It wasn’t until I was eleven or twelve that I noticed her. Sprinklers and garden hoses were teasing us with drops of water while we danced under the hot July sun. I remember her bathing suit. It was red with white spots and a two-piece. Her dark hair was soaked and strings of it were sticking to her face as she jumped through the rainbows of water.
Before I saw those eyes and that hair and that smile and the way the sun bounced off of her back and her legs and the way that she moved and the way that she danced, she was my teammate in football, my robber to catch, my mother in the dollhouse, my star in the musical, the one who fell off of bikes with me and scraped knees and chipped teeth with me and sprained ankles and fell out of trees with me, but that day in the wet grass under the clear Midwest sky, she was something else.