It being the first week of summer vacation and the sun being high in the sky and her belly being full of egg salad sandwich and Coca-Cola, Jean decided it was a perfect day for shooting her BB gun.

         After yanking her shirt down over her tiny pot gut, she climbed out of the porch swing and brushed Wonder-Bread crumbs from her lap. The cool sandwich and soda made perfect fuel against the rising humidity of the Florida afternoon that had already set her chin length brown hair frizzing about her face. But being ten and long since classified as a tom boy, Jean didn’t care about the negative ramifications to femininity of such things as frizzy hair. Matt Dillon never fretted over frizz. Daniel Boone likewise neglected the topic. And Andy Griffith certainly never discussed the moral impact of frizz or the consequences of its presence. No. These towers of manhood and guardians of good were too busy fighting for justice and right for Jean to consider that frizz should bear any weight in her mind. She would channel her efforts into perfecting her marksmanship and put her problems on the business end of Ol’ Betsy the BB gun. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about frizz.

     As she scampered through the house to the back porch in search of Betsy, it occurred to her that Ava, four years her senior and therefore one-thousand lightyears removed from her in interests and life goals, probably gave many rats’ asses about frizz. Given the amount of time the girl spent combing, washing, drying, styling, and fiddling with her waist length golden locks, the odds were good that Ava cared a lot about frizz. Not only frizz, but everything else appearance related. The hours of hair fiddling constituted but a minor portion of Ava’s newly developed beauty regimen. Long languorous baths, lotions, make-up, lord-a-mercy the gallons of make-up, and endless clothing selection sessions were now part and parcel of Ava’s days. And Jean, who’s current record for avoiding baths stood at five days before being declared too rank for cows to tolerate, found Ava’s new habits baffling and annoying. Why only one year previous, Ava had been her willing compatriot in role-playing Gunsmoke and Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, and Roy Rogers. Together they’d raced their bikes along dirt roads in pursuit of bandits and cattle thieves. It’d been Ava’s idea to borrow Mamma’s black silk nightgown and tie the straps under her chin to use as a Dracula cape. The whupping they’d received upon the stolen gown’s discovery had been worth it for the hours they’d spent in rapturous make-believe. But no more were the games of vampires and cowboys, soldiers and heroes. Ava was chained to the bathroom sink admiring herself, and Jean was left to imagine playmates. Just thinking of it set Jean’s mouth into a pouty scowl as she located Betsy among the junk on the back porch.

     Once the gun was strapped over her shoulder and her cowgirl hat slapped jauntily atop her frizzy head, Jean marched into the kitchen in search of discarded cans to use as targets. At the sink, her mother stood washing lunch dishes by afternoon sunlight. Without shifting her focus from the task, she addressed the rummaging ten-year-old.

     “What are you digging for?” Mamma asked.

     “Stuff to shoot,” said Jean.

     “Don’t get any bottles, hear me? You go bare foot out there too much to be scattering glass all over the place. The last thing you need is a stabbed foot.”

     “Yes Mamma.”

     “Have you seen Ava?”

     Jean frowned into the garbage can. “Last I saw her was in the bathroom sink.”

     Her mother paused. “In the sink?”

     “She sits in it doin her make-up.”

     The explanation drew a weary eye-roll from her mother, which made Jean feel a bit better. “I’ve told her about that. She’ll be weeding for the neighbors’ all summer to buy a new one if she breaks that sink.”

     Jean pictured Ava crouched in the dirt, sweat caked and red palmed, yanking weeds from Darlene Patterson’s tomato patch whilst mascara pooled beneath her eyes. It was a satisfying image.

     “I’m gonna go shoot now,” she said, scooping the last coke can into a plastic grocery sack.

     “Be careful, baby. Love you.”

     Jean stood on tip toe and gave her Mamma a departing kiss on the cheek, then trumped away out the door en-route to the pasture, its barn, and the five-gallon oil drum upon which she intended to array her targets.

She varied the set-up of cans with the store of narratives in her imagination. An even straight row were deserters slated for a firing squad. A staggered triangle was a band of marauders charging a wagon party. A lone and distant can, a quick-draw stand-off. Jean cocked Betsy with confident yanks and sighted without even resting the barrel on the fence post. Every now and again, she’d ping a BB off the metal of the oil drum, just to give the game a more authentic audio, the real ricochet of a bullet.

     After the fifth round or so, the cans were shredded to uselessness, and so Jean trotted forward to collect the trash and head back inside. As she stooped for a gutted diet coke can, an alien sound distracted her. She stood, frowning, then cocked her head listening again for the foreign noise. It tittered across the pasture, somewhere behind the barn. A giggle. But the weirdest giggle Jean had ever heard. Who or what the hell was in her pasture, giggling like an idiot?

Creeping up to the barn, she peeked around the side. And a foreign sight joined the foreign sound. Beneath one of the spreading oaks that bordered the seam of pasture separating their land from that of their neighbors, stood a golden-haired girl clad in cut off short shorts and a spaghetti strapped shirt. She stood with her arms looped around the neck of a tall, gangly teenage boy whom Jean might’ve described as a red-neck Ichabod Crane, had Irving’s school master ever been the type to wear confederate flag shirts and denim shorts with a can of Skoal shoved in the butt pocket.

Ava, it seemed, has found herself a boyfriend.

     The older girl giggled again and pressed her body close to the scrawny boy’s, until not even the beam of a very strong flashlight could’ve squeezed betwixt them. One foot lifted slightly off the ground in the manner of a thousand film heroines, and she tossed her long waving hair. The boy, who Jean had a vague school bus garnered recollection of being named Bo, cupped his long-fingered hands over Ava’s butt. Jean thought he looked like a monkey grabbing at fruit.

     An uncomfortable, dry pit opened up in Jean’s stomach. She’d thought she disliked the recent changes in her sister’s behavior. She’d disliked the make-up and primping sessions. She’d disliked the eye-roll that had become her standard reply to Jean’s requests to play. She’d disliked the way Ava now insulted their old TV shows, calling them “silly” and “babyish.” But all that was peanuts to the display unfolding before her. Jean could feel a scowl pulling her lips tight and folding the skin between her brows. She’d seen girls acting like Ava was. On plenty of TV shows. Such girls were the kind Mamma had termed trashy and had warned them to avoid imitating.

     Ava preferred trashing up with her boyfriend to playing Gunsmoke and Dracula?

     Jean gave Betsy an evaluative shake. The gun rattled noisily as the remaining BBs shifted in the chamber. Lifting the gun, she socketed the butt into her shoulder and laid her check to the stock. Closing one eye, she peered down the sights and aimed for a rounded peak of flesh just visible beneath the fray of her sister’s cut off denim. She waited for another giggle from Ava, and pulled the trigger.

​

The End.