The forgotten

The girls were in their backyard playing a strange game of tennis. Julia, the oldest, had tied tee shirts together to make a net. Up until now, the younger two, Sarah and Emily, had been entertaining themselves by attaching popsicle sticks to paper plates and hitting a styrofoam ball.

The sky was dreary, though not yet threatening. Sweat was dripping down the girl’s faces. The yard had been abandoned by Ms. Hart many years ago, and it was brutely unkept, and the girls made no effort to clean it. They felt at home in the three years' worth of dead leaves and plastic soda bottles and half-empty bags of chips scattered about the grass. In the left corner closest to the house, there was a small patio that smelled of cigaret smoke and coffee.

The smell matched that of Julia’s hair, although she very rarely smoked herself. Today she was wearing a fairly modest pair of boot cut jeans with a hole in the left knee and a tee-shirt that was once a fairly tacky shade of pink, but now looked more of a faded red. The shirt went halfway down her thighs, and she was wearing plastic flip-flops. The outfit did not at all reflect the 90-degree heat that day.

Sarah, the middle child, was more appropriately dressed for the weather, though not appropriately dressed. In jeans shorts that hardly covered her and a grey sports bra, though she was only nine and small for her age. She was equipped with a pair of Nike sneakers, though they had once belonged to someone else and were just the slightest bit lose on Sarah.

Emily was in the strangest outfit of them all, wearing only a pair of plaid pajama pants. This was not unusual for Emily, as she was often left to dress herself when school wasn’t in session, and she felt no need to conform to the dress code society saw fit for little girls.

Although Emily’s fashion sense was severely underdeveloped compared to the older girls who, though they might not look it, did spend many minutes picking out the appropriate outfit. Julia preferred that her clothing be at least a size too large and although she was quite small, most passers-by would perceive her large for her height due to the way her clothing hid her body. Sarah was the opposite. In the summer, she wore hardly anything, and in the winter, her short-shorts were traded in for the same two pairs of athletic leggings. Almost nothing that she wore on her upper body covered her stomach, which was frowned upon by all adults who knew her, for she was only nine.

On this day, the girls had gotten into a fight over who would have to play tennis on a team by themselves.

“I always have to play by myself,” said Julia in a flat voice.

“That’s because you’re better than us,” Emily remarked in a tone that matched that of a young college student rather than the first-grader that she was.

In the end, it was Sarah who agreed to play by herself, saying “if you two are going to keep arguing I guess I can be on my own team, but I won’t be happy about it!”.

What the younger children did not know was that Julia had outgrown the games they played throughout their childhood. She believed that at thirteen she was too mature and sophisticated to play tee shirt tennis. And yet Julia played with her sisters. She did not want them to grow up, as she had. She wanted them to keep the joy and excitement they felt over simple things until they entered actual adulthood. For Julia’s life had become increasingly more complicated sense she began to feel a pull away from her youth and a draw towards the activities her peers were engaging in.

As the game began, it appeared as though Sarah would win, seeing as Emily had not been focusing on the game, finding the cardinal in a nearby tree more interesting. As she wandered towards the red bird, she did not realize the soda can just in front of her. In her distracted state, she stepped on the can and fell, hitting her leg against the concrete.

Emily cried out “Help! I broke my leg”. At this cry of distress, Julia ran to Emily, and upon examining her leg, saw that it had become red and swollen. Sarah looked on at the scene with deep concern, and, thinking it would be best if Emily went to the hospital, began toward the house to get their mother, Ms. Rong. But before she could go inside, Julia stopped her.

“You can’t get mom,” Julia said. “She wouldn’t be any help. I can take Emily to the hospital myself”. And with that declaration, she picked her little sister up off the cement and carried her out of the yard and towards the nearest hospital, which was about five blocks away.

Sarah was left to herself. She sat on the single patio chair in the yard, which had not been sat in for quite some time. She picked up the ping-pong ball and began lightly tossing it without much care. As she waited for her sisters to return, she began to think about what Julia had said. “You can’t get mom, she wouldn’t be any help”. It was true that her mother was rarely in the mood to admire her children, but Sarah had never doubted her mother’s love. She was always provided with food, her house was large if not a little dirty, she had enough money for clothing, her family did not struggle to pay rent, and yet despite these luxuries, she knew her sister was right. Her mother wouldn’t have helped Emily. She would have said the hospital was a waste of money.

As Sarah thought about these things, she threw the ball higher and higher, until at last, it flew over the roof of the house and landed on the street, far out of the reach for Sarah.