| opiate |
07-23-2007 09:31 AM |
Quote:
http://www.thehumorarchives.com/joke...rrett_Kaminaga
A Short Love Story
Jumper had known Molly Jensen since the moist-eyed days of
early youth. Charlie Rickford had teased Jumper about hanging out with girls
until Molly beat him up and made him cry in front of Arthur Jones, Jonathan
Loo and even Quentin Clarke. And this was in _the second grade_, where
crying meant the end of hanging out, of chasing each other at near light-
speed on bicycles, of endless adventures in the any-world of the fantastic
playground. It was, in the second grade, like another fall of man. but
Charlie was reunited with the gang the next day, his . . . unmanly tears
forgotten in the furious pace of a seven-year-old's life.
Jumper liked Molly because she never asked him to marry her, never
wanted to play house, was interested more in transformers than in the fake
Barbie dolls that you could cut the hair off of and it would never grow back.
Not that Jumper pretended or even thought that girls were yucky; he liked
them on the whole. but they were so much less real than Molly was. Jumper
still got frightened at the movies, went swimming and played get-dirty-get-
scraped tag with the guys, but he reserved his most fantastic adventures for
playing out with Molly. The any-world of Charlie and Arthur and Jonathan
always had the same machine-gun fights (even when they played knights and
dragons), the same gory deaths, the same _everything_. Molly and Jumper
created worlds better than anything on TV, filled with the black-and-white
hopes and fears of second grade, because Jumper and Molly were best
friends.
When they reached intermediate school, and Charlie and Arthur all
eagerly pretended to be grossed-out by spin the bottle and the other I'm-
curious games of adolescence, Molly and Jumper, impossibly, grew closer
together. One day at the park Molly wanted to play on the swings instead of
play four-square, and she began to talk about the grayer hopes and fears of
thirteen-ness. And Jumper, amazingly, found that he really didn't mind. So,
they learned from each other -- Molly talked about training bras, about
stupid slumber parties, about the unbelievable pain of braces. Jumper talked
about his middle name (Xavier), about not making the basketball team cut,
about the requisite machismo of being a teenage guy. And they both got to
sleep a little easier because of it.
|
|
