Mom has to work late tonight so Dad orders pizza from the place in Boone Village. You go with him, but you aren’t going to wait in the pizza place for the pies to come out of the oven. You want to go into the video store and look at the VHS cases. “Okay,” he says, “but we can’t rent anything tonight.”

The employees at the video store are always showing movies that you can’t watch. Once, and only once, your parents let you stay up to see Happy Birthday to Me while it played on a local tv network and you had screaming nightmares for days. As you look at the covers of all the movies that you won’t rent, a strange science fiction movie plays on the screens mounted around the shop. The future is shiny leotards and florescent headbands, large pieces of unwieldy computer equipment and flippant robots. Travel between stars has made the universe’s vastness comprehendible. A menacing alien presence stalks a heroine down a tiny hallway.

Why would the aliens build the hallways in their ships so small when they are so big? Your mind asks you. This is the beginning of you not being able to enjoy blockbuster movies.

Just as you forget that your time is limited, you hear your Dad’s voice behind you. The pizza is ready and getting cold in the car. You take one last look at the tv screen. There’s something about toaster-shaped spaceships and odorless disintegration mist and difficult interplanetary politics and furry posable tentacles and the unpronounceable greeting of the U’thkath. As the glass door swings closed behind you, the soundtrack of the movie fades away but the glimpses of the movie stay forever in your memory. What the hell were they watching in the video store that day?

Before dinner you walk home from piano lessons. You’ve been learning arpeggios and can just now barely play both hands together. Most of the lesson is spent doing your homework from the week before. You always forget to practice and your teacher always knows.

You mean to practice. You think about the music from the lessons a lot afterward, but the actual songs get confused in your head. Some of the parts speed up and other parts slow down. You hear the songs the way that you whistle them and then new parts to the song start to come into your head. When you sit down with the music, entire aspects of the melody seem to be missing.

It’s nearly summer. The neighbors are grilling their yard. The street smells like charcoal and chicken. You climb into a creaking swing on your front porch and watch the fireflies as they mingle with the leaves of the elm trees.

The little girl that moved from France always wears a blue ribbon, a large royal blue ribbon, tied in her hair. Other kids at the school make fun of her behind her back. Nobody is friends with her. She sits alone in art class, on the other side of the room, directly across from you. So you always feel like you’re staring at her when you look up. But you aren’t trying to. You just keep looking at that ribbon.

You like the ribbon. Not because you like ribbons, necessarily. On the first day that she came to the school, you saw her out the window of your class. You weren’t looking for her. You didn’t even know she existed. You were waiting for your friend Matt when you saw her Mom, a tall woman with the kindest face, walk her up the block. As they reached the front of the school, her Mom pulled the ribbon out of her pocket and tied it in. It’s been there every day since.

You know that some day the French girl won’t have the ribbon her hair. Some day one of the mean kids will make fun of her for it, or her mom will do something different, or she’ll just get sick of it herself. But for now, you can’t keep your eyes off of it. There’s something really happy in that ribbon. Like with any superstition, you don’t tell her that you like it. You don’t want her to know. So you don’t talk to her at all. Because you think that the moment you talk to her, the moment that she knows that you like the ribbon, she’ll take it from her head and no one will ever see it again.

Except for Tuesday.

On Tuesday and Tuesday only, your Mom drops you off at school. The windows on her Ford Kuga are tinted, but she still wears the darkest of sunglasses. She always seems preoccupied as you climb from the seat. Today you decide to watch if she watches you, thinking maybe you’ll wave from the top step.

She doesn’t wait. But, after nearly racing away, she parks halfway down the block. You hide in the doorway watching. In a few minutes, Mrs. McCallister pulls up and lets out Sandy, Allen and Jake. They start to great you as they enter the grade school, but you put a finger over your lips and pull them aside. Mrs. McCallister hurriedly drives down the block and after she passes your mother, the Kuga shifts into drive and slowly idles out of the parking spot.

Your mother is following Mrs. McCallister.

What a mysterious life she lives.

Your Dad wears a tweed suit and a plain tie. His hair has just started to turn gray at its curly ends. When he smiles, he flashes an uncorrected gap on the left side of his top row of teeth. He drives you to school every morning and every morning as you pile out of the back seat, he asks, “Do you have your lunch?” even though you are always holding it in your hand.

You imagine as you run up the steps to the elementary school that your Dad always waits at the curb watching until the faintest shadow of you fades into the doorway. But your Dad doesn’t. He usually drives away as soon as he sees the back of your head. He pops an old tape cassette into the stereo. He leans back in the seat of the family Volvo and turns the volume up. He takes a small sip of coffee from his travel mug and says to no one in particular, “Oh yeah. This is the funk.”

This is what your Dad calls funk.

(Thanks for Casey Cochran for his guitar.)