Growing up fast

This was the first day in almost two weeks that he had woken up before noon. It was 9:17 am and Nicky Davenport was shocked at just how wide awake he was. Normally he would protest the call to arms, but something compelled him to climb out of bed besides the growing urge to urinate. He tossed the down quilted comforter off himself and used momentum to swing his legs first up and then forward in a rocking motion to a standing position. He shuffled out of his bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom. Monkey the tan chihuahua that had nested between his legs all night looked annoyed at the sudden exposure. The small dog yawned, stood up and shook itself causing its nametag to jingle and jangle against its collar, hopped down and followed his friend down the hallway.

The bathroom was bright, and Nicky squinted as he pissed unable and unwilling to properly aim. It had snowed again, and the whiteness reflected even more sunlight into the room. Holiday break was almost over, back to school on Monday. Nicky sighed as he shuffled back into the hallway and towards the sliding patio door where Monkey waited patiently for his own chance to let nature call. Nicky watched as the small chihuahua hesitantly stepped into the deep snow, awkwardly lifting each leg before stepping it back down again like a newborn baby deer learning to walk. The shivering dog with its bulging eyes and tongue sticking out the side of its mouth squatted to pee, the steaming piss melted the snow around it leaving a lemonade snow-cone.

Back inside Nicky went to the kitchen and brewed some coffee. Most 13-year-olds didn’t drink coffee, but Nicky had been forced into early adulthood. His Mom worked nights at the hospital and had arrived back home this morning at 7:30.

“You’re working tonight again?” Nicky asked his mom the previous afternoon.

“7 to 7, pumpkin. There’s a lasagna in the freezer.”

Nicky hated being called pumpkin by his mother. She was overbearing and babied him often, but since he had turned 13, he didn’t need a babysitter anymore. Mom would work 6 nights per week and that meant if he was quiet during the day while she slept, he was on his own. Nicky loved the independence.

The gurgling sound of the Mr. Coffee machine matched the gurgling sound of Nicky’s stomach. It seemed like lately, he was always hungry. The warm aroma of the dark roast invaded his sense of smell as he poured the black liquid into his Ghostbusters mug. He stared out the window at the brightness of the day, the evergreen trees blanketed with snow surrounded the area. Something about sipping a coffee this early in the day while observing the winter wonderland outside seemed so adult. Like he was the star in a Folger’s commercial. The best part of waking up… Nicky sighed and then sipped. Just like on TV he thought.

Nothing made Nicky feel more grown up and independent like fixing his own breakfast. He had barely seen his mom since he had turned 13 and she had gone back to work, giving him plenty of opportunity to feel mature. Reaching into the fridge, Nicky removed all the necessary omelet du fromage ingredients. He diced up some red onion and green peppers with a large, curved chef’s knife. He began to heat up a skillet on the electric stove and then chopped up some deli ham and cherry tomatoes. The ingredients hissed and sizzled as he poured them into the pan and the scent of the searing vegetables made Monkey abandon his place on the living room couch in order to investigate. Nicky cracked 5 large brown eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork until they had become properly scrambled, thick and bubbly. He slowly poured the eggs into the skillet as Monkey looked on with curiosity. With a wooden spoon he stirred the ingredients into each other as they all crackled and cooked into a messy ununiformed scramble. A kaleidoscope of mother nature’s colors filled the non-stick pan. Green, purple, red, pink, yellow and black and white from the salt and pepper. He turned the stove off and removed a large block of cheddar cheese from the fridge and dug in the sink for the dirty cheese grater he had used yesterday’s morning. As he grated the cheese over the scramble, Nicky began to let his mind wander.

I hope Jennifer Hall still sits beside me in science class. He pictured her brown eyes glancing up at him from the textbook and rolling deep into the back of her head as he finished a pencil doodle of the Bat-signal on her side of the desk.

The smell of burning cheese churned him back to the present. He had grated a small mountains worth of sharp cheddar into the scramble, onto and over the edge of the frying pan and over the stove and burner itself.

“Toast!” Nicky exclaimed.

Reaching into the freezer he pulled out two pieces of frozen wheat bread and stuffed them into the toaster. He pictured Jennifer Hall’s green braces for another moment before the toaster popped and he slathered an ungodly amount of peanut butter onto the scorched brown bread.

Monkey waited patiently under the table by Nicky’s feet as he devoured his breakfast. Letting out a high-pitched single note whine every 30 seconds or so in a desperate attempt to score a chomp of human food. The whining went unnoticed by Nicky, he had mastered the art of tuning out the begging dog but would of course let him lick the plate clean when he was done. He then wiped the crumbs off the counter to the awaiting dog and slammed the dishes into the sink with a loud clatter. He had forgotten for a moment his mom was sleeping down the hall.

Nicky sat down on the living room sofa and turned on the TV. Saturday Morning cartoons. The tumultuous driving beat and guitar riff of the theme song to X-Men the animated series began playing. Nicky felt slightly embarrassed at how excited he suddenly became, but he was still a kid after all.

At 12:02 someone knocked at the door. Monkey yipped and ran towards the front of the house screeching.

“Hey, Milo.” Nicky said opening the door to the 10-year-old next door neighbor.

“Hey Nicky! What are you doing?!” Milo yelled excitedly hopping up and down in his black and gray snowsuit.

“Quiet man, my mom is asleep. I’m cleaning up the house.” Nicky lied with his face sticking out the door into the cold. His left leg blocking Monkey’s escape to maul the young boy with stinky face licks. “What’s up with you?” he inquired into the origin of his neighbor’s excitement.

“I found a frozen pond in the woods!” Milo blurted out smiling and wide eyed. “Wanna go skating and play hockey?”

Nicky pretended to ponder for a moment. To insinuate that in order to do so he would have to put aside important work and the chores were piling up. He didn’t want to seem too eager. But skating and playing hockey on a frozen pond in the woods sounded like heaven.

“I’ll grab my skates.”

“Yes!” Said Milo jumping into the air and clapping his hands as Nicky shut the door.

The two boys lived on a quiet residential suburban avenue that sat directly across from a small, wooded area of about 10 acres. Years later the woods would be torn down to build houses and a strip mall. But at this point it was still a mess of evergreen trees separated by a meadow that was overlooked by powerlines. They laughed as they jumped into the ditch next to the road crashing into the deep powdered snow. They climbed over where the barbed wire had signaled the boundary of the developmental land. Past the withered by winter black berry bushes that maintained their sharp thorns. Nicky had tied his skates together by the laces and had them swung over his left shoulder. In his right hand he used his hockey stick to knock heavy piles of snow from the branches in front of them. Milo did the same.

Although at the ages of 10 and 13 a three-year gap in age was quite a broad leap the boys had been neighbors all their lives. Milo looked up to Nicky and although Nicky would never admit it, Milo was his closest friend. They would play street hockey every night in the Summer and had spent the Winters sledding down the high school hill. Nicky felt if they pretended they were brothers there was nothing to be embarrassed about hanging out with a younger kid.

They passed the tree line into the meadow and hiked through the snow. Eventually they came to an area marked by an orange pole that read “gas line. No digging.”

“It’s here!” Milo said kicking the snow away from the icy perimeter of a frozen area. Using their sticks, they piled the snow along the edges revealing an area of about 8 feet in diameter. Hardly the frozen pond Nicky had imagined.

“This is more like a frozen puddle.” Nicky said unenthused.

With no space to skate the boys began to pass the puck back and forth over the ice to each other. The familiar smack of wood hitting rubber hitting ice was a sound Nicky cherished. They stood on the bank of the puddle silently passing the puck back and forth when Nicky noticed something. There was something that looked like a silver fern poking out of the ice. With curiosity they wiped at the snow surrounding the fern with their gloves. The ice was clear, and they followed the shape down and across the ice. It widened and lengthened and soon the fern turned into fins and gills and the unmistakable hooked underbite of a sockeye salmon. The fish stared up at the boys frozen in time.

“What’s a salmon doing in a puddle in the woods miles from the Ocean?” Nicky asked rhetorically.

Quietly but hastily the boys began wiping at every square inch of the puddle with their gloves. The snow cleared and the ice polished. Nicky could feel the hard coldness on his knees as he knelt, wiping with a frantic excitement. Soon the entire puddle was cleared and sparkling, and the boys stared on in amazement.

Frozen in the ice in the woods was an array of Oceanic wonder. Several Purple starfish clung to the edges of the puddle. A large orange crab had been scuttling across a rock when the freeze took hold. Green anemones and sea cucumbers scattered seemingly at random across the rocks and deep into the puddle which appeared hopelessly deep. A school of silver minnows swept across the length of the puddle and looked as if they were escaping the hungry salmon.

“There’s an octopus!” Milo gasped.

At what looked like the bottom of the puddle was a red bulbous mass. It’s 8 tentacles looked to be turning gray like the poor mimicking creature froze stiff right as it was becoming camouflaged.

It was the second time today Nicky had become hypnotized by nature’s stunning spectrum of color. He remembered when they went on a field trip to the city aquarium. The class explored the rocky beach at low tide investigating the tide pools for signs of life. If you lifted a rock tiny crabs would scurry everywhere. But there was never anything like this. He smiled at Milo.

Nicky stood and picked up his stick again. He passed the puck in Milo’s direction.

“So, did you see X-Men this morning?”