Sightings Read Free Page A

wanted it over. Nevertheless, in an attempt to maintain Georgia Ambler’s purity for the sake of our friends, Ronald and I kept what we’d seen to ourselves. We were demonstrating yet another secret power we hadn’t known we possessed: our ability to carry an impossible weight. It was a burden we lugged alongside us throughout each swing in the on-deck circle, during every glimpsed interaction of our girl. Some days we’d lean against the baseball fence and watch Georgia ride past, and while the others started in on what they wanted to do with her and how, Ronald and I stayed silent. How could we break it to them that everything had already been done, that the world held no more mysteries?
    Despite our burden, we continued in our routines: baseball in the morning, pool in the afternoon. It was pleasant enough, though while the others continued peacocking past Georgia’s lawn chair every chance they got, Ronald and I stopped bothering. Everything we’d hoped to see we’d already seen secondhand.
    June crept into July, July into August, and soon, much to our horror, school supplies began lining the window displays where once a sunscreen pyramid had towered six feet high. Eighth grade was nearly upon us, and yet we didn’t feel any more powerful than before. In fact, most of us just felt a whole lot more tired. Whether we were willing to admit it or not, those Indians had taken a toll on us, and while the remainder of our interactions with them had proved mostly innocuous, this was only the result of our having redrawn the boundary lines – never stepping foot near the teepee, while they steered clear of the baseball field. Some afternoons we overlapped at the pool, but they stayed in the deep end and we in the shallows while Georgia Ambler, quite tactfully, ignored all of us equally while sprawled on her lawn chair.
    For a few nights that summer, Ronald and I wandered back to that basement window, crawling up to the soft glow of the hanging bulb in the hopes that we might realize that none of it had been real. Just some dream we’d dreamed up. Some wild trick of the light. We never saw Pony and Georgia alone together again, and most nights, when we peered down, all we’d see was old Pony (Chief Tiny Dick) staring at the television while lying shirtless near a box fan. From our vantage point, his skin looked ghostly – a fresh pallor coating his body – while the rest of us just grew darker.
    In the rare instance when Pony and Georgia passed each other at the pool, they never looked at one another directly, adding further credence to our dream/“trick of the light” theory. Still, every once in awhile I’d catch Pony glancing up at her from behind a crinkled
Sports Illustrated,
turning pages without reading a word.
    While I’d never known love myself, in my fourteen-year-old estimation, Georgia seemed to have left a mark on him. In the days following what we assumed was the abrupt end to their relationship, Ronald pointed out that Pony resembled a young warrior who’d just lost his favorite horse.
    â€œSo broken-hearted,” Ronald whispered, peering down at Pony from our place outside the basement window. “Horseless with a hell of a long way to walk.”

    If we, like Carrie,
did
possess secret powers, most remained undetected that summer. Sure, I could run like a coward and keep a terrible secret, but neither of these powers would give us our neighborhood back. Where was my invisibility? My super human strength? Some days it was all I could do to keep my eye on the ball and swing.
    That final Thursday evening in August a platoon of weathermen bombarded our TV screens, pointing out areas on the map that looked suspiciously like where we lived. Those men used words like “doppler,” “humidity” and “perfect storm,” drawing even the most inattentive eyes toward the screen. The Emergency Broadcast System seconded the