A Day on The Playground

Carter Freed and I are best friends, and I don’t know a single soul who’d tell you otherwise.

We grew up in the early 2000s—a time when Carter and I would spend hours creating pieces of Lego art and when we loved the impossibly square yellow sponge who lived in the ocean. We were similar to other boys our age, of course, in the way that we chased girls on the playground, but also tried to avoid them, or they’d give us their cooties. Actually, we tended to stay away from girls in general; most often, we played by ourselves. Sometimes, we’d sneak our Game Boys to school and play games during recess. Pokémon was the shit back then… but we grew out of that pretty quickly when the Mario Bros. game came out on the Nintendo DS, which we received as gifts in 2007. Nearly every day at recess, we’d sit and play such games together, and rarely did we play with anyone else. I didn’t need anyone else, though—Carter Freed was my best friend, and I was his.

We attended a small, private religious school, which was just down Main Street from our houses. Besides Carter and me, first grade had nine other kids, and second grade had a total of ten. We shared a classroom, as the other grades did. With my birthday in the middle of April, I was the youngest in our grade, and so was in the classroom—not a spectacular feat, but it certainly irritated me whenever someone thought they could tell me what to do. Of course, Carter, who’s exactly eight months older than me and was the oldest in our grade, would come to my aid. Because of Carter, I survived elementary school… but not entirely unscathed.

A time came when a classmate stole my DS at recess. She—yes, she—took it right from my hands and ran away with it. It pissed me off so much; I sprung to my feet and sprinted after her, screaming after her around the playground. Carter was elsewhere at the moment, probably sitting in the tire swing and bragging about his scores. I stumbled and fell on the stones. The stinging started immediately, but I didn’t start crying until I saw the blood running down my knees and the bloody dirt stuck in my hands. Nobody heard me because I cried so quietly. I was alone.

I hid in the bottom of the wooden pirate ship, sniveling and rubbing my sore hands together. It hurt, she hurt me, and I was sick of people being mean to me because I was just so ‘different’. I wasn’t different; we were all the same, born to be good Christian people who followed God’s Law. Yet, no one wanted to read with me during religious classes or sit next to me when we sang hymns. I couldn’t understand why I had no other friends besides Carter. I sat in the pirate ship for at least five minutes, wondering why I felt so alone.

It was then that Carter ambled into the pirate ship. “Jude?”

I sniffled.

In the dark lighting of the ship, his blue eyes appeared black, but the concern on his face was quite clear. “Jude, why’re you crying?”

I sniffled again. “I’m… I’m not crying.”

Carter sat across from me and leaned closer to my face. “Liar. I see the tears on your face.”

As Carter inspected my knees, I rubbed my cheeks with my forearms, and he spit into his hand and scrubbed his saliva on the dried blood until it disappeared off my legs. I laughed, “That’s icky, Carter.”

He grinned. “Guess what I got!” He said as he pulled a black DS from his back pocket—my DS. My head popped up from between my knees and I snatched it from his hands.

“Carter, what’d you do?”

Carter’s grin grew bigger as I became vaguely aware of a girl’s crying. My eyes widened. “I broke Emily’s nose.”

“…Oh.”

“CARTER FREED!”

His face turned white, but he tried to hide it from me, because boys aren’t supposed to show emotions—yet, I had obviously cried like a baby. He sighed, then kissed his fingers and touched my knees. “Good luck to me,” Carter sang. “I hope your knees don’t scar.”

That was the day I scarred my knees, and Carter was expelled.