Spring on South 8th

Jimmy and I turned the corner onto South 8th Street. Spring was starting to add some new color in the form of budding flowers to the bases of the gray rundown buildings with boarded up windows, chipped walls, and security fencing. All the buildings were closed now, most of them permanently; abandoned to be easels for graffiti artists and places to get high. Bent cans, brown broken bottles, and candy wrappers spilled across the sidewalk and into gutters that were never cleared.

We were almost home when we heard a muffled sound. On the other side of the street, a girl's face was pressed hard against a window of a clean white Avalon: her nose flat upon the pane, one eye squinting, lips twisted downward. Her breath fogged up the window in a rapidly growing patch. The car rocked harder as the motion inside intensified. She could only be fifteen or sixteen but the girls on South 8th started early. Childhood died young in Cowell.

It wasn't until we heard a car door open and a yelp of pain that we turned around.