Four Square Carolyn Chung
The ball is Kenny’s, so he is King. The Queen, in the quadrant to Kenny’s left, is green- eyed Aayush in a sleeveless t-shirt that shows the first bars of his rib cage like the beginning of a song. The Jack is Aayush’s sister, Liza, and the Dunce is Bohan Zhang. In line to be the next dunce are the rest of the sixth-graders in Mr. Mobasseri’s 6/7 split class at West Kipling Junior Middle School. You can tell who’s in which grade by what’s in their pockets. The sixth-graders have nothing, or else they have Pokémon cards and sidewalk chalk. Wood chips, maybe, and Pop Rocks. The seventh-graders have earbuds. They have house keys and metal bottle caps. You can hear a seventh-grader coming down the hall. The seventh-graders have lunch with the eighth-graders in the plaza across the street. The girls wear skinny jeans and lean far across the countertop at Triple O Pizza, next to Rabba Fine Foods and Tracey Nail and Beauty. The boys stand, dazed and blinking, against spray-painted walls, sucking on e-cigarettes. The seventh-graders never play four square. Bohan Zhang, a sixth-grader, has a pocketknife in his messenger bag. In the pockets ofhis jeans, he keeps unwrapped Warheads, bus tickets, and a Zippo lighter engraved with a woman’s backside, his good luck charm. He is tall and speaks with an accent. If Bohan hits the pavement running, he is never caught. It is the week before summer break and the ground beneath the sixth-graders’ sneakers takes deep breaths, long and warm. There took place, before recess, a slow collapse of concentration. But within the court, the sixth-graders stand with their hands out, samurai-like in gaze, ready for anything. The first bounce is Kenny’s. The ball kisses Aayush’s right corner. He cycles backward a moment too late—Liza becomes Queen, Bohan becomes Jack, and Lexy is the new
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