Writer’s Sketch: Sidewalk Games

Quietly, I tapped my fist against the glass. Hopefully, Isabelle was home. The streets were empty, vacant of any signs of play, but that would soon surely change.

I knocked again. Isabelle appeared in the window beside her front door. She shook her head back and forth with a touch of fear in her gentle face. I was frightened too, but unlike her, I didn’t want to miss what was about to arrive. Again, I knocked.

She opened the storm door, but kept the screen door secured. “I don’t want to come out,” she said. “You’re not from my side of the neighborhood anyway. You should go. If the others see you, they’ll be mad.”

“We can watch from inside your house and no one will know,” I said. But she wasn’t interested in watching. Her face was paler than usual and she continued shaking her head back and forth. That’s when I heard the dead bolt click. Glancing over my shoulder, I caught sight of what had scared her enough to lock me out. The Horseshoe Kids were marching in a pack up the hill towards her home. Isabelle lived at the dead center of our neighborhood. A neighborhood split into two groups. The Horseshoe Kids and the Top Side Kids. Luckily, my side of the neighborhood was arriving first.

“That’s Emma!” I heard someone shout.

“Are the Top Siders here yet?” said another.

“I don’t see them,” I replied. I peered down the street to my side and sure enough, the Top Siders were on their way. And they were carrying bats and hockey sticks. “Uh-oh,” I said. “They are here! They have sticks!”

Colin, the oldest and angriest kid from my side of the neighborhood laughed as he waved on the group of twenty behind him. He snagged a large fallen branch from someone’s side yard as they approached, marching in unison. The Top Siders began to holler as they approached Isabelle’s house.

I watched from the stoop as the two neighborhood clans met. Colin at the lead of mine and Olivia, my other friend from the Top Side leading hers. “What are you doing?” I asked nervously.

“Finishing this, once and for all!” she shouted, swinging her bat down onto Colin, but he blocked her attack with his tree branch. Panic fled through my body immediately and my pulse raced in time with the chants from the other kids. This fight between the groups had gone far enough. I spun around and knocked on Isabelle’s window again, this time harder and harder, trying to alert her to the danger outside. Until finally, my fist cracked through the glass.