Wingate Park - Pride Comes Before a Fall

I think I was 10 and in sixth grade. I was walking home form school with my two closest junior high friends (K&F) and another girl in our grade who was friends with one of my best friends (N). N lived in K's building on New York Avenue, and I was usually at odds with her. She wasn't so nice to me, and I was jealous of her relationship with K. I was probably irritated that N was walking with us, and tried to keep my feelings to myself. I was unsuccessful.

It was spring time, and we were all happy because we had a half-day. As was our usual after school practice, we went to the corner store on Albany Avenue to get potato chips and soda, and then we walked down Rutland Road so that we could stop at Wingate Park to play on the swings and slides. When we got tired of the swings, we went to race on the slides. Back then, we didn't have safe, plastic slides. We had the tall metal kind that heat up in the sun and burn your skin.  I don't know why we thought that running on the slides was a good idea, but I was excited because I was going to race N, and I felt like I could beat her. I really, really wanted to beat her.

Interlude: Although I had good memories of field days at Wingate Park at the end of every school year, there was that other incident. When I was four, I went with my preschool to Wingate Park, and there was a cement rectangular wading pool. The water wasn't on, but for some reason, I was playing around in the empty pool with my bathing suit on anyway - a cute little red bathing suit with an apple on the front.  My little friend, Z, who happened to be the son of the woman who ran the preschool, found a Tropicana orange juice bottle in the park. This is back when Tropicana orange juice came in thick glass bottles. There was a little water dripping from the faucet of the wading pool, and Z tried to fill the bottle with his four year old hands. I imagine that some of the water must have gotten on the outside of the bottle as he tried to fill it. I remember him calling me, turning around, seeing he bottle flying toward my head, and the searing pain that followed. I remember seeing the glass bottle, half its original side with jagged edges after it hit my head. One of the preschool teachers grabbed me and rushed me to the bathroom. I remember seeing the blood and water flowing into the faucet, which freaked me out a bit. She put a bandaid on my head, and I remember my mom being horrified, because it was obvious that a bandaid was insufficient for he wound to my head. I ended up needing seven butterfly stitches, which our next door neighbor who happened to be a nurse put on for me.

The plan was to run up the slide, down the steps, around the slide, back up the steps, and down the slide.  I ran as hard as I could, and I was winning . . . until we got to the top of the slide. Maybe my laces had come untied? I don't know. What I do know is that somehow I tripped and went flying in the air. It felt like I was suspended in air forever, and when I finally hit the ground, it felt as if someone had shoved a broom handle into my stomach. My elbows and knees were scraped and bleeding, and I couldn't catch my breath. I saw people running from around the park to see what happened - some were concerned, some were laughing and pointing. They were all upside down from my perspective, as I writhed around on my back. My friends tried to make me stand up and walk, but I just wanted to lay there and catch my breath. My friends supported me as I limped over to K's apartment three blocks away so she could patch me up. 

Talk about pride coming before a fall? The main characters in the novel will be little kids when it begins, and I wonder how I can incorporate the impact of jealousy in friendships, and childhood accidents? Did anything crazy ever happen to you at a playground?