Free Falling Backwards: A Memoir by Jann Arden Page B

down in the middle of the gym floor at a basketball game or on the popcorn-strewn aisle of a movie theatre or on the bathroom tile at a party. I’d lie down and put my feet up against a wall, plug my nose and blow to slow my heart down. It was par for the course now. I wished somebody knew what it was that I had.
    I had a funny heart, but my funny heart has always served me well.

chapter four
LEONARD AND DALE
    I t’s hard to write about Leonard and Dale. They were such a big part of my life growing up. The impression the two of them left on my heart is indelible. They were simple, down-to-earth farm boys but they were as crazy as the day is long. There was nothing they couldn’t get me to try. They didn’t care much about school or anything academic. They just wanted to be outside, running around like tribal nomad people, shooting at anything that moved (and they shot a lot of things). One day they just appeared out of a clearing in the trees. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. There they were, standing by our trailer with their dogs in tow, ready to drag me off right then and there. I don’t think they even asked me what my name was, they just asked me if I wanted to play and off we went. I think I fell in love with both of them the very first second we met.
    Leonard and Dale were cousins. That was one of the first things they told me, like it was a big announcement.
    “We’re cousins, you know,” Leonard said, with his hands on his hips. Leonard could fold his ears in half and make them stick with the help of a little spit, and Dale could turn his eyelids inside out,which he did for hours at a time. I was mesmerized by everything they did, no matter how strange it was. I had never seen anybody turn their own eyelids inside out. Gary would have sooner died than to stick his ears together with spit. I thought boys like these only existed in the movies. I had seen a matinee of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and these two were as close to that in real life as I was ever going to meet.
    Dale constantly had a bleeding nose, but he seemed completely unfazed by the blood bubbling out of his nostrils. He’d just wipe his face on his sleeve or snort the blood up into his mouth and spit it out onto the ground in a grotesque pile. I thought that his spitting was wonderful. He could lob a giant glob of spit and blood twenty feet through the air. Leonard spit a lot too. I don’t know what it was about spitting, but it was certainly all the rage with those two.
    They seemed to have the ability to pee at will. They’d whip out their little wieners (which I had never seen before in my life) and pee on anything and everything. They’d even try to pee their names into the snow. I couldn’t quite get over that one. After a few short months in their company, I just peed anywhere I wanted to, too. I never thought twice about pulling my cords down and peeing over the side of a fallen tree. I knew I would never be able to pee my name into the snow, but that didn’t matter. It was fun to pee outside. Liberating, actually. It beat having to go all the way back home. I couldn’t imagine peeing right in the middle of the yard at our old house in the city. I would have been hauled off by the cops. Gary would have had a heart attack if he’d had to pee outside. He was very proper. Leonard and Dale definitely did not like colouring or playing with dolls of any kind. I think they would have eaten poor Gary alive.
    The cousins lived next door to each other, just up the road from us. It was a five-minute run or a thirty-second bike ride. Their grandparents lived behind them at the end of a winding dirt roadthat looked like it had been ripped right out of the pages of
The Grapes of Wrath
. My gram and Charlie had a little garden in town, but Leonard and Dale’s grandparents had a real honest-to-God pig farm right there down the road from where my parents were building our new house. (Pigs, if you don’t know, are really mean when