Photo by Tim Cooper on Unsplash
A swift breeze blew through the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees, emitting a mist of sticky sap. It reminded Jennifer of the palm of her hand sticking to their car door handle as she left to go to school that morning. The jacaranda flowers, shaped like the horn of an antique phonograph, had stuck to the handle. It was a momentous day. She’d been able to walk home from school, the first day she wouldn’t be the oldest kid in after school daycare, the first day of dressing how she wanted, the first day of independence.
She paused at the edge of the parking lot to Big Ed’s Liquor Store, which was at the end of the block, and put her bottle of Clearly Canadian raspberry flavored water and a box of Cherry Bombs on the concrete wall, stuffing the change in her pockets.
Big Ed’s was owned by Bill, a Vietnamese immigrant—or was it Cambodian, she couldn’t remember which—with a strong, rectangular face and a broad smile. Jennifer liked Bill. He smiled all the time and didn’t treat her any differently than the way he treated her mother or any other customer.
“No momma today?” he had asked her.
“Oh, she’s still at work. I walked home today,” Jennifer said, and smiled.
Bill gave back her change and nodded.
She’s asked her mom if she could walk to the store with the money she’d received Wednesday night babysitting the Anderson twins across the street. She’d had to dress appropriately, no makeup or any other accoutrements to make her stand out from any other babysitter. The twin’s dad, Brady, had said she could use the phone and call anyone she wanted once the boys went to bed.
Who would she call? she thought. She just smiled and said, “That’s okay.”
Jennifer had only been in her new middle school for a few months, a midyear transfer after spending the first three and a half months at the middle school she thought she’d be graduating from. At the end of fall though, her mother was promoted, and they were afforded the chance to move to a real house, with a backyard, and a bedroom for each of them, as well as a spare room, which her mother said was for “whatever they wanted”. It was mainly storage still, but her mother had put a love seat in there, and sometimes Jennifer went in there to read, protected amidst the boxes.
She grabbed her items and began to walk again, admiring the blanket of purple jacaranda flowers covering the asphalt. Jennifer looked down at her top. It wasn’t anything flashy, but that hadn’t stopped her mom from objecting to her wearing it when she first pointed it out at the store. It was just a button-down shirt with a color, burgundy, but with small white roses, almost imperceptible to the eye, spread throughout. The linen felt nice against her body. Jennifer French, the Jennifer in her class that everybody already knew, had said “nice blouse” that day, and Jennifer had just said “thanks”.
There was laughter in her left ear, and she turned out of curiosity, out of the deep need that draws human beings to want to join into laughter. A vibrant yellow car drove by, a car Jennifer recognized as a “Woody”. It wasn’t one, but it looked like one, she had thought years later.
Something flew out of the rear window, something that Jennifer’s brain didn’t have time to process and categorize, before feeling as if some massive force was pushing her nose in. Whatever it was, it was as if the strength of the impact were tied to the rising decibels of laughter coming from the car. The yellow car kept driving.
Jennifer looked down at the ground, and saw that what hit her was a full, unopened can of Arizona Iced Tea, it’s pastel design and comically large size taunting her. Not far from the can was a slowly forming puddle of blood. Her blood. She didn’t feel any pain, but she dropped to the ground nonetheless, her face now inches away from the sidewalk, watching the bloody splotches expand. She raised her head and looked around, desperate to be both seen, as well as hidden.
Her blouse had gotten surprisingly little blood on it so far, but she knew that she was going to have to sully the shirt to survive this ordeal. She wasn’t afraid of bloody noses; her childhood had been full of them when the weather was dry, or the air was dusty. Jennifer was more stunned than hurt, and it was her wounded humiliation that pained her now. She grabbed her blouse with both hands and raised it up to her nose, wiping the blood and then pinching the bridge as she had been taught.
It was then that she realized she was crying, and with that realization, begat more crying. She wanted desperately for someone to stop and help. A car drove by, and she imagined what she looked like to them, her knees bent, one hand splayed flat against the concrete, one up to her face. The car didn’t stop, but within moments of that one driving by, she could tell by the whirr of the motor that another car had slowed down. She refused to look up at the car and felt violated to be looked at in this way. The car resumed its speed though and kept on going as her tears morphed into heaves, as she mourned the fact that nobody was going to stop and help her to her feet.
Movement directly ahead of her caught her eye though. A teenage girl was walking towards her. She was wearing blue jeans and a white top slung down over one shoulder so that you could see her pink bra strap. Jennifer stumbled, but then got to her feet by the time the girl arrived, as if anticipating the arrival of a visiting foreign dignitary.
“Hi sweetheart,” the girl said, smiling. She had a big, beautiful grin, with two large front teeth that were confident and proud, suggesting she hadn’t ever needed braces. Jennifer could feel her own brace-covered teeth smothered with blood and was suddenly aware of the acrid taste.
“Hi,” she said, then having forgotten she had been crying, snorted, sucking up a mixture of snot and blood.
The girl put her left arm around Jennifer’s shoulder, and then held her right hand in her own. They walked along the sidewalk towards the row of homes.
“Where do you live?” the girl asked.
Jennifer pointed to the spot about two football fields down the street and to the left, a Spanish-style home with a large half-moon bay window, bougainvilleas sprouting up around the front steps.
“What happened?” the girl asked.
“Someone threw their can at me,” Jennifer said. She licked what blood she could off her teeth and lips. “I’m okay. My nose just bleeds a lot.”
The girl smelled like strawberries, and Jennifer felt like the girl’s arm was covering her shame and embarrassment.
“Ohh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s crazy what people will do these days. Where do you go to school?”
“Stevens Middle School.”
The girl smiled and then looked up at the sky. “Hey, I went there!” She looked back down at Jennifer. “Is Mrs. Miller still there?”
“From home ec? Yeah, I have her.” Jennifer was trying desperately not to snort. She could tell the bleeding had stopped, but the outflow of snot hadn’t subsided, and her dry heaves were just waiting in the wings.
“I had so much fun in that class. We made a pair of sweats, and I got sick on the day when we were supposed to finish them, and now I have a pair of sweats that are more like bell bottoms,” the girl laughed a little at that as they walked on. “That’s a nice shirt. I’m sorry you had to get blood all over it. Are those flowers?”
Jennifer felt tingly and warm and comfortable now. “Uh huh. Roses,” she replied.
“That’s funny,” the girl said and laughed.
Jennifer wasn’t sure why it was funny, but she laughed along anyways.
“These flowers are so pretty, aren’t they?” the girl asked, gesturing with her free hand to the street. “A little bit smelly, but it’s worth it to see all this pretty purple, right?” Jennifer felt a tingle and a sense of calm. The girl continued, “They’re a little smelly, but this street is the most beautiful one to drive through in Spring.” When they got within a few yards of it, Jennifer pointed across the street to her house, and the girl deftly directed them across the street.
“Did you see who did it?” the girl asked. Jennifer was still embarrassed about the mess of now drying blood, snot and tears that she felt she was now mostly comprised of, but she still took a moment to look up at the girl’s face.
When Jennifer saw it over the girl’s shoulder, she did her best to keep it inside. The long rectangular back end of the car that had carried the boisterous, menacing laughter, the long slender hood, and most of all, its audacious yellow color. It couldn’t be, she thought, but she knew it must be.
“No, I didn’t see,” Jennifer lied.
The girl’s arm was still around Jennifer’s shoulder, but now it had been transformed from the welcoming embrace of a mother hen, to the mangled, treacherous grip of the grim reaper. Jennifer took a deep, inaudible breath, working hard to hide her sudden trepidation.
As they got to Jennifer’s front lawn, the girl slowly let her grip go, and Jennifer slid away.
“Just get yourself cleaned up, okay hun?”
“Okay,” said Jennifer, “thank you.”
She hurried inside her living room and threw herself to the back of the couch that leaned up against the drawn curtains. Even though she knew, she still poked her head in between the curtains to watch the girl cross the street, walk briskly three houses down to where the yellow car was parked, and go inside. When the girl’s door shut behind her, Jennifer felt as if someone had punched her as hard as they could in the stomach; a pain ten times more palpable than the iced tea can that hit her nose. She started crying, and then started wailing, the quietude of the house giving her protection to grieve further.
The grandfather clock that hung on the wall struck four times, and Jennifer was reminded that her mother would be home soon. She looked down, and saw that her shirt was ruined; dark, dried blood stains darkening her burgundy top. She ran to the bedroom, took off her shirt, and vigorously scrubbed her face, neck and shoulders, making sure to wash the remaining makeup off of her eyelids. Running to her bedroom to put on a new shirt, she thought frantically about what to do with it. She scrunched it up in her hands, holding it close to her heart, and then walked with determination to the backyard, opening the plastic lid to their garbage bin, and stuffing it deep inside.
It was then that she heard the struggling motor of her mom’s Volvo drive down the street, and quickly ran back inside the house. She opened the front window blinds, taking another look at the yellow car as her mom entered the side door, her arms filled with plastic binders.
“J.J.! J.J.! Are you here?” her mother asked. She called her J.J. and had for a while. Jennifer was okay with it. It was better than when her mother was angry and yelled out her full name, Jonathan James.
“I’m in here, mom,” Jennifer responded, and walked towards the kitchen.
Her mother smiled cathartically and dumped the contents of her arms on the dining room table. She wrapped one arm around Jennifer and drifted both of them over to the couch, like a fairy floating effortlessly across the living room.
Jennifer snuggled into her mother’s side.
“What happened to your shirt? Weren’t you wearing the maroon one today?”
“Burgundy,” Jennifer corrected. “I spilled some milk on it, and just decided to change.” Her mom never noticed the shirt was missing, as Jennifer knew she wouldn’t.
The round blots of Jennifer’s blood dried on the sidewalk the next day when the temperature rose to 96 degrees. Jennifer never saw the car, or the girl again after that day, but the stain stayed there for the next few years, and Jennifer would look at the spot with a melancholic nostalgia, and remember not the pain from the can, but the sobs in her living room. Rains would come, and the stain would fade, but even when Jennifer and her mother moved away just two years later, the stains could still be seen. The year after they left, it rained for ten days straight, and it was only then that the stain was completely gone.
Randall Terrell is a freelance writer and public relations consultant living in Southern California's High Desert. When he's not writing and reading, he's looking for adventures throughout the desert to share with his wife and 11-year-old son. He is currently working on memoir that tells of his efforts to track down his homeless father's last days. He can be found on Instagram at @_RandallTerrell_