
Sarah finally stops her garden destruction and looks up at me. “She couldn’t have slid all the way down to seven-point-nine, El. There’s no way. You have her in two classes this year, right? Advanced bio and anatomy. She’s on time, she’s never sick, and she aces everything.”
I nod. Judy Green has been at the top of her class since I’ve known her. “She outranks Anne,” I say. “And Anne’s good.” I’m not bragging, only stating a fact, although if Judy lost more than two points, I suppose I’ve got my tense wrong.
Now Sarah stands up, pulling her robe around her, belting it with mud-caked hands. She doesn’t seem to care that she looks as if she’s been wallowing around in a pigsty. Her voice, normally soft, hardens. “Then how did she lose the Q points? Tell me that, El. Did you know something? Did you hold anything back from me?”
“No. Of course not.” This is one