The Rope, Essay Example

“Do it,” they said.  “Do it.  Jump.  Jump!”

Standing on the tree branch, rope in hand, their voices were very distant, but still clear.  A dozen kids below me, a few more in the water, all calling out for me to go ahead, just do it, already. 

And the worst:  don’t be such a chicken!

I thought that last voice probably belonged to Marco, a distant blob far out in the lake, away from the kids who simultaneously hated, feared, and idolized him.  Marco was big.  Fat big and tall big.  Old, too, by comparison to us eleven and twelve year-olds.  He was fourteen and already in high school.  His idea of a fun was to chase us kids around the neighborhood until my friend Ronnie had an asthma attack.  He had pimples on his face and hair that always looked greasy.

And he was mean.

“C’mon, chicken!” Marco shouted in a deep, man’s voice.

The other kids picked up his cue:  better to follow the bully than to draw attention to yourself and risk becoming a target.

The rope, well worn from years of kids standing right where I was now, pondering the abyss, felt slick in my hands.  The water seemed impossibly far away.  A drop of a thousand feet, a million, six million.

I couldn’t do it.  No way I could do it.

Only twenty feet, if that, but you were liable to bust your legs into splinters on the lakebottom if you didn’t swing out just right, and I knew that in the smart part of my brain, but my own animal instincts warned me to get out while I still could, insisted that I wasn’t strong enough–in body or spirit–to heave my small body off the safety of the branch.

In the back of my head, my mother whispered, Honey, get off of that tree right now before you hurt yourself.  Besides, it isn’t ladylike!

“I told you she wouldn’t do it,” someone said from the ground below.

“The girls never do,” another kid agreed.  “They’re always such chickens.”

I tightened my grip on the rope, breathed in through my nose, and…

…did not jump but

           leapt

…out into the breach, my heart racing and my ears filled with the surprised cheers of my friends and classmates and the farm kids whose names I didn’t know.  Heard Marco shout a big oof of shock to see me careen out into the wide open air, my long hair streaming behind me like a mermaid’s tail.

The rope thrummed beneath my hands, a living thing, and the wind seemed to catch me, rising me higher and higher as I sought that sweet spot above the deepest part of the lake, the safe spot where I could drop without fear.

“You did it!” someone shrieked.

“Let go!” they cried.  “Let go of the rope!”

My hands were glued to its stiff, scratchy braid and, instinctively, I pulled my knees up to my chest, trying to protect myself from the fall that would be inevitable.

I swung back towards the tree, too fast.  Jerked on the rope like a worm dangling before a fish and through my course off kilter.  Instead of landing back on the wide branch where the other kids could laugh some more and call me chicken and coward and crybaby, because I was crying now, my vision blurred and big ribbons of snot coursing down my chin and my hair in my eyes, instead of returning to safety I slammed against the tree trunk and careened back out into space again.

“Oh, jeez!” someone shouted and I heard Marco cry out in fear.

The rope slipped out of my grip.

I fell with my legs stuck straight out, bare pink-painted toes pointing towards the water’s shining surface like an arrow.

In the moment before I hit the water, I heard one of the girls shout four words that meant things had gone from bad to worse:  “Someone get a grownup!”

The water was too shallow, the lakebottom too near.

My body propelled downward, an unstoppable force and hit the muddy lakebottom, feet-first, in the time it took to blink.I opened my mouth to scream and swallowed what felt like gallons of lake water that tasted of summertime and freedom and, now, pain belong description.

No way I could have heard my ankles and shinbones snap like brittle twigs, not with all that water in my ears, but I heard it, alright.

Heard it and howled beneath the water.

Howled as my friends ran for help and fat Marco shouted “Is she okay?” from his vantage point deeper out in the treacherous lake.

Howled even when Mr. Amberson, who kept a fruit and vegetable stand at the end of the lane, fished me out by my hair, his eyes wild with shock and terror.

Howled with laughter and pride, despite the pain, because I was no chicken, no sissy-girl like the others.  I had done it.

I had let go of the rope.

The End