Gemma Grave Girl

Norman is, by most people’s interpretation of the word, absolutely ordinary. With a name that has the word right in it, the nine year old is quite as normal as it gets. Not only did the boy have ordinary brown hair, and ordinary freckles, and ordinary knobby knees, he lived a nothing short of ordinary life. 

This morning, Norman brushed his teeth, got dressed, combed his hair, and rode his little boy-sized red Schwinn bicycle to school. 

I know as well as you do that like every little boy of nine cannot possibly focus on his school work when a beautiful day such as today calls to him from outside the window.

A swing set across the playground rocks quite gently in the breeze—a little bit thoughtful and a little bit anticipatory. Norman feels just about the same as this lonely swing set. We know this because his muddy sneaker bounces on the toe underneath his desk while his fingers roll a stub of a pencil across his half-finished multiplication tables. Unfortunately for Norman, he knows that his mother is expecting him home right after school so that he can finish her list of yard work before dark. 

After the last bell of the day at precisely two forty seven, Norman leaps over to his cubbyhole and tugs the coonskin cap he forgot to bring home yesterday onto his head. He wishes that he had his pellet gun so that he could play Davey Crocket on the way home, but his mother told him no as usual. 

Instead of his gun, like any ordinary young boy would do, he substituted it with a stick that had a sharp curve he found on the side of the road. Norman takes his usual route home, riding past his father’s auto supply store. He waves his stick in the air and rings his bell while going by, but his father doesn’t see him. Turning onto West Cherry Street, Norman rides until he finds himself in front of a red house with a yellow door. He always knows he’s going the right way when he comes across this house because Norman, like many boys his age, can never really quite remember street names. But not only does the red house with the yellow door have directional value, every day without fail, the old woman who lives there in the company of her Boston Terrier, offers him a chocolate chip cookie and a bit of ginger root from her garden. “Who do we have here? Davey Crockett?” 

“Nope,” he says through a mouthful of cookie. “Just Norman with a hat. I can’t be Davey Crockett until I get my gun.” 

The old woman smiles, her eyes wrinkling shut. “Oh I see.” 

He thanks her with a tip of his coonskin hat and rides along. 

The best part of Norman’s ride home is the giant hill at the end of West Cherry Street. If he kicks his feet out and screams “yahoo!” at the top of his lungs, he goes barreling down the hill so fast Norman could imagine that he was flying—or on horse back, on a roller coaster, or in a super fast fighter jet depending on the day. 

 At the bottom of the hill, he laughs and starts to whistle, skittering his gun stick across the iron bars of the tall fence that surrounds the cemetery—another marker that tells him he’s going the right way. 

Whenever Norman finds a rock in the grass, he throws it over the fence, hoping to hit one of the headstones. 

Now, I wouldn’t be telling you about Norman if he just ate cookies and threw rocks at things. Despite how ordinary Norman is, sometimes ordinary people run into things that happen to be a little bit more out of the ordinary. 

Just as the boy was going to throw another rock, he squints through the fence and spots something that he has never encountered on his way home from school—or someone, rather. 

He squishes his face against the bars and shouts, “hello?” 

Upon squinting a little bit more, Norman realizes that it’s a girl. “Excuse me? Hey girl! You there!” 

She doesn’t turn to look at him, too invested in the flower in her fingers she plucks the petals from. 

“Hello!” he shouts louder, throwing the rock over the fence. 

It hits the grave nearest to her, bouncing off and rolling near to her foot. 

She looks up, curious and surprised. 

While most boys of eight don’t really think about these things or even know what to call it, in the back of Norman’s brain, her long yellow hair and large gray eyes make him believe that she is pretty. “Want to play?” He asks. 

She shrugs, but Norman takes this as an enthusiastic ‘yes’ so he runs to the gate and wheels his bicycle along side until he reaches her. 

“Hi there!” he grins and drops his bicycle against a monolithic marble angel. “I’m Norman.” 

The girl looks at him for a long time, observing his muddy shoes, his dirty pants, and the grubby hand he has offered for shaking. “Gemma,” she says with something of a smile. “I like your hat.” 

“Do you like Davey Crockett, too?” He scrambles on top of a headstone, riding it like a horse. “Sometimes he rides a horse just like this:” He demonstrates. 

The yellow-haired girl named Gemma narrows her eyes and tilts her head. “Who?” 

“The frontiersman from TV. Duh.” 

Gemma looks back at the flower in her hands and starts picking off the petals again. “I don’t have a television.” 

Norman’s mouth hangs open. “What? No TV? How do you even live?” 

She keeps plucking until all the petals are gone. She starts on a new flower. “I had a radio once. It was a long time ago, though.” 

“Oh,” is all that Norman says for a while until something else pops into his head as things so often do with ordinary boys . “Want to play war?” 

Gemma looks up from her flower. “How do you play that?” 

“Well this is my gun. Actually, it’s just a stick, but that’s why we pretend.” He looks around and finds another stick under a nearby tree. “Here. This can be your gun.” 

The girl takes the stick in her hands, looking it over a few times. “What do I do with it?” 

“Shoot it. But you have to shoot it before I shoot you.” Norman holds his stick up to his eye and pulls the trigger. “Bang! Bang! I just shot that bad guy over here.” 

Gemma looks. “That’s a tree.” 

Norman blows out his cheeks and rolls his eyes. “I know. But it’s a bad guy right now. You’re not playing right.” 

Gemma looks at the stick gun again and sets it on the ground. “I’m not sure that I want to play this game,” she says. 

Norman sighs and then sits on the ground next to her, yanking grass out of the ground with his fist. “So what do you do for fun?” 

She shrugs. “I’m just waiting.” 

Norman wrinkles his nose. “In a graveyard?” 

“Yes,” she answers simply. 

The boy looks down the path to his right and then to his left. Finding nothing worth waiting for he asks “For what?” 

She answers him with a smile. “You’ll see.”

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