The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [16]
“We want to play,” Mickey said to Sean.
“No thanks,” he said. “It works best with three.”
Tim was less polite. “Go screw yourselves.”
Gwen sucked in her breath. That was a curse, or as good as. Go-Go was delighted, repeating it over and over. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”
Mickey was not easily intimidated. She put her hands on her hips and stared Sean down. “This lot doesn’t belong to you.”
“Doesn’t belong to you, either.”
“It belongs to her, though.” Pointing at Gwen. “To her family. They bought a whole bunch of land when they built their house.”
“No way,” Sean said. We all knew—except gullible Go-Go—that it was an outrageous lie.
“Go look it up,” Mickey said.
“Where?”
“Downtown.”
“Get out of here,” Tim said.
Go-Go was running in circles. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”
Sean took Mickey’s measure. “You any good?”
“What does it matter? It will be a better game with five than with three. We’ll play two-on-two, with a permanent pitcher.”
Gwen assumed she would be the permanent pitcher. She was. She rolled the ball across the plate, first to Sean, then to Tim, then to Go-Go, finally Mickey. Tim’s ball came back at her, hard, right to her midsection, and it clearly wasn’t accidental. Gwen clamped her lips tight to keep from crying.
But it was a better game, just as Mickey had said. She and Tim faced off against Sean and Go-Go. Gwen was supposed to get a turn at some point, but she didn’t, not that day, and not often in the days ahead. The game evolved into something more like football or rugby or dodgeball, with complicated rules about tackling and catching. We became attuned to the noises of the street, the sound of approaching cars and trucks, and learned to time the action of the game around the traffic. We fought sometimes, went home early, yet came back together the next day, or the day after if there was rain. We suspended the games during the heart of the winter, but started playing again long before spring. The Halloran boys were baffling to the girls. Sometimes they presented as a unified front, sometimes it was every man for himself, and, most often, it was two against one, with Go-Go, the baby, the odd one out. And Go-Go was easy for the girls to gang up on as well, so it was just as often four on one. Every group needs its goat, and Go-Go was the inevitable choice in ours.
We were having a four-on-one day in late April, a cranky, frustrating day in which all the gains of spring seemed to have been lost. The sky was gray, the air had a real chill in it, and the things that had budded and bloomed over the past month looked miserable. Daffodils and tulips bent their heads, beaten down. On the way to the field, Go-Go jumped on one of Tally Robison’s flowerbeds with both feet, irritating the rest of us, who understood our freedom came at a price. If we gave adults any reason to complain about us, we knew we would lose privileges.
But Go-Go became only more intolerable when we tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t jump on flowers. He pinched the girls, he pulled at their clothes, he flailed at his brothers. Finally, in frustration, Mickey threw the red rubber ball over his head, into the street. Later, she said it wasn’t on purpose, which would fit with her general incompetence on the playing field, yet it had seemed deliberate to the rest of us, an exaggerated, high, arching throw that would have soared over anyone’s head, but especially over little Go-Go’s. There’s no doubt that she said: “Go get it, you moron.”
Which Go-Go did, despite the rumbling noise that we all knew to heed. He dashed into the road after the bouncing ball just as one of the huge mill trucks came around the curve, going much too fast, but we all knew the mill trucks went too fast and it was our responsibility to be careful. The rest of us watched, frozen, mesmerized. We were going to see someone die. We watched the truck bearing down on the boy and the