A girl came home with a limp. She was favoring her right leg.
Her neighbor was looking out the window. They were roughly the same age — for as long as she could remember, the neighbor had wanted to marry the girl. Sitting at the window, she noticed how the girl winced whenever she leaned on her left leg.
The neighbor winced, too.
Whatever had caused the girl’s limp had occurred that morning. The neighbor had been ripping up weeds when the girl had left home. She’d raised her bloody hand in greeting, but the girl hadn’t seen her. Now the neighbor tried to guess what had happened. Maybe the girl had fallen out of a tree. Maybe someone or something had hurt her. She didn’t know what hurt — her foot, her shin, her knee. The neighbor examined her own leg, but the answer wasn’t there.
So she went to find out.
The neighbor walked toward the schoolhouse. Everything looked suspicious on account of the girl’s limp. Maybe she’d tried to climb over a familiar gate, the neighbor thought, and her leg had got stuck between the posts. Or maybe she’d jumped down and had sprained her ankle. The neighbor wanted to light the gate on fire. She wanted to rip it from its hinges.
She heard the hum of a wasp nest before she saw it. The neighbor imagined the girl getting stung. Would it have hurt badly enough to make her limp? She thought so — she herself had been stung many times and the pain had been extraordinary. But the more she thought about it the less likely it seemed. The wasp nest was hanging from a high branch. And the girl had been wearing slacks and long sleeves. Despite the number of times the neighbor had been stung, never once had it been through her clothes.
Once she was a safe distance away she threw a stone. The wasps filled the air with even greater urgency. The neighbor grinned as she continued toward the schoolhouse.
Next she passed a loud dog. The dog was on the other side of a fence. No matter how loud it barked the neighbor was confident she was safe, though her stupid heart beat faster. She could easily imagine the dog biting the girl — even through her clothes, the neighbor thought. Her love for the girl flared in her chest.
She still had stones in her pocket. She was going to throw one when a man came out of the house.
“Stop threatening my dog!” he said.
The neighbor lowered her arm, though she didn’t drop the stone.
“Someone said your dog bit someone.”
“That’s a lie! My dog would never bite anyone.”
The man came to stand by the fence. The dog seemed soothed by his presence, ceasing its barking and licking his palm. The neighbor briefly doubted herself. If she was wrong about the dog, she thought, what else was she wrong about? Had she really seen the girl limping? She’d been watching from a distance — but, no, she knew she wasn’t mistaken. She remembered the girl wincing in pain.
The neighbor threw the stone over the man’s roof, just to prove a point. Then she continued on her way.
Finally she came to the schoolhouse. Another child was already there, digging in the dirt with his bare hands. He was a local bully who rarely went inside the schoolhouse but could often be found outside of it. His hole was impressively deep, the neighbor observed, though she wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you kick my friend?”
The bully looked up from his hole.
“Maybe,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”
The neighbor heard this as an admission of guilt. She kicked dirt on the bully and waited for him to stand. He did so reluctantly, as if being summoned to a chore — wiping his hands against his thighs and climbing to level ground. The neighbor’s heart beat fast again. What she wanted more than anything else was to experience what the girl had experienced. It wasn’t enough to know what had happened, her love for the girl required that she feel it, too.
“Do you remember which leg?” she asked the bully.
She was grateful to him for answering with violence.