All the Wild Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

too.”
    “Doesn’t matter.  Won’t say it.”
    “Now son, sometimes we have to say something to get along, stay out of trouble.”
    “I won’t.” 
    “How about, you mouth the words... but think, I don’t mean this?”  He is really trying.
    “No.”  Poor vice-principal Davison, he came at it from every angle but he had just met the raccoon in me, no backing down no surrender.  Every moment at Escondido I could feel my back against the wall.  Give an inch and they’ll take your life.  Never back down.  Never surrender.
     
    “Here’s the trick to winning a war.”  General Tangle had told me a lifetime ago in the blackberry bramble.  “You just have to be willing to suffer more casualties than the other guy.”
                 
    Wednesday it is fighting a kid who teases me for having long hair.  Thursday it is swearing in class, but Governor Reagan is an asshole, so I stand by that one.  Friday it is sneaking a peek in the girls bathroom from a hole in the boys.  This one I didn’t do.  Two other boys did.  They are let off.  I am blamed.  Five short days I went from “that new kid”, to “He did it, it’s his fault.”   
    After school I have to meet with vice-principal Davison and my mom.  The moment I see the way Mr. Davison looks at my mother I know why he has been so nice to me.  She is that divorced grad student with the rack he keeps stealing glances at.  Little does he know she doesn't have time for him or anyone, her dance card is three checks past full.
    It gets easier after that first week. 
    I get used to being treated like a trouble case.  I get used to the jeers at my long hair.  I get used to Mrs. Harris’ glares as I refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance.  It all became the new normal.  The one where my father was gone and my mother is busy and my little sister is separated by a yellow strip of paint and my big brother and sister are across town.
     
    If there is any tender bittersweet ending to all this, I can’t see it.  I wish I could find the perfect sentence that would make us all go, “my that was terrible, but isn’t it uplifting how they survived.” 
    Truth is we didn’t.  And we did.  I was talking to Shaun tonight on the phone.  I told her I was writing about our childhood, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to let her read it.  Told her it was a rough read. 
    “It was a rough childhood,” she said and we laughed and laughed.

SUMMER OF LOVE
     
    I am 10, and standing at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury.  I am overwhelmed by the din and constant barrage of color.  I lose the ability to move, I stand letting it swirl around me.  Pedestrians ebb and flow around my island.  It’s a circus.  It’s a gypsy caravan.  It’s thrift store full of floral print exploded onto the skinny, hairy, people. 
    “Hey little bud, how you doin’ man?”  The man has blue stars painted on his face.  He is tall.  He is a teenager.  He leans over.  “You wanna turn on?”  He holds out the end of a hand roll, just like my father smokes.  Only it smells sweeter.
    I shake my head.
    “That’s cool, groovy man.”  The blue star man boy fades into the surging sea of hip.  I can’t help but smile.  Everyone here is smiling.  Everyone is happy.  A teenage girl with flowers in her curly red hair takes my hands and dances in a circle to the beat of a band only she can hear.  The sea takes her away, but casts a fresh faced child onto my shore.  The child is six, he is wearing faded but clean overalls and nothing else.  He looks up at me.  He is nervous, his lower lip trembles.  I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.  A laugh bursts from the child.  I grin and strike a fresh goofy face.  He laughs deep, from his belly.  A mother’s hand breaks the surf and lifts the child up and back into the sea. 
    It reminds me of the fairies on the land where I grew up, the land we left.  If those fairies were large and had a