Addie on the Inside by James Howe

your tongue?” Bobby asks.
We are walking and I, uncharacteristically,
am not talking. “You
can
speak now,”
he prods, but all I can give him are uh-huhs
and nods. My mind is on Becca and why
she was crying. It’s on DuShawn and why
he was lying when he told me he couldn’t
see me later.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â â€œWait up!” Joe cries, and he
    and Zachary surprise me with hugs from
behind. “Our hero!” Joe says. “We love
your courage, we love your mind!” “We
want to marry it!” says Zachary, though
how they’ll marry my mind I really
don’t know.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â My mind is full of not knowing,
    and if it’s true that not knowing is a kind
of strength, then at the rate I am going,
I will soon be the strongest girl
in the world.

Busy
    He told me he’d be busy
when I asked him to come over,
there was something about something
that had suddenly come up
    and he can’t see me all weekend
and I think it’s all baloney
or a worse word than baloney
but I don’t know about what
    and I’m tired of not knowing
but I’ll wait it out till Monday
for what
ever
to blow over, then
I might just
    kick
    his
    butt.

What Was Here
    Running in the backyard,
trying to catch a ball and missing it,
I trip on what turns out to be
    a two-by-four, the end post
of a swing set long gone.
“Remember, Joe?” I say,
    â€œremember when we were little
and would swing out here
in the summer evenings,
    counting fireflies, pumping
higher and higher,
racing to the moon?”
    â€œWe never did,” says Joe,
as hopeless at throwing balls
as I am at catching them.
    What we are doing tossing
a ball around in my backyard
is anybody’s guess.
    â€œOf course we did,” I insist.
“My mother made us lemonade
and those little butterscotch cookies.”
    â€œNope,” says Joe. “I never had
butterscotch cookies, and we never
raced to the moon.”
    Joe can be so stubborn.
Then I remember:
That old swing set was taken down
    the summer I was four,
the summer Joe moved in to
the house next door.
    It was someone else I raced
to the moon, a girl who lived
down the street. It was Becca
    who loved my mother’s
butterscotch cookies,
who counted fireflies,
    who pointed her toes to the sky.
It is Becca who would remember
what was here.

Becca
    She lived down the street.
Each spring the first tulips on the block
nodded hello from her mother’s garden.
    When my mother told me she’d moved
to another town, using the word
divorce,

I nodded in my most grown-up way,
    not asking what it meant. I bent
down in their garden later that day,
picked a tulip to take home, peeked
    through the window to make sure
they weren’t playing a trick, hiding inside
and waiting for me to seek.
    The house was empty. The tulips,
all but the one drooping in my hand,
nodded goodbye as I turned away.

Grandma Finds Me
    Grandma appears at the back door.
“Stay for supper, Joe?”
“Can’t,” says Joe, “but thanks.”
And off he goes to his house, running
and trying to kick his heels together in the air
and not quite making it and laughing
at himself for not quite making it,
as Grandma lets the screen door
shut softly behind her and comes to me,
pulling her braid over her shoulder
and stroking it like a cat. “I like Joe,”
she says. “I like how comfortable he is
in his own skin.”
    We stroll around the yard, looking for
tulips. Grandma carries a pair of shears.
I love the word: shears. So old-fashioned
and yet it’s what she calls scissors
because it’s what her mother called them,
and it’s a way for her, she says,
to keep her mother near.
    â€œWhat were girls like when you were my age?”
I ask as she bends and touches a yellow tulip
the way moments ago she’d touched my arm.
“Did they mess with your head?” I ask. “Did they
act like you were their friend