There was a game where we lay back in swings and closed our eyes, me and my friend Summer. When someone made too much noise nearby we'd sit up and yell DON'T WAKE ME UP at them, loud, leaning forward in our swings, top-of-our-lungs anger. We won if we both yelled. If only one of us yelled, then we lost. This is the first game I remember playing.
There was a game where someone was a Hider. The Hider would hide my lunchbox, anywhere in the school, and everyone else tried to find it and get it back to the handball court before the Hider caught them.
There was a game where Summer and I would phone each other after school, and one of us, let's say me, would get a wooden spoon and I'd hit it against things in my loungeroom, and Summer would try to guess what I was hitting. There was a two-metre circle of things around the phone that I could reach - stretching the coiled cord as far as it would go - and after a while Summer could guess them all. I learnt the sound of her spiral staircase bannisters, and her kitchen sink, and her music stand, and her many many books, though I couldn't ever tell one book from another.
Read More