Erica Shoots the Plastic Airplane, 10 years old?
Erica Shoots the Plastic Airplane, 10 years old?
2022-10-04
I feel like I need to get these out as soon as they come to me, now. I’ve said it before but I feel Iike if I let these memories go then I’ll never remember them again and they’ll be lost forever.

Lauren (the babysitter from the last memory) had a younger sister. She took over when Lauren was either unavailable or when she had just gone to college. I can’t remember her name, but I want to say it was Erica.

It was Erica’s first time babysitting us. We were still getting to know her as a person. She was quiet, like her sister. Nice, though. Not extremely confident around us, she seemed to care whether we liked her or not. Another late Summer, early Fall day. We were playing outside on our street, Dan had just procured a plastic slingshot airplane, which is exactly what it sounds like: A plastic handle with a rubber band that you’d pull and release a plastic airplane from. The thing actually got decent distance, and things like that kept us occupied, trying to figure out all the ways to use it.

Our house was on the intersection between two streets. We were playing on the street on the west side of the house, shooting the airplane on the grass there, Erica supervising us. She asked for a turn, or we offered the slingshot to her.

She launched the plane, and it skewed away from the elevated grass where we were playing, down onto the street. It was a small suburban street, not a lot of traffic, but this moment was one of the few where a car was actually passing. The plane landed in the road, not in a way that would have affected the approaching car, like…it hit the road as the car was still 50 or so feet away, meaning there wasn’t enough time for us to go retrieve it.

Out of all the ways the car could have passed over the plastic airplane, avoided it entirely or stopped in front of it, the car squarely ran it over with it’s front left tire. We all stood there for a second processing it—the new babysitter wanting to fit in, breaking the new toy of the kid she was watching, due to a rare passing car that seemed like it had been staged for this exact outcome.

It could have been something that Dan would have cried over, but I think we might have been past that point. Maybe the absurdity of the moment short circuited that kind of upset? We ran down to the road and picked up the plane, it was cracked in a way where it couldn’t fly straight anymore. Erica looked embarrassed and she said something like, “It looked like the car swerved to hit it,” which it probably didn’t but we all agreed it probably did anyway.

A year or so later I was at my friend Eli’s house. His older sister Erin had some of her friends over, too, and one of them was Erica. I was fresher, more confident around my friends and when I saw her I said “Oh you broke my brother’s airplane once!” She looked embarrassed for a moment, probably blushed remembering that moment that she’d put behind her and apologized again, said she felt bad when that happened. Then we went on with our lives.

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