RE: Trailer Trash 3 pt 9 (Patreon)

(pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, pt 7, pt 8)

   Gasping out for breath, Elena scrambled up the exterior of the playground fort, frantically grabbing for every available handhold across the wooden edifice and scuffing her new sneakers into every foothold she could cram them in. She hauled herself up over the railing and dropped heavily into the fort’s tower, that uppermost section featuring the long plastic spiral slide.

   If someone had told her several hours ago that she would be covered in sweat and practically panting with exertion from playing tag with children, Elena wouldn’t have believed it. Her hands felt raw from clambering around the playground, she had splinters in the side of her arm she’d yet to pluck out, her elbows were scratched up from a tumble she’d taken across the mulch, and she didn’t even want to think about what she’d done to her nice white shoes.

   This is... so much fun!? Elena thought, feeling bewildered as she struggled to draw in lungfuls of chilly Autumn air. They’d been playing for hours and hours—it was already starting to get dark out. 

   Their game of tag began in an incredibly lopsided manner; a five-against-one, with Elena joining all of the cousins to oppose Tabitha’s purported dominance of the game. To ‘win,’ Tabitha had to tag out their entire team—with the caveat of not allowing those she’d tagged to in turn tag her—which reset the round, forcing Tabitha to start tagging them out all over again.

   The tables turned back and forth as the day progressed. Each game—with the exception of one particularly unfortunate instance—began with Elena’s team hurriedly dispersing in every direction to put as much distance as possible between them and Tabitha. Then, one by one they would form back up into a hunting party to pursue Tabby as they were each tagged out.

   Looking back, no two rounds played out alike, and the dynamic within each round changed in a heartbeat. If you hadn’t been tagged, you were frantically fleeing Tabitha’s approach, and if you’d already been tagged, you were racing after her to try to catch her before she tagged the rest of the group. Sometimes Elena and the four boys formed a cohesive group, other times they split up with an every-kid-for-themself attitude. Many of the rounds ended with Elena leading the tagged-out pursuers in close coordination to defend the last remaining untagged cousin from Tabitha.

   The first two rounds had both been shocking losses, with Tabitha dispatching all four cousins and Elena in a handful of minutes. Although she could hardly believe she was starting to take a game of playground tag seriously, Elena felt her competitive spirit rising to match the circumstances and started giving it her all. In the third round, Elena coaxed and cajoled the boys into attempting some semblance of a strategy—clustering up together for mutual support. 

   Yeah, right. ‘If we all stick real close together, one of us can just tag her back right away, right?’ Elena remembered, shaking her head in disbelief at her own naiveté.

   Tabitha had lunged fearlessly into their midst, tagging each of the boys with a healthy shove that sent them sprawling back out of retaliatory range. With Tabby’s practiced weaving and ducking past the remaining clumsily outstretched arms and striking out with precision, it was the shortest round ever. Their entire group was overturned in a record twenty seconds.

   That wasn’t to say Elena didn’t have fun—there was something incredibly uninhibited about this whole experience, a refreshing simplicity to today that she wouldn’t have ever imagined, and didn’t think she could recreate. The four cousins hadn’t spoken a word to her when she was just Elena, an outgoing but somewhat unknown quantity here to babysit them with Tabitha, this total outsider. As an aloof older teen, she in turn hadn’t really had any particular interest in them, either. Once they started playing, however, their different perceived roles fell out of relevance and were quickly forgotten.

   The boys—she recognized them individually as Sam, Nick, Aiden, and Joshua, now—were young enough that they weren’t boys, weren’t this complicated different gender dynamic she was forced to be aware of. In playing alongside each other, they somehow ceased to be part of the social rhetoric that dictated how Elena acted and how she treated them, and something about it all was incredibly straightforward and liberating. They were just all kids having fun together—except Tabitha, of course. Tabitha was some kind of monster.

   Tabitha... Elena immediately grew alert. The idea of Tabitha had been imbued with several new flavors throughout the course of the day, and the name rolled back and forth over her mind like something she couldn’t adjust to.

   Whatever else she thought the girl was in Marine Science or in the school library, this seemingly shy and reserved classmate of hers was the undisputed apex predator on the playground. In a game of tag the previously unassuming redhead became an unstoppable juggernaut, an invincible tyrant whose shock and awe blitzes regularly sent all four cousins scattering with yelped shrieks of raw panic. The very sight of Tabitha’s spry form darting about the playground after them—or worse, closing in instead on her—filled Elena with a thrilling sense of fear. Although they did win several games, victories were few and far between enough that every win felt like an enormous accomplishment.

   Am I ever gonna be able to see her like I used to again? Hunkering herself down into a crouch, Elena turned to peek through the wooden bars of the fort at the chaos below. Aiden was dashing frantically by in the waning October light, but she wasn’t sure if he was in pursuit or retreat. One of the three newcomers to the game, a taller neighborhood boy who the boys were calling Kenny, ran past as well.

    Throughout the game, Elena had witnessed Tabitha perform incredible feats of acrobatics. The girl was fast, and had no qualms committing herself to hand-springs, diving lunges or running slides to tag someone out or avoid pursuit. She was fearless in both scaling up the playground equipment, and then jumping off of them as the situation demanded, and wasn’t shy about rolling across the mulch as she scrambled back up to her feet to avoid a tag.

   The different terrain was used to full effect against her opponents—the animal-shaped rocker seats and park benches she could leap over and clear entirely, a feat impossible for the much younger boys to imitate. At a full sprint, Tabby would grab the posts of the playground fort or the swingset bars to sharply swing her entire body in a new direction, while those chasing after were forced to patter to a skidding stop in the mulch to bleed off momentum. 

   Elena’s long legs enabled her to outpace Tabitha briefly in the open spaces—but in the fenced enclosure of the playground, there really wasn’t anywhere for her to go. Instead they endlessly traversed the trifecta of grounds between the fort itself, a giant tree that shaded the area, and the detached set of monkey bars. The cousins constantly gravitated towards the playground fort, ready to make a quick escape on one of the slides or at one of the series of riser exits the moment Tabitha began to capture the fort. After all, she could only cut off one of them at a time. Usually, anyways.

    Elena was just in the middle of determining her preferred getaway route from the fort... when she noticed her mother’s silvery-white minivan parked in front of playground.

   Oh my God! Alarmed, Elena abruptly stood up, struggling to shift mental tracks back to normalcy. They’d been playing for—how many hours, now? It was dark already, and not heading back to call had been an uncharacteristically irresponsible lapse on her part. Her mother had obviously checked in at Tabitha’s grandma’s place when she was worried and then been directed here. When Elena saw Tabitha run up the risers towards her position, she felt torn between the game mindset and this sudden return to reality.

   “My Mom’s here,” Elena blurted out with a grin, holding up her hands.

   “Yeah. She’s been watching for a while,” Tabitha revealed, and the petite redhead continued her ruthless advance. “At the bench over by the tree.”

   It felt like a standoff showdown atop the fort, and each of the teenage girls eyed each other warily under the unspoken agreement of one last tag. There was only the stretch of the clatter bridge and a small landing of risers between them. The spiral slide was just beside Elena, but its exit down below was practically facing the fort where Tabitha stood, and it would only be a short hop down for Tabitha to catch her. That felt… anticlimactic.

   In a moment of inspired courage, Elena shot Tabitha a grin and vaulted over the railing of the fort tower and dropped—almost eight feet all the way to the ground. She landed gracelessly on her hands and feet, but it felt heroic, adventurous, and the surprise she saw on Tabby's face, the surprise she felt herself was the sort of satisfaction she couldn’t get from a roller coaster at Six Flags. That an innocuous game of tag would so easily eclipse their big summer trip as a personal experience for her was exhilarating, and Elena had to chuckle to herself as Tabitha landed beside her.

   “Good game?” Elena laughed, brushing off her palms. 

   “Yeah,” Tabitha nodded with a wry smile. “Good game.”

   Letting the cousins and other assorted neighborhood children continue to run amok for a moment, the two girls crossed over to the bench where Mrs. Seelbaugh was waiting.

   “You girls look like you’ve been having fun!” Elena’s mother remarked, giving them both a curious look.

   “Sorry, Mom. Totally lost track of time,” Elena admitted sheepishly, working to reconcile herself with the more mature Elena of earlier today, who didn’t play on playgrounds like a child. She could tell her mother was thrilled that she’d had such a good time, and that she was likely to inundate her with questions about what had happened later when they were alone. 

   “No worries, hakuna matata,” Mrs. Seelbaugh laughed. “I got to talking about those thrift store top designs with Tabitha’s grandmother for longer than I intended, myself. Are you girls ready for me to take you home? I can give the boys a lift down the street so they don’t have to walk.”

   “That’d be great, Mrs. Seelbaugh,” Tabitha said. “Thank you!”

   “Oh, I meant to ask you earlier, Tabitha,” Mrs. Seelbaugh said, rising up off the bench and stretching. “It’s been on my mind—the resemblance is so strong, is your mother’s maiden name by any chance Shannon Delain?”

   Tabitha’s smile seemed to go rigid at hearing the name.

(pt 10)

/// Shorter teaser this time, I'm not sure if I want to keep this drawn up in broad narrative strokes like this, or risk getting bogged down with a more tight POV for this section.