On the day of the party for my eighth birthday, Cristy is dabbing her fingers into the ashtray on the back of the front bench seat in Dad’s station wagon. She soldier crawls back to our spot in the trunk and reclaims her wheel-well seat.

From mine, I watch her draw on her window.

The interstate’s smooth road hums beneath us, as if we’re starship captains watching deep space unfold, boldly going where no one has gone before. Road signs whirl by, for Boston, land of tall buildings, a far-away alien world.  

Cristy is swirling circles of ash on the window glass until they form clouds, then strongmen. She’s telling me about superheroes who pound away bad guys. Superheroes never get hurt, she points out. Good eclipsing evil. Hope eclipsing despair.

She doesn’t want to talk about her broken arm, or the bruises that spill down her other arm below her sleeve, threadbare because it’s a three-time hand-me-down through her brothers, a boy’s shirt that looks like it’s been cut from battle fatigues that have seen things.

She adds an ashen baseball bat to each strongman’s hand. “Like Reggie Jackson,” she says, careful not to slob ash onto her cast. It’s the bright white of a fresh baseball.

“He’s a New York Yankee,” I protest, but she’s moved onto another finger of cigarette ash, another strongman. I let it drop.

She doesn’t want to talk about the fall that fractured her arm either.

Something about a tree, she’ll mumble if I press. It’d make her cry, so I don’t.

Her yard isn’t big enough for a tree, Danny told me.

“If her yard had a tree, its branches would push into her bedroom,” he said. “Like Jack and the Beanstalk, she’d get carried away, and probably for the best.”

I asked him what he meant, but he wouldn’t explain.

“Just promise me you’ll never go over there,” he said, and I promised.

Outside, the dark green haze of the late-summer woods that line the highway swim by in waves of August heat. I turn to the window on my side.

Like cavemen on the foldout pages of a National Geographic from our school library, we paint our cave art, dipping our fingers into the ash, wielding used cigarette butts like paintbrushes. Cristy traces a smile across one strongman’s face, below hollow eyes that stare straight out.

“I call him, Protector,” she announces, and dabs a cape onto his back. He seems to lead the others. 

Her smile ripples away as she finishes, doubt eclipsing curiosity in her eyes. The highway crosses a river, and she stares at the horizon.  

“I want to grow up to be strong,” she whispers, “but I can’t.”  

“Girls can be strong too,” I tell her.

She nods but says nothing. We’re still ten minutes from Saucy’s and my birthday party.

Cristy wants my life, Danny says. She’s the only one who needs a ride to my party. Her family shares a station wagon with stained seats and a window crank that doesn’t work.

We don’t talk about how they struggle with money.

We don’t talk about how her dad doesn’t always come home. Or the scar next to her nose from when she was little.

We pass Danny’s family’s station wagon on the highway. He’s buckled into the back seat, reading a book with a bright cardboard cover. The windows are up because they have air conditioning. His mom waves as we pass, her eyes clouding over when she spots Cristy.  

Cristy sees it too.

Danny doesn’t read well; Cristy says to me from her wheel well. We crouch so our heads won’t press too hard into the car’s soft ceiling.

“Do you have some quarters?” I whisper to Cristy when a new song comes on the radio, “for the arcade?”

She doesn’t like when people ask her if she can afford things. They get the wrong idea. Danny gets the wrong idea sometimes.

Like feeding birds in the winter, he says, they get dependent on you. If you stop, they starve. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he’ll eat forever. Danny’s heard that at church.   

I don’t care about that fishes-and-loaves stuff, so I pass Cristy a handful of quarters, warm and damp from my grip.

At Saucy’s, she uses them in the arcade room to beat all the guys at Pac-Man, Centipede, and Grand Prix.

I remember, still, how they rolled their eyes at the girl in the butch clothes who reset all the high scores that day, how her eyes glowed with the victory of being seen and admired. How happiness looked on her face, in the glow of the arcade screens while she stared at her strongmen as they vanquished would-be villains.

I never had a friend like her again.

Cristy’s family moved away before my next birthday, and I saw her less and less. The last time was the summer she turned twenty-one, the year before she died. I don’t want to know how.

She sat at a table in some nameless dive bar, in one of the M-towns halfway to Boston, her face lit by the light of the lantern hung on a fake chain suspended from a smoke-stained ceiling. 

Her hair had grown out and she wore it like a cloak, her face a cipher as she nursed a mug of warm, flat beer.    

“Cristy?” I said, half-standing at her table, half-ready to flee to the restroom.

She burst from her reverie like it was water boiling, as if realizing she were being cooked alive.

By the scar near her nose, I knew her, but she didn’t know me. She stared through me, at nightmares I couldn’t see.

The hope in her eyes had faded. I ran away before mine could too.

I wonder what would’ve happened if I had stayed. If I could have been her strongman. If I could have saved her.

---

Among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England, R.W. Owen resurrects antique typewriters and writes all first drafts from their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan’s fiction has been recognized with honorable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest and has been published in Literally Stories, Five on the Fifth, Writers Resist, Idle Ink, Litbreak Magazine, The Rock Salt Literary Journal, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag. Find Ryan on Bluesky, @iviesofinkribbons.