Not just a diary

The next day I was woken up really early. I heard Lodi’s voice.
“Jessi….Jessi…”
I was still in dream land, passed out on my couch. Lodi? Is that you? Did you just call me Jessi? Where am I?
Suddenly TK was right behind my head, “JESSIN!”
I shot up like a freaked cat, scared to death. I immediately grabbed one of the couch cushions and smashed him in the head with it. I saw Michael and Leon cracking up. It was early. Very early. I pretended to ignore them and go back to sleep.
“Come on Man! Matt’s waitin’!”
“…wait…what…are you talking about?”
Leon through his hands in the air, “Set up man come on!”
Michael headed for the still open door, “You’re late get a move on!”
I got up and stretched lazily while the Leon and Michael ran out the door, “Lodi, come with us?”
She nodded and then followed.
I was still dizzy. It was then I noticed I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Normally I wouldn’t care considering I was a pretty good looking kid for being twelve, but I didn’t want them to know about that drawing on the back of my shoulder for some reason. They didn’t know that much about me and I planned on keeping it that way.

I faced TK, not daring to turn around.
“Hey where are your parents?”
I looked at him thoughtfully, “My what?”
“Parents… you know the things you live with…” he said sarcastically.
“Oh, they’re…uh…gone. Let’s get moving.”
“Gone?”
“Hey throw me my shirt.”
He picked it up, “Are they out of town?”
“Umm… in a way…”
He passed my shirt to me, “We’re late. We’d better go.”
I quickly put that on and found my shoes. I grabbed my skateboard and we were off.
I rounded the corner to the ally with TK and stopped abruptly, amazed. It was six in the morning and there were about twenty kids all carrying things and putting together. Matt saw us and came over.
“Bout time.”
“I know, Jessin forgot.”
He laughed, “Ha! I knew it! Nice hair-do buddy. Okay here’s the deal. We’re making this huge fort right?” I looked at it. So far it seemed to be just a dark alleyway with an old white wheel-less van off to the side.
Matt handed me a paper. It was a print out of what the fort was supposed to look like. On the back was a picture of it last year. From what I could see, there were two ends to the alley. One was a lot smaller and had the old van, and the other end was going to be barricaded by huge slabs of wood five feet tall and a door. It looked from the outside to have a roof because all you could see was the slabs of wood starting at the top of the five foot wall and tilting upward about four feet back until it was almost 7 feet tall. It reminded me of a pot. It was actually starting to take form now that I looked at it.

“Do I have to do anything?” I asked, handing the paper back to him.
“You’re supposed to help out but I think if we’re quiet we can just go around helping all these hyper-active first years do it.”
“Sounds good to me…”
“Keep a look out though. I don’t know if Wyoming knows we’re doing the set up today. One year they did and they knew all our supplies. Last year they even tried installing a camera on top of that wall right into the center open pit of the fort. It sucked, but we caught them and got a camera out of it.”
I went about holding up boards and things while they screwed them onto either side of the alley. Sparks flew everywhere when we started screwing it into the cement but it worked. The wall was tall, about two stories of cement. I looked up at it.
“ ‘Ay TK… what’s on the other side…?”
“Of what…the wall? The Jewish community Center.”
“Ahh…”
“Yeah we’ve terrorized the place a few times… and got thrown out a few times too.”

It took them until about eleven o’clock before all the boards were in place. A lot of the first years were starting to get restless and tired. I was sent to pick out a few of them to run down to Burger King and grab a bunch of burgers. I picked two short boys and a small girl to go with me.
“Okay pitch in if you want a burger!” I called and a bunch of people gave me their money before we started off.
I walked in front of them along the rusty white gates. The two boys chattered and pushed each other for a while. Then they started getting interested in me.
“What’s your name?”
“Jessin.”
“Are you from Australia?”
“Yeah…”
“Are there kangaroos there? How come you’re so tall? How old are you?”
I answered only the questions I felt like, and ignored them until we got to the crosswalk.

“Are we going to run across, Jessin?”
“No, we’re going to wait until it says we can.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll get in to trouble if you guys come back flat.”
“Ohh.”
We crossed and ordered twenty burgers from Burger King and two buckets of fries. I gave a bag or two or a bucket to each kid and we headed back.
“How come we have to carry it all?”
“Well you do want to be strong like me don’t you, mate? This is how.”
“By carryin’ fries?”
“No, by carrying lots of stuff and building up your muscles.”
“Ohh.”
When we got back the three kids I took with me were proud of being so important as about ten kids came rushing over for food. It was gone within an instant. I looked over at the fort. It looked finished to me and pretty cool. The door was all locked up with two combination locks.
I went over to TK, Lodi, and Leon sitting down in the grass with a kid that I didn’t know yet.
“Hey.”
TK hand slapped me, “ ‘Ay, Jess what’s up… Oh by the way this is Donny if you haven’t met him yet.”
“Yo,” said Donny and we slapped hands as well. He was about five feet tall and he was dressed in baggy white pants and a white shirt. He was a black skinny boy and he had black dreadlocks around his head to a little past his ears in front, but all the way down to his back in the back.
“Donny handles the station most of the time and knows how to work most of the electronic stuff.
“Station…?”
“Oh yeah you haven’t seen the inside of the fort yet. Come on I’ll show you and Lodi.”
We all got up off the ground excepting Leon who went to see what Matt was up to.
TK opened the locks on the doors and stepped inside. I ducked my head as I walked through the covered part until it got higher. The middle of the fort was completely roofless like in the picture, but I wouldn’t have guessed it from the outside. The edges had about four feet of roof all around though with bean bag chairs and things everywhere. We went to the end to the van and slid open the old white van’s sliding door. TK stood back.

“Go take a look.”
I stepped inside and was immediately impressed. The whole thing had been gutted out to now be metal all around. The front seats were still intact but they had been removed and put on rollers. The dashboard was cluttered with electronics…TVs, speakers, microphones, wires, amplifiers, and much more.
Donny came in after me, “I haven’t hooked everything up yet but we can usually get about two color TVs hooked up to these camcorders and the black and white TV to anything we want. That mixing board over there with all those tiny knobs on it I use to switch back a forth between frequencies and camcorders on the moniters.”
“Holy… how did you guys get all this stuff?”
“A lot of it is mine. Some of it was donated… some stuff we just found… one camcorder we got from Wyoming place last year… A lot of it is outdated and old but it works.”
We hopped back outside.
TK grinned, “Pretty cool huh?”
“Yeah…”
“Oh yeah and over there are the trunks. Each truck has a key-lock on it. They contain practically two of ever kind of water gun or Super Soaker and tons of water balloons… hoses… and random stuff we almost never use. In the coolers on the other side of the van there are about two hundred pre-filled water balloons…just in case.”
I shook my head amazed, “This must be some fight you got going with Wyoming…”
“I think we do it more for fun now than fighting. Its just more fun to attack each other than be allies.”
Lauryn laughed, “It does sound fun.”
“Does Wyoming or Casa Del Arroyo have anything like this?”
TK sighed. “Unfortunately yeah they do. Wyoming moves it every year and this year we have no clue where it might be. Casa Del Arroyo, being friends with both of us, has theirs under their abandoned bridge… and another in this one tree house. They don’t need all this fancy stuff like we got though.”
“Totals are… seven eleven year olds… seven twelve… five thirteen… and whoa only four fourteen. Now the schedule… You don’t have to follow the schedule but if there is a emergency or Wyoming decides to attack us… you should come running to this base for the battle and we’ll go from there. Those could happen at any time so be aware.”
He rotated some more and drug a piece of paper out of his back pocket.
“This years schedule… Mondays… we shred the skate-park. Tuesdays… we terrorize the Prado Grande Pool. Wednesdays… We chill at the mall or party at the arcade… Thursdays… Are just chill days where we chill here or at home…Friday try to make it here so we can take inventory or plans at Wyoming… And then on Friday nights it’s the big camp outs… where everybody’s invited. Make sure you bring your stuff and stuff. Saturdays… we terrorize the pool some more and meet here at noon just to get redirected with your group of friends and figure out what you wanna do the rest of the day… and then Sundays this place is closed down. Go home. Rest. Do your chores, please your parents, take a nice long shower, etc. But that night is Exodus and we all go to Hoffmintown for that.”
A kid raised his hand.
“What…um… oh yeah your name is Tyler.”
“Yeah, what’s Exodus?”
I was glad somebody asked that.
“Exodus is this Christian Church Group and Hoffmintown Church for mid-school only. It’s a lot of fun and you don’t have to be a Christian. We just skateboard over there every Sunday night at seven till eight-thirty. You’ll see when we go it’s tight. Any other questions?”
Another eleven year old raised her hand, “Do you still have the age rule for weekends?”
“Oh yeah, normally you can bring your younger brothers and sisters on weekdays if you’re responsible for them but Saturdays are for twelve and up only and Sundays are only for people with complete access… speaking of which… I have to hand out the keys.”
He went over to a trunk and drug out a bundle of chains and keys.
“Okay each one of these necklaces has at least 3 keys, one for the door, one for the coolers with the water balloons and one for the trunk. Some people’s chains will have more than others.”
He went around handing out chains to everybody, most of them putting them around their necks.
“The locks change every year guys so next year these will be useless.”
He passed me a chain off his pinky finger. It had five keys, each a had a different red symbol on it applying to the red symbols drawn on the locks of the trunks and things. Donny already had his chain. His had like ten keys on it.
“Whoa, what are all those to?”
“Oh one’s to the pool… a few are the house and Laundromat keys… and the rest are for here. I get access to everything since I own most of this stuff.”
I stuck my keys on the back of my wallet chain and stuck it into my back pocket again.
After Matt told everybody a few more things like no guns or smoking weed in the base… he let us all go. There was to be a campout in the fort tonight to celebrate.
The Campout went pretty well. A few kids’ parents wouldn’t let them come yet so it was a nice sized group. They all brought sleeping bags and such and we ordered pizza. I hung out with Lodi, TK, Leon, and Matt mostly. We chilled, talked, and chilled more.

Oh yeah and there was one more thing… the ghost story…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2002 at 12:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.