Young Guns
Two Little Girls in Connecticut
When I was little I went to my friend Kristin’s house in Spring Glen, a picturesque Connecticut neighborhood where kids walked to school and had lemonade stands on the weekends. Kristin was new at school, and as we walked home that day, she told me that she moved a lot. She spoke of her strict stepdad with caution, explaining he didn’t let them eat salt or sugar, and everything in the house had to be kept very neat. We stopped at the Spring Glen Pharmacy to buy candy and gum from the old man who owned the place. He was about ninety million years old, and his hands shook violently with Parkinson’s as he counted our pennies. We would stare at those shaking hands with our eyes wide and our jaws all agape, even though our mothers told us it was rude to stare. We’d buy lemon-lime thirst quenching Gatorade gum and agree it was the best thirst quenching gum in the whole wide world.
When I went over her house after school that day, I saw that hers was a tidy brown house. She lived on a sunny street with almost no trees, making the street look harsh and barren compared to the shady green street where I lived. The inside of her house had an 80’s country style look going. The rooms were all painted muted shades of blue and dusty rose and soft cream, and the windows hung with handmade frilly curtains. Kristin had a sister who was sixteen or seventeen, who believed in the existence of unicorns and dragons with all of her heart. She had unicorn posters all over her room and her bedspread, and she even had a purple Pegasus poster inside her closet door. I thought she was cool because she was seventeen and had a big room and Aqua Net hairspray and a perm, but even at eight years old, I knew her deep belief in unicorns meant she was strange and that the kids at school probably laughed at her for holding on to that last bit of childhood faith in magic.
Kristin and I used to lie on her closet floor and read with flashlights. It was one of those long but not deep closets with the sliding doors; it was great because it was empty except for the blankets and pillows and flashlights on the floor. That day, I followed Kristin on tiptoe into her parents’ bedroom. Her wicked stepfather lurked downstairs. In my memory, he looks just like the villain from Sleeping with the Enemy.
We climbed up on her parents’ bed and she whispered, “I’m not supposed to go in here.” I felt nervous and excited and completely at her mercy. She reached into the shelf in the headboard and opened a box and pulled out something wrapped in a soft yellow cleaning cloth. She unwrapped slowly as I peered closely. The last bit of cloth fell aside revealing a shiny black handgun. “It’s cold,” she whispered, “feel.”
My tiny eight-year-old hand reached out, and I felt the cold bumpy pattern on the handle as I wrapped my hand around it to feel its weight. I pressed the cool metal handle to my forehead, and it brought relief on that late August day. I knew this was wrong, like I knew Kristin’s older sister was wrong to love and believe in unicorns. The awareness of the wrongness was delayed—precluded by pure fascination and awe. Kristin wrapped the pistol back in that yellow cleaning cloth and put it away. We ran downstairs and into the kitchen, where her stepfather silently poured us glasses of water and gave us some unsalted crackers to snack on. They tasted like cardboard.
