Counting to Eight and Other Childhood Games By Tracie Adams

Warren LeMay CC




Counting to Eight and Other Childhood Games

You held me underwater in a pool at a roadside motel. As I kicked and clawed against your palm, I heard you counting—one, two, three. We had seen Jaws that summer, and through the blur of chlorine I was certain I’d feel teeth before you reached eight. When you let me up, I gulped air like a newborn. You laughed. Sometimes your love was sharp like teeth, but when you withheld it, that felt more like drowning—one strangled breath at a time.

I locked you in a refrigerator, your body crumpled like a rump roast. The only sound was the soft thud as it rocked and kissed the wall, over and over. And me crying, too weak to pull the door open. Mom spanked me, but it hurt worse when you shut your door in my face, wouldn’t let me play with your G.I. Joes or watch you build towers with your Erector Set. Your silence pounded me like fists.

You threw my cheerleading pom-poms in the dirt, called my championship medals “cute.” I wrecked your minibike into a tree, and you didn’t speak to me for a week. You made a new friend—a boy who shot arrows straighter than I could. He huddled beside you on the football field where I wasn’t invited. 

You pinned my wrists above my head and grinned while I thrashed. When Mom asked what happened, you laughed, “Nothing.” She always believed you. You won because you understood early that silence is a weapon, that the rules were different for you. You could open doors I couldn’t. Maybe you felt scared, or jealous, or lonely, but you never had to say it. I lost because I talked too much, followed you everywhere, loved you out loud.

We were children, learning how to love. You learned to withhold. I learned to chase. But love shouldn’t feel like being held underwater, waiting for someone else to decide when you can breathe. The worst part wasn’t how reckless our love was. It was that one day, we surfaced from childhood to find we’d drifted apart. The games were over, and neither of us was counting anymore.


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Tracie Adams, retired educator and playwright, writes from her farm in rural Virginia. She is the author of two memoirs, Our Lives in Pieces (2025 IAN Book of the Year Finalist) and Not Finished Yet (2025 BookLife/Publishers Weekly Prize Finalist).  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 and published widely in over 100 literary magazines including Hippocampus, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, Stanchion, and Fictive Dream. Visit tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on X @1funnyfarmAdams and Substack @tracieadams.