It was heavier than merited by its size, like a double-A battery. Cylindrical, with one end curving together to form a dull point. We found it in the playground, on a grassy mound by the fence. A thick bronze needle in a green haystack. It looked like a miniature skyscraper from one of those futuristic industrial dystopias depicted in movies.
Mr. Morton’s lower lip swallowed up the lower part of his mustache as he held the bronze battery at a distance. “It’s a bullet,” he stated. Then, looking off into the distance, his clear blue eyes crystallized. “This area was a scene to many battles during the war.” The fog from his eyes clearing, he looked down and started telling us about the system of underground tunnels used to smuggle contraband, and of soldiers sitting criss-cross-applesauce with stethoscopes held to the ground listening for diggers.
* * *
She interrupted, disrupted, destroyed, shattered the balance between the factions. The previous year, before her father’s military post changed, everything had been peaceful, quiet. The international kids congregated over near the little kid’s playground, sat at the picnic tables, or on the stone steps, and chatted in English, laughing their well-mannered chuckles. The local kids played football on the other end of the school, or watched their friends play football, or smoked cigarettes behind the bleachers, thinking of the dirtiest things to say to one another in the national language.
The hybrids drifted around, a nomadic tribe, wheeling and dealing with the international kids in English, and gossiping with the local kids behind the bleachers in their language. The hybrids unwittingly held the key to the relations between the international and national kids. Beyond symbolizing the physical mixing of the two factions, their association to both groups acted as a valve to release built-up tension between the cliques, and at times even promoted mingling.
And then, she showed up. In modern-day bellbottoms, and shirts that literally read “Flirt.” The kind of girl kids compete over by arguing about who saw her first and, thus, has “shotgun” rights to her. Huge bangs, like daddy-long legs, hanging to her lashes, and bullion locks that streamed down her cheeks, so only a small portion of her face was visible, like a Muslim in a gold-colored headscarf.
She was an American; a Mormon, and she did not speak a word of the local language. The international kids immediately embraced her as one of their own, and a few of the international boys proved smitten. But it was the hybrids that fell sickly in love. Every single one of them contracted the illness. Meanwhile, the local kids could barely point her out of a crowd.
The trouble began when the hybrids settled down, and started camping out near the little kid’s playground. Started eating their lunches there, staring at her and squabbling over who had a better chance. The local kids, the more hostile of the two groups, saw the scales tipping. All their pent-up resentments with regard to the international kids--their stinging indifference, their bland phoniness, their courteous cluelessness, how they lived in their country and didn’t bother to use the national language--bubbled to the surface. But it was against the hybrids, the turn-coats, that the anger was directed.
She did her share, though, dating and dumping nearly every member of the hybrid group. Almost like she were conspiring with someone, who knows who, who knows why. It was around the time she started dating her third hybrid that the fights broke out. Pitiful after school duels; frightened exhibitions of preteen bravado for a crowd of nervous spectators (nervous not for their friends, but that someone might start chanting their name and they’d be forced to participate). A lot of rolling around, and heavy breathing (yes, like sex, like terrible first time sex).
The fights continued, even after she stopped dating the hybrids, and settled down, definitively, with an international kid. Even after, at the end of the year, she informed everyone that her father had been restationed once again, this time in Japan. The end of the year came, and off she went, leaving behind a war to start another one somewhere new.
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