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Molly Baker Does a Round-Off
My eyes are closed, my heart has slowed and soon I will be dead. I should be thinking about my wife but instead, here is Molly Baker standing in front of perfectly trimmed hedges in the front yard of her house, and I am twelve, wondering desperately what her bush looks like, even as I appear safe and non-threatening as a boy-friend (as opposed to a boyfriend) is supposed to look. And she's twelve too, looking every bit of it—skinny legs dotted with mosquito bites, red miniskirt just above knobby knees, brown ponytail, braces. The braces back then were serious heavy metal, but on Molly they weren't so bad because her lips were always pink. Even now, as I lay quietly dying on a hospital room bed that stinks of rubbing alcohol, I wonder what made her lips so pink, and I can still feel the urge I felt then: the burning curiosity of what her lips would feel like if I kissed them.
Her breasts were almost too small to be considered "breasts," but they were definitely there, and naturally they didn't go unnoticed, even as she stares at me, with her hand on her hip, looking irritated.
"Are you listening, Scotty?" she says, because we are in seventh grade and the boys still allow the girls to boss them around.
"Huh?"
"What are you staring at?"
"I dunno," I said, focusing instead on her brown eyes and the freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose. "I like your shirt. That's all." She lifted a doubtful eyebrow at me and rolled her eyes. I cleared my throat. "So," I said. "What were you sayin'?"
"I learned how to do a round-off." She stood straight and squinted at me in the sun.
"What's a round-off?"
"It's like a cartwheel. Watch."
She motions for me to move back, which I do, then steps to the corner of her yard and lifts her arms up like a gymnast. In seconds she is barreling across the grass and flipping over on the palms of her hands, and what began as a boring acrobatic act suddenly becomes truly amazing, because when she has her legs over her head, her miniskirt collapses into the hem of her shirt and I am standing less than fifteen feet away from Molly Baker's white cotton panties. I only get a glimpse — just long enough to piss me off, drive me wild, and make the crotch of my shorts shuffle. Soon she is back on her feet and brushing blades of grass from her palms.
"Well?" she asks.
"Nice," I reply.
I should be thinking of my wife.
Where this story first appeared: Boston Literary Magazine.
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