#second you

The line goes around your toes, up your legs, across your belly, over your shoulders, up the funny bump of your chin.

The outline isn’t perfect, but it’s you enough.

You write your name inside because names are how you say “mine” to the world.

The older kids on the block once whispered about a game with two shadows — how you can make a second one if you feed the first, how it will follow rules if you say them right.

Their version had dares and dares feel like lies.

Yours will be friend-shaped.

You put the three coins by the feet of your drawn self.

“In case you get hungry,” you tell the shadow. You put the baby tooth where the mouth would be, like a pale seed. You suck your thumb to get spit and taste iron and flinch and do it anyway — just a pinprick.

The drop falls exactly where your charcoal heart should be and makes a tiny starburst.

“Okay,” you say, serious the way you are when you build a fort and declare it a castle. “Listen.”

You straighten, look at the streetlamp as if it can hear, and recite the rhyme you half-remember and half-make.

“Stand in mine, stay behind,Do not touch me till I ask,Come when I say please, and keep me safe.”

You say please the way kids do — polite because Mom says so, not because the world is ending.

The moment holds anyway. The lamp buzzes and a moth thumps itself silly against the glass.

Your outline on the ground looks thicker, like someone colored it in a second time.

“Hi,” you whisper, then louder, braver, “Hi!”

A breeze you don’t feel anywhere else moves across your ankles. Your drawn hand — the charcoal hand — doesn’t move, but your real shadow’s fingers uncurl without you telling them to. Just a little. Like a wave back.

You grin so hard your face hurts.

“I knew you were there.”

You hold out your left hand and keep your right glued to your side — because you promised no touching until you ask, you remember your own rules. At first there’s nothing, and then there is a pressure that isn’t pressure, like cool water settling around your fingers. Your shadow’s hand overlaps your real one exactly.

You feel held in a place your skin doesn’t have a name for.

“Do you promise?” you ask, because this is how you make things true. “You promise to stay behind, and come when I say please, and keep me safe?”

Something at the edge of hearing answers. It might be a leaf ticking the curb. It might be the lamp changing its mind. It might be a voice under your voice saying, I promise.

You nod like a tiny mayor signing a very important paper.

“Okay. You’re Second-You,” you decide. “Or… Under-You.” You test both and giggle. “You can pick later.”

You don’t tell anyone.

It feels like breaking a soap bubble with words if you try. You put the coins back in the kitchen drawer after, but not the tooth.

The tooth stays in the outline because you think maybe it helps him chew.

Every evening you steal five minutes before dinner or after homework or during the commercials of a show you’re supposed to turn off.

You check the lamp’s hum. You stand in different poses so your outline learns you better — a superhero stance, a flamingo leg, a cartwheel halfway done before Mom shouts about dresses and grass stains.

You trace little updates on the concrete whenever rain eats the lines away.

Sometimes you use chalk when the charcoal goes missing.

Once you try a washable marker and get in trouble for “decorating the public,” but the scolding doesn’t stick because the lines wash to a ghost and ghosts are allowed to stay.

Sometimes you bring a flashlight and tuck it between two flowerpots to make a second shadow on the fence. You clap when you see both — one on concrete, one on wood — and imagine Second-You grinning in stereo.

You practice the rules with your most official voice.

Stand in mine. Stay behind. Don’t touch until I ask. Come when I say please. Keep me safe.

You make up extra rules too, silly ones — No scaring the cat. No eating the cookies unless I say. No telling secrets to the wind.

You hear a huff of something that might be laughter from under the porch, and you beam because it means he has a sense of humor.

When you’re mad because a girl at school said your shoes were baby shoes, you sit by the outline and kick your heels and tell Second-You everything.

When you’re proud because you climbed the rope in gym all the way to the knot, you lie down so your real shadow and your drawn one kiss at the nose and you whisper, “Did you see?”

Your hand goes out without thinking, and sometimes there’s that same cool, not-touch again, a weight in the idea of your fingers, a pinky hooked through your pinky where no pinky is.

It feels like a promise kept.

On a night when the sky is tired and the lamp takes longer to come on, you get scared of the dark for exactly one breath, the old kind of scared that lives in closets and under beds. You almost call for Mom. You don’t. You look down and your shadow — your real one — tilts its head when you don’t.

The lamp blinks awake and everything snaps polite again. You laugh at yourself and decide to bring Second-You a better coin tomorrow. Not a copper one. A shiny one.

You hide the dinosaur egg somewhere the grownups won’t clean. You fold the Band-Aid wrapper into the smallest square you can and tuck it under a pebble at the edge of your outline. You brush leaves out of the lines because it feels like combing someone’s hair.

You tell no one.

You keep playing happily.