Blowout

My Shortcut

33 My shortcut the summer I was ten the teenage boys next door stole my panties from the clothesline my mother knew it was them their dirty car with their blistering music they skinny-dipped with girls in their pool while their parents were on vacation I heard splashes once in the middle of the night and peeked from my window to see their slick dolphin bodies their patches of hair as they took turns doing cannonballs diving that September the boys’ father wouldn’t let me cut through his yard anymore which was my shortcut to school rabbits had come to take a bite out of each of his tomatoes but he blamed the neighborhood kids though we all hated vegetables and would never have bent to chomp the warm beefsteaks that hung on his vine go around he snapped aiming the hose at us I want my underpants back I wanted to say but didn’t instead I wondered about what kind of rabbit or gopher or groundhog would be so fussy or curious as to sample each tomato and move on to the next the way a kid might take a bite from each chocolate in a fancy box to test the filling inside it would take Anne Marie and me a good ten minutes longer to get to fifth grade since we had to walk on sidewalks now and wait for traffic guards to get us across streets 34 one morning the teenage brothers pulled up turning down their Jimi Hendrix cassette the one who was driving said hop in we’ll give you a ride I was tempted by the cracked leather seat with orange foam swelling through our old man’s crazy the other brother said he’s obsessed with his garden I’d never really talked to teenagers before except my cousins who were forced to play board games with me at Christmas I felt seriously grown-up as I reached for the loose rusty door handle at first I pretended not to hear when Anne Marie called to me that we’d be late her first-grade sister loping behind but then Pam smiled flashed me her missing-tooth smile there was the same blank space on the clothesline where my panties had been snatched so I ran toward the sisters Anne Marie tapping the face of her Bobby Sherman watch ...