Tags
bike riding, friendships, humor, kids, knock out teeth, life, memories, outdoors, teeth, transportation
In order to tell one story, I need to first talk about Blythe. I am pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate it and I hope she never finds this, but what I write is fact and all anyone would need to do is check her dental records to confirm.
***
I met Blythe in third grade; her Grandparents lived on the same street as me which basically means in kid language you will be fast friends or mortal enemies and that spot was saved for a boy down the street, so we were fast friends.
One day while riding around town on our 15 speeds we came across a credit card with Yosemite Sam’s face on it, which might have been one of the coolest things we had ever possessed up to that moment. Blythe let me keep it because she wanted to make sure her brother never got it.
The next week she and I were playing in my yard with Yosemite Sam, sometime later her brother ran up on my lawn and I truly believe if she hadn’t acted like he had leprosy the following events wouldn’t have occurred.
“Hey, what are you girls doing?” He asked happily.
“Go away Marcus!” She screamed at him.
“NO! Dad wants me out of the house so I came here to see what you were doing!”
“If you don’t go away in five seconds I am going to scream bloody murder.”
“Fine!” He yelled back, running up to me, wrenching the card out of my hand. “This is mine now!” Then he ran over to his bike and took off like a jet.
Blythe got up, the second he ran away, hopped on her own bike and they had disappeared down the street. At the time I didn’t understand sibling quibbles (and still kind of don’t even though my brother and I fight every now and then), but I knew they hated one another.
Like a sloth I walked back to the backyard and got my bike, I really didn’t want to be in the middle, I didn’t know either of them very well. A second later Marcus was at the gate pale as pale could be and he was a pretty tan kid. “Blythe’s hurt, come right now!”
I peddled faster and harder than I had ever before or since. He led me one street over and all the way down to the busy section, stopping in front of a house with a pool of blood on the asphalt. The break handle lay split apart next to her bike, but Blythe was nowhere to be seen.
“She was here when I left. She was right here.” He looked like he was going to throw up and I had no idea what to do. I had no idea what was injured on her and she had been abducted. How could it get worse?
A woman came out of the house, visibly shaken herself. “My husband took her to the hospital, go get your parents you can meet them there.” Marcus was gone in a flash and I stared at the blood like it was just a nightmare and I would wake up at any moment to tell Blythe of the scary dream.
***
Blythe was out of school for a day or two and when she returned all of her teeth were intact. She explained to me that she had used her front breaks to stop, as she always did since her back ones were broken, it flipped the bike over and she slammed her face into the ground. Her front teeth had taken a beating, but as long as she didn’t hit them in any way for the next few months they would be fine.
“Oh hey here’s your card back.” She said to me.
I hated the card, I wanted to rip it to shreds, it nearly cost her her life or at the very least her teeth. “You should keep it.”
“I really don’t want it, Sonya. You keep it forever and always to remember our friendship.”
I still have it. I still hate it. We aren’t even friends.
***
Blythe would actually not be fortune enough to keep for hurting those teeth and within a month she had two rather large fake teeth glued to a retainer as a temporary solution… but that will have to wait until part 2.
-ducksoup- 