Growing Pains

Summer of ‘09, I sat on Mary’s rickety porch swing and watched as she danced in the empty street through the sparkling, iridescent droplets of her lawn sprinklers. The balmy heat radiated off my skin, and my forearms up to my elbows were sticky from the residual popsicle juice from earlier—the red, white, and blue ones, of course. It was a summer staple, kinda like Mary and I. 

I had no idea how much time passed as I sat there thinking about random things, like how the clouds drifted through the sky like pieces of cotton candy, the stray dog sniffing the trash cans looked like the one that Aunt Louise used to own, and the sunlight bounced off Mary’s curls turning them into shimmering waves of gold. Only when Mary called out to me did I tether back down to reality. 

“Skip!” She waved at me with a smile from some ways off. Though her tone was full of joy, there was a touch of exasperation lining her words. “Are you still watching?” 

“Yup,” I answered breezily, popping the p and waving my free hand in the air before letting it flop back and forth. Mary stopped dancing, and I already knew she couldn’t hear me even before she cupped both hands behind her ears. Raising my voice, I yelled, “Sure am!” 

Mary seemed pleased by my response and called back, “Watch this!” She proceeded to cartwheel three times in a row, and I clapped my hands like we did after we saw the fireworks show for the first time in third grade. When she straightened up, she bowed with a flourish before seeking refuge in the porch shade. I scooted aside as she unceremoniously threw herself onto the swing beside me, causing the hinges to creak in protest as I reached over to give her the spare water bottle. She snatched it from me with a grin. “Thanks, Skip.” 

I was born Marie, but Mary preferred to call me Skip because she didn’t like how similar our names sounded whenever people said them, but also because she once saw me skipping stones over the lake just a few miles from our neighborhood when our families’ annual lake day happened to coincide. I’m a bit proud of it—the name, Skip—no one else but her called me that, not even my parents. It felt like a badge of honor to have a nickname from her. She was always surrounded by others at school, so much so that I rarely talked to her, but she never had nicknames for anyone else, just me. On the other hand, I always called her Mary. I couldn’t imagine calling her anything else. 

“Got any plans for the break?” Mary turned to ask me. 

I shrugged. “Not really. I’m mostly hanging out with you. Why?” 

“Hm. I’m not sure, really. It was just a question.” She leaned over to rest her head on my shoulder. I let her be. “I assumed you had plans with other friends or something.” 

Mary was my only friend, but I guess she didn’t know that.

“What about you?” I asked instead. “Your family still going up north to visit your grandparents?” 

“Nah, not this time. Grandpa’s not doing so well these days, so my cousins have been taking care of him.” She sighed, and I looked down at my hands.

I couldn’t offer anything helpful at the moment, so I dug my fingers into my cargo shorts until my knuckles slowly turned white. She paused before adding in a more lighthearted tone, “I guess I’m stuck in the same boat as you, Skip.” 

“Haha. Nice one.” My voice caught in the back of my throat. 

Another silence fell soon after, and Mary absentmindedly kicked her feet to and fro. I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak, and honestly, could hardly even breathe. I was Skip, the girl who was good at throwing rocks. Mary was always the one who knew what to say, and even if she didn’t, her popularity said so. Despite our differences, we were best friends. I was always going to be Skip, and Mary was fine with that. 

Occasionally though, there were no words needed. I’m pulled from my thoughts when Mary springs up with the grace of a cat. From the moment she stood, I knew exactly what she was thinking, and when I saw the wide grin that stretched across her face, it only confirmed it. My body tensed like a tightly wound coil in anticipation, and she shot out a hand to tap me on the shoulder. 

“Tag, you’re it!” 

Before I could even muster a reply, she already took off towards the street with a shriek of laughter as she got dowsed by the stray sprinklers. 

Mary had always been a faster runner than me. It never bothered me, but she was always running on ahead and chasing something. I was scared I’d chase after her and get tripped up somewhere along the way, so I never ran. Not after her, at least. But this time, I did. Because tag was just a game, and we were stupid and young and it’s the summer of ‘09 when anything was possible. My bare feet tore through grass and mud and I left footprints in my wake as I blitzed across pavement and asphalt. Mary giggled the whole time until her cheeks flushed red, and I ran and ran until I was out of breath, my stomach sore from equal parts exhaustion and laughter. 

I wished that the summer would last forever, but time moved on and soon we graduated middle school and were on to bigger, better things. It was high school, and suddenly things like playing tag and wasting our summers away were considered too childish, and it made me wonder what a difference a small two years made. 

Mary was as popular as ever. We didn’t talk much in school, but she would acknowledge my presence by smiling at me when she passed in the hallways or when we happened to run into each other in the bathroom. Neither of us extended a conversional branch to the other, however, but we made up for lost time over the summers where we spent hours crying over romcoms and poking fun at bad Netflix adaptations. 

A lot of other things changed, too. Her parents eventually sold the rickety old swing because it was an eye sore after they repainted the front porch and redid the lawn to be more eco-friendly by replacing it with a succulent garden. Ms. Schultz, the kindly old lady that would babysit us as kids and make us homemade chocolate chip cookies, required hip replacement surgery and was recovering at home with the assistance from her daughter. I moved out of the neighborhood to the next town over because mom relocated for work, but for the time we couldn’t see each other, Mary and I made up for it in phone calls. Rather than talk about what antics we were getting up to at the family dinner table on the rare occasions one of us happened to be over for dinner, we instead talked about our futures and college plans. Mary chattered excitedly about wanting to get into neurology to help people, and getting married to her current high school sweetheart, and having two kids. All the while, I kept my answers vague while trying not to physically combust. At fifteen, I didn’t get why we needed to know the entire roadmap of our lives. At heart, I was still ten, skipping stones over the lake. I didn’t know what to make of myself. 

Then, the rumors started. Mary’s social standing at school took a turn for the worse. There were things said about the crowd she hung out with and the fact that she associated herself with older men. She still had people by her side, but as the whispers grew in numbers, they slowly decreased one by one. Whenever I called her after school to check up on her, she sounded fine. Mary assured me that she would get through it like she always had. However, the more people talked about her, the less I saw of her. Until, one day, she stopped showing up completely. 

I didn’t know when it happened. Her teacher pulled me aside one day to ask where she was. I told her I had no idea. Mary hadn’t shown up in a week. I called her that night. It sounded like she had been crying. 

“Skip, I’m pregnant.” 

What tumbled from my mouth was not a question of concern or expressed worry, but a simple, “What?” 

“It’s over, Skip,” she acquiesced. “I don’t know what to do.” 

“Mary, hold on. We can talk about this—” 

“No, we can’t. But Skip, you have to promise me something.” She sounded scary at that moment. “You have to promise me you won’t tell a soul.” 

“Mary, I—” 

“Promise me.” 

“I-I promise.” 

She released a sigh of relief. I could vividly picture her smile from the other end of the line. “Thank you, Skip.” 

Then, the line ended, and the silence of my house crashed in on me. The reality sunk in over the next few days as I trudged through school and laid in bed staring at my ceiling. After the second month Mary hadn’t shown up at school, I made the decision to visit her. 

The moment I came back from school, before my dad could greet me, I threw my backpack in the hall and grabbed my helmet from the wall. Swinging a leg over my bike, I took off towards her house on the path I memorized by heart. Familiar streets passed me by, and I envisioned the phantoms of our past dancing along the shadows of houses and following me the whole way. When I turned the corner of a familiar street, I saw an unfamiliar sight. A big, bold FOR SALE sign posted next to their mailbox. An even bigger, bolder SOLD sign was slapped diagonally across. My bike screeched to a halt, and I nearly tumbled into the grass in an effort to keep myself upright when dismounting. My worst fears came true. The house was sold, and with it, the girl I once knew. 

“You just missed her, dearie.” A wobbly voice rang out from the other side of the street, and I turned to see Ms. Schultz hobble onto her porch. “Their family moved about a week ago.” 

I ran over, tripping over the pedals on my bike as I dragged it along beside me. “Ms. Schultz, do you know where?” 

She frowned. “I’m afraid not, Marie. Mary didn’t tell me anything when I asked, only that she wanted to tell you she was sorry.” 

“I see.” My voice cracked. “Thanks for telling me.” 

“Of course.” 

My voice cracked, and I struggled to keep the tears at bay. “I guess I’ll go home then. Dad’s making dinner today.” 

“Yes, you go do that.” Ms. Schultz gently sent me off with a smile touched with melancholy, adding, “Marie, dear, if you ever need anything, I’ll be here. Give me a knock.” 

Unable to trust my words, I gave her a nod. 

That evening, I took the long way home and cried the entire way. By the time I reached the front door, my tears had long dried. Dad never questioned why I was gone. 

Summer after was a blur, and I spent my days studying to pass the time. I tried calling Mary, but she never responded. I busied myself with other things to keep myself from thinking. I never did take Ms. Schultz up on her offer, and she gradually became a figment of the past—just another someone who Mary and I knew. Occasionally, mom would bake cookies, and I remembered the taste of semisweet chocolate chips and the warmth of an old lady’s hand in mine before it faded into obscurity. Not long after, I graduated high school. I was an average student, so I came and went without anybody noticing. Mary became less of a person and more of a distant memory. When the rumors died, so did she. 

Everyone called me Marie in college, and I never corrected them. Skip was a girl who couldn’t grow up, and as a result, she was left behind with no one to remember her by. I studied accounting because it was easy and it would provide a stable future for me. I met a guy sometime then, and we dated for five years before he proposed in the winter right after I got my first promotion. We were engaged for a couple years, and I mustered up the courage to tell Mary about the news. It was directed to voicemail, but I invited her to the wedding. She never showed up. 

After the ceremony, as the best man was giving his speech, I received a phone notification. In the bathroom, hidden away in one of the stalls, I saw that Mary had requested to friend me on Facebook. I accepted it and scrolled through the years I missed. She had a son named Leon and a daughter a few years afterward named Anna. The boyfriend of hers from high school never stuck around. A couple of bridesmaids found me after three hours had passed, letting me know that the groom was wondering where I had gone. 

In the end, I was married for a year and had gone to marriage counseling for four months before getting divorced and living on my own. I got promoted again, moved cities and offices, tried talking to Mary, and scrolled through her updates when she wouldn’t pick up. From what I gathered, Mary moved to live near her grandparents. After her grandpa passed, she moved back into our old neighborhood, and Mary got a job at the local supermarket where she met her current boyfriend. On Sundays, she volunteered at soup kitchens and spent time with her kids. Although she once had dreams beyond the bounds of our small town, she was back where it all started, while I was somewhere hundreds of miles away. 

My first interaction with Mary came over a decade later in the form of a text through Facebook Messenger. Ms. Schultz had passed away, and the funeral would be held in a week at Sunny Hills Cemetery at ten in the morning. 

On the morning of, despite the puffiness of my eyes and my headache, I woke up three hours early to drive over. The sky was dark, but the approaching dawn the street lamps gradually lit the way. I pulled up to the street of our old neighborhood and parked in front of Mary’s old house. Everything seemed so distant now. The streets we used to roam and the mailboxes all battered from use were signs that things were different. Shortly ahead, I noticed that Mary was already waiting for me on the curbside. 

As I walked up to her, Mary gave me a tired, lopsided smile that bordered on a grimace. Her expression fell quickly afterward, and I noticed her eyes were rimmed in red. “You made it.” 

“Of course, I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” I sat down beside her, tucking in the folds of my black dress underneath me as she did. 

“I’m glad you’re here, Skip. I mean it.” 

She never asked me what I’ve been up to, and even the questions I’ve been dying to ask for the past years couldn’t reflect anything I truly wanted to say. Why did you leave me? Where were you when I needed you? Why didn’t you tell me anything? Did you ever care for me? Somewhere deep down, I knew Skip already had her answer. 

I mustered a melancholic, “Me too.” 

She smiled with all the fragility of spun glass, and I realized that even if I were to ask, she wouldn’t give me an answer that actually mattered. Instead, we sat side by side in our growing silence as we watched the sun rise on the chalk-covered streets of childhood. Skip and Mary, together, as they once were—just two girls running toward an uncertain future.

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Postmortem—

Unlike "Out of the Woods," "Growing Pains" experienced little changes from the original, mainly to improve clarity and decrease the awkward pacing that would occur within the flow. It was our final big writing assignment for the Creative Writing: Short Story course. Like all works submitted for the class, it was subjected to a lengthy group peer review discussion with my classmates. The original rubric had the story capped around 1k-2.5k words, so with the necessary edits, the revised version came to be around 2.7k words.

The story was meant to be a coming-of-age that explores the complex (and often messy) relationships teens have growing up. Skip and Mary were created to be foils of each other who became unlikely best friends based on happenstance. Mary is actually fairly interesting as a character because the story is told entirely from Skip's perspective. We get a kind of rose-tinted lens, and in it, Mary is the best friend, but that isn't necessarily the case. Her motivations for hanging out with Skip aren't well-intentioned but self-serving. She views it as a means of curing her boredom, but Skip has grown too overly dependent on her to remember what life was like without her.

A lot of the narrative structure and overall tone was inspired by "Nilda," a short story written and published by Junot Díaz in his anthology, This Is How You Lose Her. The sort of liquid turbulence of the passage of time was primarily what I hoped to encapsulate. The reality is that growing up waits for no one, and that's what Skip ends up discovering by the end.

The original copy can be viewed and accessed via download below.

Growing Pains - Short Story.pdf

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