Maybe down in Cleveland Heights they play it, or across town on the west side. Rub the dent on your arm, the red welt where the bracelet snapped and split, until it goes away.Īsk anyone in Cleveland and they’ll tell you that girls in Lakeview Heights don’t play this kind of game. No talking about it afterwards, no laughing, no anything, even if it’s just the three of us. No talking with the boys outside of the game. Don’t tell anyone if you hate it, if his tongue feels like a dead fish in your mouth, if his hands leave snail-trails of sweat down your sides. You do exactly what the color prescribes, even if you hate him, like we hate Travis Coleman whose fingernails are always grubby. ![]() You don’t pick the boy he picks you they’re all the same to you. You go with the boy who snaps your bracelet. ![]() It doesn’t have a name, this game, and we don’t talk about it even when we’re by ourselves, after school, the boys gone off to football or paper routes or hockey and no teachers around. In eighth grade we’re too old for four-square and tetherball and kickball. After a minute she’ll follow him and meet him under the bleachers, far down the field, where the teachers can’t see. And whoever he picked, Angie or Carrie or Mandy, will watch him go. He’ll walk back the way he came, along the edge of the football field. ![]() One of them reaches out and snaps a bracelet off one of us, breaking it like a rubber band, fast and sharp as plucking a guitar string. The boys come past us, in a bunch, all elbows, laughing. We stand on the playground by the flagpole, arms ringed with colored bracelets from the drugstore, waiting. We play the game at recess, and the teachers don’t notice. Green means up your shirt blue means down his pants. This is how we play the game: pink means kissing red means tongue.
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