Chapter Text
“JT! Keep up!” Jared’s mom calls.
Jared looks up. He wanted to look at a bee on a little yellow flower, because it made a buzzy sound and it’s all yellow and black stripey, but now his family is too far away. “Wait!”
“C’mon, Runt!” Jeff yells. “If you don’t catch up, you’ll hafta live in the woods!”
Jared doesn’t want to live in the woods. There are mosquitoes and it would be cold at night. “Wait!” he calls, forgetting about the bee and running as fast as his legs will carry him.
“He’s joking,” Jared’s dad says as Jared catches up to them. His chest hurts now from running so fast.
“Are you sure?” he asks. He really likes his room and his toys. He doesn’t want to live here. He’d get wet when it rained.
“Of course.” His mom picks him up and spins him around. “We would never leave you anywhere.”
“What if you forgot?” Jared worries.
“No one could forget your ugly face!” Jeff cries, and then laughs so hard he falls down on the grass.
“What was that?” Mom asks Jeff, with that voice that says hoo boy, you’re gonna get it. Jared is scared of that voice. Jeff is too, even though he says he’s not scared of anything. Megan isn’t scared of it yet, but she’s only a baby. She will be.
“Nothing,” Jeff says quickly and stops laughing.
“That’s what I thought.” She looks back at Jared and kisses his forehead. “You are impossible to forget, little one.”
Jared smiles inside and hugs his mom tight. She squeezes her arms around him.
“Can I go to the playground now?” Jeff asks, getting up off the ground bouncing up and down on his feet.
“Take your brother with you,” Mom says, putting Jared down.
“Aw, Mom,” Jeff complains, but then he gets a look and he shuts up pretty quick. He takes Jared’s hand and starts tugging him toward the play structure. “Come on.”
It’s a park Jared’s been to lots of times and he likes it here. There are swings and a big slide and lots of sand-pits. Jared likes the sand-pits the best. He likes making things. Only they didn’t bring any buckets or shovels with them this time, so then it’s not as much fun. As soon as they reach the structure, Jeff takes off for the monkey bars. Jared can’t do monkey bars yet, he’s too little.
“Jeff!” he yells. “You’re s’posed to stay with me!”
Jeff doesn’t listen. Jared flops down in the sand and feels sad. He can do the monkey bars if Jeff helps him, but Jeff only helps him when Dad tells him to and Dad’s back at the picnic table with Mom and Megan. Jeff is bigger and he always wants to go do big-kid things and leave Jared behind so he has no one to play with.
“What’s wrong with you?” a voice asks.
Jared looks up. There’s a boy on the other side of the pit. He’s older than Jared, maybe about Jeff’s age. He has green eyes and his hair is the color of the sand and there are dots on his nose. And he has sand toys. A big yellow bucket and two shovels, a blue one and a green one. Lucky.
“My brother left.”
“Where did he go?”
Jared points. “To the monkey bars with the bigger kids. I can’t do them. Too small.”
“Oh.” The boy looks back at him and shrugs. “I don’t like the monkey bars.”
“I don’t either,” Jared decides quickly.
“You wanna play?” the boy asks.
Jared is surprised. Big kids never want to play with little kids. He knows he never wants to play with Megan. She’s boring. All she does is eat and poop and make a lot of noise for no reason. “You wanna play with me?”
“I have two shovels ‘cause my brother left too. Do you like blue or green?”
Jared smiles. He doesn’t feel sad anymore. “Green.”
“I like blue better anyway,” the boy says, tossing the green shovel to Jared. He starts digging into the sand and pouring shovelfuls of it into the bucket. Then he packs it down with the flat part of the shovel. Jared crawls closer and helps him.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Jensen,” the boy says.
“What kind of a name is that?”
Jensen shrugs again. “The one my mom gave me, I guess. It’s better than, like, Butt or something.”
Jared bursts into giggles. “Someone named their kid Butt?”
Jensen laughs too. “I don’t know. Maybe. What’s your name?”
“Jared. Sometimes my mom calls me JT, ‘cause my middle name is Tristan. So it’s a J for Jared, and then a T for Tristan. And my brother calls me Runt, but I don’t like that.”
“What should I call you?”
“Not Runt.”
“Okay. I like Jared, then. JT sounds like a robot or something. Like R2-D2.”
“What’s R2-D2?” Jared asks. He piles more sand into the bucket. It’s almost full.
“You’ve never seen Star Wars?” Jensen says, like he can’t believe it.
Jared shakes his head.
“Oh man, it’s so cool! There’s like all these weird aliens, and it’s all in space so there’s these cool rocket ships that everybody flies around in, and there’s this scary guy, Darth Vader, and he’s all big and you can’t see his face and he talks creepy and breathes a lot, and then there’s Luke and Leia and Han Solo and Chewy and they’re always fighting him, and Darth Vader cuts Luke’s hand off even though he’s his dad, and then in the end they win and all the bad guys die and it’s awesome!” He finishes with a big smile and then a huge gulp of air like he forgot to breathe when he was doing all that talking. That happens to Jared sometimes when he gets excited.
“I love rocket ships! Maybe my mom and dad will let me watch it when we get home.”
Jensen fills the bucket to the top, and then flips it over. He pats the top and the sides and then carefully lifts it back up, so there’s just a cone of sand left. “If you draw windows and a door and stuff on it, it looks like a house. Like where the Sand People from Star Wars would live. If they were really small.”
“You wanna make a big castle?” Jared asks. “I know how. My dad showed me.”
Jensen nods and they start filling the bucket up again. “I wish you could come to my house and watch Star Wars. But you can’t ‘cause we don’t live here.”
“Where do you live?”
“In Richardson. We’re just here to visit my cousins.”
“Is Richardson far away?”
“Not too far. We came in a car. So it’s not like China or something, where you’d hafta be on an airplane. But it took a long time.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, Jensen! What’re you playing with a baby for?” a big kid, even bigger than Jeff, yells as he runs by them with a bunch of other kids.
“Because he’s nice, unlike you!” Jensen yells back.
“I’m not a baby,” Jared says. Jeff calls him that sometimes. It hurts his feelings.
“I know. Babies can’t make awesome sand castles. Unless they were like a superhero’s baby or something.”
Jared smiles a little and feels better. “Who was that boy?”
“My stupid brother. He used to get in trouble when he was mean to me. But now my parents are always looking at the baby so they never see it anymore. I mean, sometimes he’s nice. But sometimes he’s not.”
“Your parents have a baby? So do mine.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know. She’s real small though. And loud.”
Jensen laughs. “So’s mine. But sometimes she makes funny faces. And it’s fun to make her smile.”
“Mine doesn’t smile yet. Too small, I guess.”
Jensen suddenly waves at someone behind Jared. Jared turns around to look, and sees a man and woman sitting on a bench a little ways away. There’s a baby in the woman’s arms.
“Is that your family?” Jared asks Jensen, and Jensen nods. Jared waves at them too, and they wave back even though they don’t know him. They must be nice people.
“Let’s make the biggest castle ever,” Jensen says, with a smile that makes his eyes squinty. “So big we could fit inside.”
“Do you think we can?” Jared asks. He’s excited, that sounds like fun.
“Totally! But it’s gonna take a long time so grab your shovel!”
“Okay!” Jared starts digging, filling up the bucket again, but then Jensen’s dad walks over and crouches down next to them.
“Hey buddy. Who’s your friend?”
“His name is Jared,” Jensen says. “Not Runt.”
Jensen’s dad laughs a little. “Okay. Well it’s nice to meet you, Jared-not-Runt.”
“Hi,” Jared says shyly. Then he giggles at Jensen’s dad’s joke.
“Looks like you guys are having fun. But we gotta go now, bud.” He rubs Jensen’s hair like Jared’s dad does to him sometimes.
“Five more minutes?” Jensen begs. “We wanna make a big castle!”
Jensen’s dad shakes his head. “I’m sorry. We’ll be late if we don’t leave now.”
Jensen pouts, but he empties the bucket and puts the two shovels back into it. “Okay.”
“Say goodbye to your friend.”
“Bye.”
“Thanks for playing with me,” Jared says. He really, really wishes Jensen didn’t have to leave.
“You’re cool,” Jensen says with another shrug, and Jared gets all warm inside because a big kid has never called him cool before. He walks away, waving to Jared over his shoulder, and Jared calls, “Bye!”