5. Monica Sommerlad’s Hair Ribbon

I was in back of the Stanley’s house, snow-saucering down the steep hill with Philip Reich. These were two things I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I wasn’t supposed to play with Philip Reich because a few months before he and his brother Kevin had gotten in trouble for taking a younger girl from around the block named Josie to the cows field and making her take off her pants. Josie was eight, a year younger than Philip and me; Kevin was three years older than us. The story had gotten out, mostly because Philip told everyone about it, and word had filtered up to the parents. Since then most of us had been forbidden to spend time with Philip and Kevin.

Not hanging out with Kevin wasn’t such a big thing, since he was older and I didn’t spend much time with him to begin with, but Philip I’d been on and off friends with ever since we moved to the block. We weren’t best buddies, but he did live right across the street, and sometimes I’d see him out there on his front stoop by himself and it was just convenient to go over and see what he was doing, whether he wanted to throw a football back and forth. He had an amazing throwing arm for a kid, though he’d broken his leg in a car accident with his parents when he was six and he still walked with a little limp, so he wasn’t into Little League and or any other kind of organized sports.

It was a Friday afternoon, a few weeks before Christmas, and I’d been bored in the house after school, nothing on television, no homework to do (I liked doing homework; I was good at it; I kept this to myself) when I heard crunches and swooshes from next door. I went out onto the porch, even though it was freezing, and saw someone, alone, trudging up the hill behind Stanley’s house with one of the plastic saucers we all used for sledding. The hill behind Stanley’s house was steep and rocky; it had the biggest drop-off of any of the houses in that part of the neighborhood, almost straight down into the woods. That was the biggest problem with sledding there, it wasn’t cleared. You had to steer to avoid the trees. Around the middle of last winter, the Stanleys had asked my parents to stop letting me sled there, saying it was just too dangerous. Which we all knew, but it was still some kind of awesome ride.

I sat there watching for a few minutes, as the figure made his way to the top of the hill, and then with a running start went feet-first straight down that hill. He was going so fast, it looked like a blur.

“I’m going to go out for a little while,” I called to my mother, who was downstairs in the basement doing laundry.

“Not too long,” she called back. “Remember that we have to go to the Cub Scouts thing tonight, and I want you to have some dinner before then.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just need some air.”

I knew it was Philip Reich out there sledding. I’d recognized him from the porch. And I knew we weren’t supposed to go behind Stanley’s house. But it had just looked so amazing, seeing Philip fly down the hill like that, like a professional from the Olympics, like something out of a movie.

“Hey,” Philip said, when I showed up with my yellow saucer. Philip’s saucer was cooler than mine, red with white stripes.

“Hey,” I answered.

“It’s icy,” Philip said. “I totally wiped out last time.”

“I saw you. I was watching.”

Philip must have known we were all forbidden to play with him. He never said anything about it on the school bus, though, and he hadn’t even attempted to try to come over my house ever since the thing with Josie had gotten out. Maybe his parents had told him he was forbidden to play with us, too. He’d always had a little touch of that to him, of someone who just figured he was eventually going to be an outsider, and was just waiting for it to kick in.

“You want to give it a try?” Philip asked.

“Absolutely.”

My first time down was terrifying. The path was sheer ice, just like Philip said. I got maybe a third of the way down and abandoned, deliberately rolled off my sled.

“Told you,” Philip said, when I made it back to the top. “It took me, like, four tries before I made it all the way down. I’m cold. I’m going home.”

And he left. Like I said, it was almost as if he wanted to be left out.

I waited until he was out of sight. I wanted to give one last try before I went in. But I didn’t want Philip to see me bailing again.

This second time, I did resist the urge to leap off midway, although that urge was strong. I made it to the bottom, which was what I wanted. But then I kept on going, straight into a tree. I hit full-on and head-first, and then went sprawling through the air and landed on my face.

I may have been out for a few minutes. I was still face down in the snow when I started to come awake. It took me a few seconds to remember what had happened. I felt my head—there was a huge bump up there. My ears were ringing. Everything, the woods, the snow, my house with its lit-up windows, right next door, looked weird to me, like I was seeing it from a distance.

I shook my head. But I still couldn’t make my eyes focus right, and the ringing in my ears wouldn’t go away.

I was afraid. I sat back on the ground, held my head in my hands, waited for this to pass. But it didn’t pass. I started shivering and got up and walked home.

At home, I felt the same way. Like everything was underwater. Like I wasn’t in charge of my body. I started to get a really bad headache, like the one I’d had when I had rheumatic fever and they’d had to rush me to the hospital.

I didn’t let on to my mother. How could I? It was my own fault. I shouldn’t have been over there sledding. I shouldn’t have been playing with Philip Reich. I ate my dinner, hot dog and carrot sticks. I dressed up in my Cub Scouts uniform. In the car ride over to the Fire House, I kept checking my ears to see if there was anything wet coming from them. I’d read somewhere about people bleeding from the ears, after getting hit in the head.

“You’re so quiet,” my mother said in the car. “Are you nervous about the singing?”

“No, I’m okay,” I said.

The Cub Scouts thing was the holiday gathering for all the local troops at the Mombasha Fire House in town. Each troop had to sing a Christmas carol and at the end we all got treat bags with some scout-oriented gifts, like kits for cars you could make out of balsa wood. As I walked in, I saw the den mothers had really outdone themselves decorating the firehouse this year. There were Santa faces taped on the walls, and all the tables had green and red tablecloths, with fake snow arranged in little snow drifts. Christmas carols played from the stereo system, loud and buzzy, and there was a big, tinselly Christmas tree in the corner, blinking white and blue lights.

Walking felt like walking uphill. It was all I could do to get over to my troop, 246. My head was throbbing. Under my Cub Scout hat, it was like I could feel the bump getting bigger and bigger. I smiled hello to everyone and found a chair and closed my eyes.

“Are you okay?” my den mother asked, when she noticed me sitting there by myself not speaking to anyone.

I was usually a pretty talkative kid.

I could barely hear her. I nodded my head yes as enthusiastically as I could, so she wouldn’t think anything was wrong.

I couldn’t remember ever being so scared in my life, not even during the time I was at the hospital.

The entertainment began. Troop 186 sang “Holly Jolly Christmas.” Troop 210 sang “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Then one of the girl’s troops came up to sing. The holiday gathering was mixed, for both the Cub Scouts and the Brownies. It was the only time of year we did that.

They started singing “Silent Night.” I noticed one of the Brownies was a girl from my class, Monica Sommerlad. I’d never paid any attention to her. She wasn’t a smart girl, wasn’t one of the dummies. She was just one of the people I saw every day.

Tonight, she had a green ribbon in her blonde hair. I couldn’t take my eyes off that ribbon. It seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. Monica seemed like the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Not in a boyfriend/girlfriend way, it wasn’t like that. She was just…beautiful, in a way that made me want to cry and laugh at the same time.

I looked around the room. I loved this, all these decorations, these songs. Having my troop mates, my friends, all around me. I noticed Philip Reich, sitting at the end of the table, and I thought: what was going on with him, it would pass. We would be allowed to play with him again. He’d be okay in time.

Our time to sing came. My mouth wasn’t working any better than my legs, and my hearing was still going in and out and my head was still aching but when I came to these lines I sang them loud, looking for Monica in the crowd, finding her, and finding myself once again overwhelmed by the sight of that green ribbon in her hair:

Later on, we’ll conspire
As we sit, by the fire
To face unafraid, the world we made
Walking in the winter wonderland…

I sang these lines again later, over and over to myself as I was falling asleep. I could see it: sitting by the fire, talking, planning, unafraid. Not me and Monica, necessarily, but maybe me and my Mom and Dad, or me and a friend. Or maybe me and Monica.

It made me feel so good, thinking of that image. And I told myself, if I woke up the next morning, that was the way it was going to be, forever.