You’re twelve years old.
You’re on a bench next to a geometric fountain at the mall.
You’re supposed to meet your parents here in a few minutes, but you’re early.
You just popped a bath capsule at Bath & Body Works that was nestled in some hay, and then you got out of there before the salesperson could come over and ask why you were rummaging around in that decorative basket.
You stood in a glass elevator next to a man with a fat mustache and a turquoise knapsack who looked at you angrily.
You check your watch. You’re still early.
You stare up at a ten-foot-tall clock.
It’s so big that a person could step inside and be the hands of the clock. Maybe, like, a sleek woman in a black leotard. And then every once in a while she’d jauntily step out of the clock to a jazz beat. You think that maybe one day this could be you. As if it’s plausible that this is something a person could do for a living.
You see your friend April with her parents. She wanders over. She has a new bracelet with a silver moon charm. She shows it to you with a superior look on her face. Who cares?, you say to yourself. It ricochets around inside, as if echoing through a thousand canyons—who cares, who cares! But you just smile and nod.
Your parents are late.
You wish you had a best friend who was a casual pastel drawing of a flamingo that would hop off the page and follow you around and pretty much just agree with everything you said.
The gentleman with the big mustache and the turquoise knapsack walks by and looks at you again. You’re only twelve but you can feel his dark, male anger.
You listen to the fountain gurgle.
A bird got in and it’s flying around the skylit beams.
You think about how great it felt to pop that capsule.
You ponder the project you keep thinking of starting, where you’d sketch a different seashell for each month of the year and make a calendar out of it. But you can’t tell if it’s really you to do something like that.
There’s an old lady with some beads sitting next to you. You double-check. She’s definitely got some kind of bead deal going.
You suddenly want to tell her everything, all your problems, to lay your head in her lap and pour your heart out and have her nod in a calm, wise way and for God’s sake tell you what her bead deal is, and you throw a glance at her to see if this is even a remote possibility, but she doesn’t seem to notice you. Which is O.K. You’re still comforted by the fact that it’s her sitting there, of all the people it could have been.
So you keep sitting, and listening to the elevator music, to the gurgle of the fountain, and waiting for your parents to come and meet you at the appointed place in the mall.
