Lake Mini-Ha-Ha

The cherry bombs were handed to anyone Dennis deemed “cool,” so when Danny did not receive an illegal explosive, he took it personally, especially since girls were there. Even Manny received one, and Danny had seen Manny’s crap slide down his leg during a game of tackle football in Doug’s backyard. Danny did not protest; he had to pretend he had one, or that he was so cool he didn’t even notice he hadn’t received one, but Alex, who had also shit his pants during a game of tackle football, did protest.

“Manny’s yellow turd dripped down his Mexican legs, and I don’t get a cherry bomb.”

Dennis lunged at Alex with a cocked fist, but this was done just to scare him.

“You’re not old enough. Maybe when you get some pit hair, you can have a cherry bomb.”

“You’re one grade above me.”

“And in middle school.”

Manny wept. Manny did not like that they brought up his mustard poop in front of Nicole and Maria, and that his legs were Mexican when, in fact, they were Colombian, Cuban, and Irish. His last name was O’Keefe, “for Christ’s sake.”

“Everyone here has shit their pants,” said Alex, and he wanted to discuss each individual event until he could feel the gravitational wisdom and disappointment of the girls behind him who were done admiring the frogs and now were tapping their converse and popping their gum in a manner that can only be described as aggressive.

“You guys are disgusting,” said Nicole.

“We should have hung out with Mario and Alejandro,” said Maria. “They don’t shit their pants.”

“All boys shit their pants,” said Alex, and received the last cherry bomb from Dennis.

“We shit our pants,” said Dennis.

“Yeah,” said Manny.

But not Danny, who had been backing up, toward his Haro, undedicted. Tom and Ben, the tall boys in Dennis’s class, crossed their arms and looked at Danny like he had to speak up or he’d forever be deemed a “wimp,” and Danny could forget about coming to their birthday party that weekend at their pool. A lot of girls would be there, and though Tom and Ben were twins, they seemed to have been born with different metabolisms, because Ben was the kid who swam with his shirt on.

Danny stopped, looked down at his Vans for a second, and said, “Um, I don’t,” before looking back up. His face was red because he did not know if hiding his skidmark undies from his mother counted as shitting your pants.

“Bullshit,” said Ben.

“Grab him,” said Dennis.

The girls covered their mouths, and the whites of their eyes were the only thing Danny saw as he tried to chalk it up as a joke, carried away by Tom, Manny, and Alex. Dennis looked at Ben and said, “Take off his pants.”

“No!” said Danny, kicking and twisting as hard as he could until he was no longer thinking, just acting on an instinct that was not an evolutionary trait, but a revolutionary trait he had acquired the day he saw Vince get his head dunked into a toilet bowl by his older brother, and his older brother’s friends. The way he cried, the way everyone looked at him the rest of the day, week, and year, haunted not just Danny, but everyone, secretly. Vince went from the fastest mile to the lunch table with the other kids who had no click and had yet to formulate the idea that they themselves could be friends.

“Take off his pants,” said Manny, who was then punched in the arm by Dennis. Manny was out of line, and accepted this fact as he rubbed his Colombian, Cuban, Irish skin.

Nicole and Maria were astonished by what they were witnessing for the first time. They had never seen anything so forced, so instant, and it was friend-to-friend. The humiliation they were used to seeing was a psychological one that spread like a disease through gossip and graffiti. It did not matter that Jessica did not actually stuff her bra; what mattered was that everyone thought so. If you liked someone, you wrote it on the cover of your math folder, and if Mrs. De La Cruz was a lesbo, it was written in every yearbook and bathroom stall.

Danny was fighting for his life, and amongst the confusion of being manhandled by three of your friends, Danny did whatever he could, especially since he could not remember if his undies had little brown stains that would remain there forever until his mother tossed them and bought him a new pack. He bit a hand and was dropped. Whose? He did not know until Dennis, his brother, Manny, and Alex were calling Tom a crybaby and laughing at the fact that he had shrieked like a girl.

“It’s not funny, you guys! Danny…”

“Crybaby! Crybaby! Look at the crybaby, crying like a girl.”

Nicole and Maria’s hands were not big enough to cover their smiles, something they were aware of since Chrissy called them “metal mouth.” Then Chrissy received braces and deemed them “cool,” significantly impacting Nicole and Maria’s standing on the bus and in the cafeteria, where they were met with reserved seats protected by Chrissy’s dominance in the middle school hierarchy. Threatened by his sliding position on the boys’ side of the hierarchy, sliding down that totem pole like 12 year-old-shit, Tom threatened Ben with their parents, and then threatened them all with the cherry bomb.

“I’m going to do it!”

Tom did have the red candle lighter, and between anxious panting, they could hear the click of the safety button that releases the gas. All ran, except Dennis, who decided to secure his position at the top for another year.

“You don’t have the balls,” he said.

Panic-stricken, Tom declared he did have balls and that Dennis would not soon.

“You’ll go to jail,” said Dennis, grinning a grin he had seen a thousand times in the window of Mr. Santopadre’s science class.

The cherry bomb was lit, and instead of being afraid of being blown up, Danny, Manny, Alex, and Ben shouted, “Throw it! You’re going to blow your hand off!”

He did, up and over the little pond called Lake Mini-Ha-Ha, filled with tadpoles and one snapping turtle everyone called George. It fell into the water, and Tom sighed until Dennis reminded him that these cherry bombs were waterproof. It set off a car alarm and killed 23 tadpoles whose slimy and lifeless bodies were projected into the air and onto Dennis. Everyone laughed, but him, and they all spoke of this incident as if they were etching it into stone, so that by the first day of school, it would be known, as the legend is passed down each homeroom line, but Dennis saw his shirt. His only shirt, and that his mother would tell his step-father, who had threatened Dennis before in every way imaginable. So when the dinner bells rang, and everyone went home, Dennis sat at Lake Mini-Ha-Ha and cried like a girl.