Bo, the boy, chases me and Katlyn. He gets us, with a gleeful shout, and so we run after him. The wind in our hair, we’re still laughing. Then, he runs behind the school.

It’s dark back there, behind millions of bushes and leaves and monsters, lots of monsters. It’s scary. We follow, our toes barely making any noise as they touch the ground. Our teeth and our fingers back clicking and rustling noises. We slowly crawl beneath the green jungle of branches.

"Leave, you kids!" A sharp, rasping, scratchy voice comes from somewhere. Far away, across the rows of cars and bricks, there stands a woman. Deep wrinkles cut her skin; her walk is slow and deliberate, as if she is finally deciding to take it slow after a long life of moving too fast. She shakes her hand, slowly, slowly. She’s red and her eyes are blazing like sun on a hot summer day. She frowns and the shake of her hand grows stronger.

We crawl from our jungle of leaves and look down. At our shoes, at our hands, at our knees. Anywhere, just not at her. Our feet walk us back again. Back to the woodchips and plastic toys. She yells some more, but we’re not listening. Our faces are hot, our stomachs cold and knotted. We’ve ruined it already, our first day of freedom. We’ve become bad kids, the kind of kids that people yell at and blame for all the things that go wrong. Even if it’s not there fault.

The toys are no more fun, the plastic looks dirty, the swings broken, and the rocking horse looks tired and old. Our feet fall heavily to the ground, weighed down by a thousand pounds. We tumble home, to our houses. We shuffle into the house, like a dog hanging his head. Our balloon has popped and the chubby child clutches it in his fingers again.