Wild-child Part 2

The trip to Canada was a hot and cramped one, and Wild-child had many nightmares in the back of that shiny new Yuppie Camry. She remembers her parents listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours cassette and stopping at a u-pump-it and getting Wild-child a Dr. Pepper. The Dr. Pepper was the coldest thing Wild-child had ever had, colder than any popsicle had ever been, because she was so hot in the back of that car. It made the nightmare less scary. It made the trip more bearable.

When the Middle Class American family left Colorado for Toronto, the half-human husband was told by his bosses that he would be in charge of a particular branch in Canada. When he arrived they had given the position to his competitor but had decided to keep him on as his competitor’s assistant. This greatly wounded the husband, who had to spend two weeks waiting for the moving truck to get to Toronto. His family’s new home was a hotel room until then. That is when his new baby got really sick. She was so ill she turned bright red all over her body, and her fever was potentially fatal. Tilly was rushed to the emergency and a doctor in Canada saved her life. She was sick and no one knew why or with what, but she almost died. It scared Wild-child and she didn’t resent her little pink sister so much for a time, because she thought the little one was a weakling and sickly, and took pity on her.
Wild-child always had a capacity to feel pity for the broken things in the world. She pitied the retarded kids who had no friends on the playground, and so she played with them when no one else would talk to or touch them. One time in Colorado, Wild-child met a little girl on a bicycle. She seemed like she’d be a nice friend, and Wild-child gave her the bag of M&Ms she had been eating in her yard. The little girl on the bicycle took the candy and rode away, and was never seen again. People saw Wild-child’s ability to feel pain, and some respected her for it, and others took from her because her humility was also gullible naivete. People like taking from the gullible - it makes them feel powerful. It makes them forget their bleeding wounds and broken souls. Wild-child allowed them to forget for a time.

It took her many years to find her niche, and she never really did. She was always the kind of person that people didn’t know how or what to do with. She didn’t make friends easily, and boys would tease her for dressing like them. She was a tomboy, not a boy. She was still a girl, she just didn’t want to dress like an idiot. She wanted to play war just like all the other kids, but because she was born a girl for some reason she could not play war as simply as those who were born boys could.

Wild-child liked to draw and create pictures with waterpaint. One day her dad bought her a model airplane, and she and Dad spent the entire weekend putting the plastic together with model glue, and when it was finished Wild-child and her dad played with it out on the lawn in the back yard. Wild-child loved her dad very much, and loved her dad most of all in Canada. He seemed to feel more relieved there than he did in America, in spite of his work-wound. As an adult, Wild-child came to find that it was probably because he was the man of his own castle, and had a whole family that was his own to come home to. It was like a cabin away from the pain of the work, and the family was the strength that kept him going. It wasn’t always so simple, but it seemed like that was why her dad was happiest in Canada. It reminded him of his childhood in Ottawa and in England, and he didn’t feel so silly for knowing so much about the world there. People in Canada didn’t treat him like a know-it-all, because everyone around him was of similar education.

Wild-child made a friend named Geoff the summer she moved to the big house on the corner. Geoff was a tall boy with sandy blonde hair, and he liked to wear camouflage a lot. Geoff had both a Nintendo and an Atari, but Wild-child’s family only had an Atari, so Wild-child would go over to his house to play Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. Geoff liked wrestling and playing war, and he and Wild-child got into a lot of scrapes running around the neighbourhood. Geoff also taught her how to collect M.U.S.C.L.E. men, which were quite the rage in Oakville. Wild-child thought Geoff was to be her best friend, the way Camilla had been. Geoff sometimes ate at her house, but Wild-child never got invited to do the same at Geoff’s place. One evening, Wild-child was on her way home from Geoff’s. It was dusk, and she had her seagreen Schwinn BMX bicycle with the training wheels on it. Wild-child was going a little too fast down the hill, and hit some gravel. The BMX wheels began to skid, and even with the training wheels, Wild-child began to slide with her bicycle. She was wearing shorts, and her thigh met the gravelly pavement for several feet before she came to a stop. Her leg looked like Mommy’s meatloaf, which turned Wild-child off of meatloaf forever. She had almost slid underneath the bed of a large truck, but had stopped in time before hitting the back of the pickup.

The scab that formed on Wild-child’s thigh stuck to her sweatpant PJs. It wouldn’t heal for a while because Canada was so much more humid than Colorado, and Mommy wasn’t able to keep Wild-child from picking at it. Wild-child secretly liked to pull at the scab in bed, because it was unusual. It reminded her of the impact with pavement, and it felt odd to have pink skin turn into a yellow wound and then become hard and crisp like a potato crisp. It was weird, and it was gross. Wild-child liked anything gross. She even liked the gross slime that grew underneath the bridge by her house. Her mom had told her not to go down there, but Wild-child did all the time when Mommy wasn’t looking. There was art down there, and Wild-child was intrigued by the four letter words that no one was supposed to say, but everyone did.