The wood chips are frozen into mini-jagged peaks as angry breath clouds my face in the bitter air. “You think I can’t do it because I’m a GIRL!”, I shout, in my most confident-sounding second-grader voice. A group of older boys is fighting me on the playground over rights to play on the jungle gym, and the only way I can win this battle is by showing them “the trick”.
I throw my backpack and gloves into a pile on the snow and make my way up the metal ladder. With one sure-bodied movement, I hoist myself on top of the 10′ tall monkey bars, and shimmy-crawl my way toward the middle. I pivot my whole body so I’m perpendicular to the bars. Laying on my stomach, I reach around one side of the apparatus to grip the bars from underneath. In one fell swoop I will do a back somersault from the top of the bars to be hanging by my hands victoriously. I’ve done this a million times. Child’s play.
I whip. I swing.
I land with a thud on the ground.
My warm hands must have melted the frosted metal, making it too slippery to hold on. I start to cry big crocodile tears of pain and humiliation. Everyone around me gapes in horror. I can taste blood.
In a rush of commotion I’m scooped up and taken into the principal’s office to get cleaned up. This is really bad, I think. Kids aren’t allowed inside during recess under any circumstances.
Someone must have called my parents, because soon my dad is here too. He bundles me into the back of the car, and comforts me on the couch with a bowl of icecream when I get home. Extra chocolate syrup because I am extra hurt, he says, applying frozen pees to the side of my bloodied, bruised face.
My Grandpa comes over that night, or maybe the next, and he suggests we play cards. King in the Corner. My favorite. Only when I go to pick up a card, it’s too much weight for my arm. The pain is intense, shooting down my arm when I hold it parallel to the table. I get a pillow – my favorite one that has a tooth-shaped pocket for the tooth fairy – and rest my useless appendage on it. I guess I’ll have to learn one-handed jungle gym moves.
Two days after the accident we finally go in for X-Rays. My father has broken most of his bones, many more than once, and he doesn’t think it’s broken so we don’t go sooner. The verdict confirms what I already know though: hairline fracture sustained from a ten foot fall, the doctor says.
I pick out pink plaster to match my pink and purple bedroom, and in a few minutes I have a new weapon cast on my arm. It joins the Minnie Mouse glasses I’d been prescribed only a few months earlier, and the combination of four-eyes and gimp-arm more or less relegate me to the un-cool kids table for the rest of my life. Whatever. I lived with an un-casted broken arm for two and a half days. I’d like to see the boys try to handle that kind of pain.
Besides, I know that as soon as this cast is off I will be back on the jungle gym, working on my array of recess tricks. And don’t you try and stop me.
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