Hide

This flash fiction piece was written as a story companion to the day 26 drawing prompt Hide from the 2020 Inktober prompt list. Click here to see the drawing.

“You better run.” That’s how every recess this year so far had started. The tallest boy in 5th grade threatening our gaggle of girls as soon as we set foot on the playground.

Run, he would say, his wolf pack of pre-pubescent accomplices grinning behind him. Then the girls would shriek in delight, and obey him. Off they’d go and, suddenly, the group I was standing in was nothing but a cartoon dust cloud. I was supposed to run, too. I was supposed to stick with the pack, supposed to do what the boy said. I knew it. But I didn’t know why.

Nevertheless, I wanted to spend recess with my friends—because that’s what you call the girls who talk to you, pick at you, ask you what’s wrong with your clothes and your hair, right? That’s what friends are. They must be. Because the girl who calls me her best friend and the ones who hang around her do it all the time. So that must be what friends are, at least when you’re a girl … right?

And friends are who you go to the bathroom with, and who tell you all the secrets about the girls in the other classes … and the boys, too. How do they know all that stuff, though? Where do they get this information? Something else I couldn’t figure out. That, and why everyone would gather around the new girl, Amaiah, as she held up her shirt to show us the new bra her mother bought for her.

Whenever she did that, I wanted to ask her … why are you showing us your underwear? And I wanted to ask the other girls … why do you want to look at it? But she showed it, and no one else seemed to find it strange, so I hovered at the back of the group and feigned some kind of interest.

“What size is it?”

“Ooh, when did you get this one?”

“How long have you been wearing a bra?”

“God, I can’t wait until my mom lets me get one.”

The chorus of girls would chime. Then, the one who said she was my Best Friend would pull me aside in the hall and tell me how she thought her boobs would come in soon, and that mine would never be as big as hers. I would just nod, or say, “Oh.” It didn’t hurt my feelings—because it was the weirdest thing to insult someone over—but I knew it was supposed to, which brought a confusing element to the friendship. Friends don’t hurt each other's feelings on purpose … at least, I didn’t think so, but then again, all the girls who said they were my friends were always trying to do it to me, so apparently I had a lot to learn. About these girls, and even more about the boys.

Out on the playground, day after day, we would run and run, and those boys would chase us. It wasn’t fun, but everyone was smiling. They never caught us, and if they got close enough to grab us, they didn’t. But they still chased, we still ran, and then we had our meetings in the bathroom after recess.

To me, it was bizarre, but everyone around me seemed to think it was normal. Even if I was only 11, I was smart enough to know I must have been the wrong one. But even if it was normal, it was annoying to me. We could be swinging instead of wasting recess running. We could be going down the slide or doing flips on the parallel bars and talking about what shapes the clouds above us looked like. We were trapped in this stupid game because of these boys, and I was determined to make it stop.

One day in the bathroom, after the new bra demonstration had ended, I called the girls together and told them I’d cracked it: what if we just didn’t run?

They looked at me like I was speaking an alien language. I pressed on, explaining that there won’t be anything to chase if we don’t take off running, and then we can spend recess doing something fun.

Again, no response. I was confused. Maybe they didn’t think it would work? So I suggested we could hide, as a last resort, if there was no other way they thought we could make them stop. I lost them, then. I don’t think they laughed at me, but there were certainly some looks shared between my “friends” that day. The ones that meant I was surely crazy, or stupid, at the very least. The chatter about hair and underwear picked back up, and I watched Jessica take the pony tail holder out of her head, shake her hair out, and then put it back up again. I always wondered how she knew how to do that. If my ponytail fell out, I’d have to have my mom fix it because I didn’t know what to do.

The next day at recess, I decided I wasn’t going to run. I wondered if any of the boys would still come after me, still pursue me enough to force my hand. As the pack took off, I went along, but then drifted away from the group. Not one boy noticed, they moved in unison like a school of fish. I made my way back toward the girls, and then two boys broke free and surged into our group, scattering us in all directions. This time, the boys separated, too, these ones pursuing those girls, and those ones pursuing another couple, and me … off the other direction, no one running after me.

That’s when I realized why they looked at me like I was crazy to say we try to stop them from chasing us. That was the whole point of running—to be chased.

The packs reformed and took off again, but this time, I stood still. And off they went, both groups, boys and girls, without me, and without noticing my absence.

After that day, I was the only one who followed my plan to end the chase by hiding. Just me, up in the tower that encased the top of the jungle gym slide, reading the words others had scraped into plastic with paper clips.

I could see them running around the field from there, but I didn’t care. I could see the clouds, too. Wondering what shape they’d form next was a way more interesting game than getting chased, even if I was alone.