Nick would rebuild, and Mr. Streeter would flatten them again. One after another—like he couldn’t stand the idea that something joyful existed in a space he liked to cut through. Some days Nick cried. Other days he got quiet, jaw locked, staring out the window with that look kids get when they’re trying to be tougher than they should have to be.
I offered compromises, because that’s what adults do.
Nick shook his head immediately. “That’s my spot. He’s the one doing the wrong thing.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I confronted Mr. Streeter again, later, when the sky was already dark.
“You drove over his snowman again.”
“It’s dark,” he said, barely slowing down. “I didn’t see it.”
“That doesn’t change the fact you’re driving on my lawn.”
He smirked. “You going to call the cops over a snowman?”
I remember standing there in the cold after he went inside, hands trembling—not from the temperature. From the way a grown man could be that casually cruel to a kid, and that smug about it.
“He’s doing it on purpose. I can tell.”
Mark sighed the kind of sigh that means I get it, but I don’t know what to do with it. Then he said, “He’ll get his someday.”
I didn’t expect “someday” to show up in our front yard like a pressure washer.
A few days later, Nick came in after school and said, “It happened again.”
I braced myself. “Who’d he run over this time?”
“Winston,” he muttered, but his expression was different—focused, almost calm. Then he leaned in like he was sharing classified information.
“You don’t have to talk to him anymore.”
Continue reading…
