Excerpt from a short story titled, 'The Three Sisters'.

My father was hit by a bus and instantly killed when I was two, leaving my mother to raise me alone. His death broke her into a hundred different pieces; a fractured woman terrified of the world. Rather than, ‘live each day like it’s your last’ she opted for, ‘live like anything could kill you at any given moment’. My mother had a heart full of love but was highly-strung with a serious case of paranoia and by the time I was six I’d inherited most of her fears.

My mother taught me “important life lessons", like sitting too close to the TV will turn you blind, or that standing too close to the microwave will give you radiation poisoning. There was an endless list of rules; don't go in water deeper than your ankles, stand at least a foot away from the balcony edge, no bubbles in the bath water, no toy guns, and no chewing gum. It's hard to make friends when you're not allowed to run on the concrete or climb trees or go in the sandpit (there could be syringes hiding in there). One of her strangest rules was no balloons. She was convinced that if one burst, a piece of the balloon could fly into my mouth and get caught on my uvula.
    

When I was in the first grade, I brought home a pencil from school and she lost her shit because she was afraid that I would stab myself with it and get lead poisoning. She made my teacher give me crayons instead and would measure them every day after school to make sure they were being used. For me it was horrifying, for my classmates it was hilarious. It's hard to stay inconspicuous when you're a green Crayola in a sea of grey pencil. 

 

Our neighbourhood was crawling with kids. They'd play baseball in the street and hopscotch on the driveways. I sat in the middle of my drive, mesmerised by how carefree they were. 

One day Sally Weaver waved me over. My stomach twisted into knots as I glanced back at my house. I knew my mother was taking a nap, but I also knew I wasn’t meant to cross the middle line on the driveway – she had literally drawn a line with paint, “the safety line”, she’d call it. I stood with the toes of my sneakers on the line, my heart thundering in my chest. I leapt over it and felt something that was completely foreign to me: freedom.

Of course, it had all been a setup and the second I made it onto the street Sally Weaver grabbed me and pushed me into a circle of kids. They shoved me back and forth between them chanting, "Jenna Whitt, smells like shit," over and over. Yeah, as if things weren't unfortunate enough, my name also rhymed with shit. 

Over the chanting I heard a strong voice call, “Oi! Let her go!”

Molly Hollis, a scrappy little tomboy from a few doors down stepped up to the group. 

“You losers got nothing better to do than pick on someone half your size?" 

Sally towered over her.

“What are you gonna do about it?”

Molly pulled her right fist back and swung it into Sally’s gut. Sally grabbed her and to my horror; Molly spat right in her face. Thankfully, my mother had woken from her nap and looked out the window. Alarmed to see that I had not only strayed from the safety line but found myself in the middle of a street fight, she raced down the driveway before the situation could escalate any further. 

Usually a parent would give you a lecture about staying away from rough kids like Molly, kids that were trouble. But my mother saw a unique opportunity. She looked at Molly and saw my own personal bodyguard, someone to protect me when she couldn't, and from that day forward we were inseparable.

Molly’s parents were strict but in a different way than my mother. They wanted her to dress a certain way, act a certain way, trying to mould Molly into the kind of daughter that practised ballet and listed to Mozart. Instead, they got a slingshot-wielding, skateboard-riding punk with scabby knees and a killer right hook. A few years later they got the perfect daughter they always dreamed of; Molly's younger sister Cara. Molly got what she'd wished for and they let her be for a while. But then a little while turned into a long while and she started to rebel, earning herself the nickname 'Molly Mayhem'.  

A few months after Molly and I met we found the third and final piece of our puzzle, Jo Jones. Jo was short for Joplin; her parents had named her after the psychedelic rock star, Janis Joplin. Jo was a special kind of magic even back then, magnetic with an intoxicating energy.  

Her mother home-schooled her, so she didn’t have much experience playing with other kids our age. One afternoon Molly and I were playing under the sprinkler in the front yard. Jo was walking by smiling into a handful of daisies when she stopped at the end of my drive. I waved at her and she skipped over, slipped off her dress and danced under the sprinkler in her underwear.

Separate we were loners, losers, outcasts but together we were unstoppable, the three musketeers; Molly Mayhem, Joplin Jones and Jenna Whitt that smells like shit.