Crazy Middle Swing
Lauren Hasegawa
I decided how I was going to die at the tender
age of ten. The decision was made together with my
best friend—in her backyard, where we usually were.
Her mom’s parenting Bible was some book called
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child,
and apparently the first way to destroy our imagina-
tions was to keep us inside. Every time I came over, if
the Seattle clouds weren’t puking rain, she’d shoo us
outside like a pair of houseflies.
That was fine with us, though. The backyard
was our kingdom, our dominion. The woods behind
her house were peppered with fortresses. Ditches,
rather, that her brothers had hollowed out a decade
ago as shelters for Nerf wars and BB gun fights and
paintball battles. If we shuffled through the carpet
of fallen leaves long enough, we could find the Air-
soft pellets they left behind. We called them BBs,
not knowing they technically weren’t BBs, and used
them as currency to buy neat-looking rocks from
each other. Less frequently, we’d stumble across
paintballs. If the shell wasn’t busted, we’d crack
them open like eggs and use the milky guts to create
masterpieces.
Between the house and the road stood a
cedar tree we dubbed “E.T.” (short for “Everyone’s
Tree,” as well as referencing a movie I still haven’t
seen). That was our look-out post, where we’d
watch for my mom coming to pick me up from our
playdate. Since the branches near the bottom were
80
sheared off into stumps, we had to do some risky
gymnastics to get up. Part of it involved hanging
upside-down. Falling and breaking your neck was a
real possibility. We were kids, though, and kids don’t
think about stuff like that.
When the time came for my mom to arrive,
we’d watch and wait from our crow’s nest in the E.T.
We developed a code so we could communicate
without our moms hearing and finding us—we’d
hold up one finger to indicate one of four things,
like “my mom’s here,” or “be quiet!” The only finger
that we didn’t use was the middle one. I knew it was
rude and she told me that her parents said it meant
“I hate you,” and we didn’t hate each other. It’s prob-
ably a good thing we left that one out. As our moms
stood talking on the front porch, we’d sign “shhh!” to
each other from different branches on the E.T., even
though we knew we’d come running as soon as they
called.
And the palace of our little kingdom? Our
palace was the swing set that bridged the chasm be-
tween the real-estate-advertisement lawn and the
wilderness that only we intruded upon. When her
mom forced us out of the house, we would race to
the trio of swings, trying to beat each other to the
rightmost one, by the monkey bars. The middle
swing was so low that our feet hit the ground on the
way past, and the left one was too high for our ten-
year-old legs. If we were Goldilocks, then the right