Photo: Sue Vincent
“You’ll stand on one side of the bridge, and I’ll cross it to the other.”
Millie considered.
Sylvia could be tricky. Sometimes the spunky neighbor was a delightful friend. Other times … not so much. And that’s not counting mishaps. Millie lost tally of how many times her playmate had landed her in trouble.
Millie’s hand rose to absentmindedly rub her backside. It still sported a bruise from the last ‘adventure’ Sylvia took them on. That tree limb would never grow again, and Millie’s piggy bank was half-emptied from the fine her parents had levied.
She looked at the pond. The water lilies floated serenely on the surface. A dragonfly hovered before dipping elegantly to paint a ripple. A frog leaped and splashed and swam underneath a wide green leaf. A bird chirped nearby.
It was perfect.
“I’m fine just relaxing here on the bank,” Millie decided.
“We won’t disturb anything,” Sylvia countered, flinging a braid behind a shoulder.
Millie shuddered. It was one of the things that were uncanny about Sylvia. Millie was positive the girl could read minds.
“I brought a ball,” Sylvia enticed. “And bread.”
The ball must be Denny’s, Sylvia’s brother, and almost certainly swiped without permission. The bread? Well, that was probably not ill got.
“No ball,” Millie said, then sighed. Somehow she always gave in to what became a kind of bargaining, when she in fact wanted none of the options to begin with.
“Great!” Sylvia scampered across the narrow bridge. “I’ll toss bread crumbs in the water and make some waves. You corral. Let’s see how many frogs we can get!”
Na'ama Yehuda 
Ha.. a modern “Lady or the Tiger.”
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Well … I’m curious now … about the association to the short story! 🙂
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You know the story of the lady or the tiger? Well, the girl was given the choice of the bread or the ball and sounds like she made the wrong choice..
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Ohhhhh! Thanks for explaining! I didn’t see it in this way, but now I can totally see how it could be interpreted this way! I’m not sure the ball would have been the better choice… Perhaps just a different kind of wrong choice… 😬
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Yes I have a feeling it would have.
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Thank you for this thought provoking comment! Those are often some of the best!
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Left me wondering all the way through what they were up to. Frog catching. Not easy to do. Best done with a fine-mesh net.
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Yeah, which is why I fully expect them both to fall in at some point and for Millie to get in trouble … 😉
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Yep
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🙂
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Bullying can take so many forms…
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Yeah, subtle and sometimes perhaps almost unintended (in children who ‘just’ don’t see that their narcissism negates the needs of others…). Also, to be fair, Millie could just say, “Nope, I’m going home.” …. so there’s a bit of enabling going on there, too … Kids are as complicated as adults are, eh? 😉
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It all has to start somewhere…
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True, that, too! 🙂
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