17/90,

I am attached to the idea of escape. When there is no way out, and at the same time no place to hide, my breathing becomes shallow; my hands go white; I blink faster; I don't speak. I expect the same from a story.

This is why I read and reread The Angry Idol, The Ghost Boat, Saturday Night, Jane Emily, The Secret Garden, Heidi, Anne of Green Gables... books my mom found in the rows of library books, had found in her own childhood and shared with me. I escaped, like so many of us do, into the summers of these books.

I launched myself capriciously into moments that resembled the tales, turning the foundation my dad dug for our future garage into the winding paths of Mary Lennox's hideaway. I slipped my Sunday church shoes from their box in the closet and onto my dirty feet so that my steps made the right tip-tap-scuff along our brick sidewalk. I spoke with an English accent to a man that I forgot was my father and, in that moment, was without doubt the groundskeeper. On special occasions, he begs me to repeat those lines and I still blush at how fully I made myself that character.

There was a moment when I realized that my sister shares this passion with me, this search for moments when we can willingly suspend disbelief. I don't know if she realized it. I don't know if I ever told her.



The toy car was shaped like a scorpion. The orange body had already begun to fade when I found it among the alley rocks. Fishing in my pocket, I unwound my piece of purple and bound the scorpion's tail. I held the string, and when I continued my walk down the alley, I heard the scorpion's wheels clicking and clunking over the uneven ground.

There is a church behind my house. It has been, forgive this, a forbidden playground for as long as I can remember. Looking back, it's no wonder they didn't want us to practice tennis against the brick walls or use their water taps to fill our balloons. They yelled at us to stay away, to keep our bikes on the sidewalk. But they could never keep me from their back stairs, the few concrete steps hidden behind the shrubbery and ending a man's height below the sidewalk at their office door.

I hid here, on the cool concrete landing. As I pulled the scorpion behind me, I knew where I was headed. I knew that this rejected toy would join the rocks and leaves that I'd collected and hidden in the landing, under the thin metal drainage grate that my five-year-old fingers could reach through and twist up. I stored everything the alley gave me here, sure that Scout would have acted the same. I knew they were safe. I knew that this was were they were meant to be.


When my sister walked into the house years later, when my fingers no longer fit into the openings of the drainage grate, my sister walked into the living room. Purple string hung damp, sticky in her hands. She unraveled the decomposing mess and showed me a faded scorpion-shaped car.