by Jadyn Marshall
Stupid labor laws. How is it more humane to make fourteen-year-olds chase brats uphill than it is to make them mop ketchup off the floor?
An hour ago Danny Perdeaux got it into his half-formed head that we needed to look for the dam in the woods. Apparently he’d gone fishing at the reservoir with his grandpa two weekends ago, and he’d gotten to be Dam King, a title his grandpa hadn’t thought out before he’d awarded it. Danny thought it was funny because it meant he got to say “dam,” and even though he didn’t know why it was bad, it made adults grimace. That was good enough.
“It’s just a little more.” Danny didn’t turn around as he led the way, which worked for me because it meant I could check my Twitter feed without the twerp tattling like last time. There was pretty good service this high up, which was nice because there aren’t a lot of advantages to living in the middle of nowhere.
“Aw, I just checked a satellite map. The water dried up. No more Dam King. Let’s go back.”
Danny didn’t pause his crusade. He just stamped a twig with force. “What’s a satellite?”
“Big camera in the sky that takes pictures.”
He stopped, stuck his tongue out at the canopy, and kept marching.
“We’re going back now.” I stowed my phone and jogged up the few steps it took to catch Danny around the waist. He started screaming and bent around the middle until his shirt pulled up, which made it annoying to hold on without pinching his skin. So I let go. He only dropped like six inches, and onto a nice cushy layer of leaf mold, but he started howling like I’d tossed him off of Everest.
“I’m telling!”
I took a deep breath. Think of the Fender, I coached myself. “Okay. We’ll go, but then we’re coming right back.”
Presto, change-o, magic Band-Aid. “Race! I’m gonna get there first!”
“Aw. Darn.” I let him charge and kept walking with my phone at a leash pace until he turned around and complained that I wasn’t racing.
“I forgot.” I jogged after him until the trees cleared up like Mother Nature had used Proactiv, and we came to the reservoir. I’d been here on a field trip in first grade, and I was disappointed to see that the dam was smaller than I’d remembered, maybe forty feet at its highest. It would still be big to Danny…who had raced to the shortest end and was now walking across the top.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing? I said we have to go back!”
“Dam King, Dam King, Dam King!”
“Crap.” By the time I sprinted up the slope he was already at the other end.
“You come back right now. You’re in big trouble, mister.”
He continued his pilgrimage and touched the concrete corner before obeying me. I met him halfway and then let him follow me back.
“Let’s not tell your mo—”
And that was when two hands landed on the seat of my Levi’s and pushed.
