Little Little Read Free

tall.
    My real name is Belle La Belle, but I have always been called Little Little by everyone, even teachers.
    Cowboy’s real name is Emily, and only teachers ever call her that.
    Cowboy was supposed to have been the long-awaited boy, Larry La Belle, Jr.
    All the things my father planned to do with the long-awaited boy were done instead with Cowboy.
    She has gone through many stages.
    The one in which she earned her nickname went on from the time she was four until she was eleven. She rode horseback before her feet were long enough to reach the stirrups, and rode her bicycle as though it were a stallion, jumping off it after she flew into our front yard, letting it clatter ahead and crash into the garage wall, while she walked coolly away from it as though it were standing patiently saddled awaiting her return. Inside our house, I was always the Indian, being pursued by her and lassoed, our mother screaming after her not to wear her hat in the house, not to pull the rope too tight around my neck, “REMOVE THOSE SPURS YOU’LL SCRATCH THE FURNITURE!”
    Long after she was out of chaps and boots, she had a thing for horses (and still does, though it does her no good, my father won’t buy her one). She went on for a while to her sports stage. Anything that bounced or could be thrown and caught was all she cared about. She spent long hours in the den with my father in the blue light of the boob tube cheering on men with first names like Bucky and Buzz, her dinner served on a tray the same as my father’s.
    The death and suicide stage came in her early teens and was a disguised way of protesting having to have anything to do with me outside our home. She took to her bed rather than have to wait for me in front of school, or sit with me in the cafeteria, or say I was her sister.
    Now it is hard to tell which one of us is most strange, me or Cowboy, though a dwarf will always look stranger anywhere.
    Cowboy doesn’t wear her ten-gallon hat and chaps to school anymore, but in other ways she lives up to her name. She is tall enough to be sought out by the La Belle High girls’ basketball team (the only ones at school who seek her out) and walks as though she just got off the horse she wishes she owned. She spits sometimes, swears she doesn’t, but she stops and hawks into the gutters—I’ve seen her do it. And she smokes Camel cigarettes with no hands. A Camel dangles from her mouth at all times away from home and school, and she lopes around like some tall farm boy coming in from the wheat fields. Her hair is all tight curls, to her shoulders, and tangled, never combed. She claims a comb won’t go through it. Whatever she says comes out of the corner of her mouth. Her shy smiles are always tipped and she rarely shows teeth when smiling. I imagine that she smells of hay and manure, not a bad smell but a musky one my mother says is all in my head: “No one else smells Cowboy, Little Little.”
    Cowboy likes to laugh with her hands in her pockets and her head thrown back, and when she’s not relaxed she cracks her knuckles.
    “When is Life going to straighten you around!” my mother cries at her, and hugs her, says, “Oh, Cowboy, you are something, aren’t you?”
    Our little town in the Finger Lakes, upstate New York, has been partially saved from economic disaster by the arrival of the Twinkle Traps plant, which is Japanese-owned. And Cowboy has been saved from being ostracized by nearly everyone except the girls’ basketball team, by glomming onto Mock Hiroyuki, a Japanese boy her same age, fifteen, new to our town and the country’s customs.
    Cowboy is now in her Japanese stage.
    She enters our house calling out “Kon-nici-wa,” and leaves with “Sayonara!”
    If we ever need Cowboy for anything, we know she is at the Hiroyukis’.

3: Sydney Cinnamon
    I WAS ALWAYS A sentimental fellow. My eyes teared at the memories of old times and leaked at the sounds of old songs recalling past days with friends I never saw