After I was dressed in a clean pair of pants and a clean shirt, I ran out the front door of our small, two-room wood cabin as my mom yelled behind me, "Be on time, Calder!"
"I will!" I yelled back, clearing my throat as I made my way between the other cabins. I knew my voice had a hoarse, scratchy quality to it and sometimes yelling hurt my throat. My mom had told me, when I was about three years old, I had cried and cried for a long time, and it had messed up my throat a little bit or something like that. She said she couldn't remember what had set off the marathon crying fit, but one day, it was like I just decided I wasn't going to be unhappy anymore and that was that. She said it wasn't in my nature to carry sadness. I guessed it was true, because I sure didn't feel sad anymore.
I knocked on Xander's back door and his sixteen-year-old sister, Sasha, opened it, her long brown hair flowing loosely down her back. I swept my eyes over her and then looked up into her face. "Hey, Sash," I said, raising my eyebrows, standing up as tall as I could to try to bring myself to her height.
Sasha rolled her eyes and looked over her shoulder. "Xander," she called. "Your little friend is here."
"Little?" I demanded, insulted. "I'll have you know, I grew three inches this summer. My dad marked it on the wall."
Sasha bit her lip, looking as if she was trying not to laugh. That's when Xander breezed by her, grabbing my arm, so I was forced to take off running behind him.
"What the heck?" I huffed as we raced through the dirt paths, narrowly missing old Mother Willa with her herbs piled high in the wagon she pulled behind her.
She yelled something at us, but she was always a little hard to understand on account of the fact she was missing so many teeth. I guessed there just wasn't an herb for that.
Xander came to a stop, and when I caught up to him, I punched him in the shoulder. He laughed, dodging my next punch. "Whoa, you're gonna want to be nice to me." He looked around, then leaned in close and whispered, "Look what I swiped." He opened his hand to show me four, perfect sugar cubes.
"Ranger station?" I asked, looking around, too, and then reaching out as Xander set two in my palm. I tossed them both back and crunched them in my teeth, closing my eyes and moaning as the sweetness filled my mouth and burst across my tongue.
Xander pulled me off the walking path and stopped, turned, and glared at me. I looked at him questioningly, my mouth too full of sugar to talk. "What?" I mumbled, shrugging my shoulders.
"Geez, Calder. What's wrong with you, anyway? Don't you know how to savor something? When's the next time you're gonna get sugar, and you just devour them both so they're gone in an instant? Dimwit." Then he shoved me so I stumbled back, trying not to laugh and lose any of the sugar in my mouth.
Xander took one cube between his thumb and pointer finger and licked it delicately, and then he moved it away from his mouth so he could talk. "See, Calder, when you have something good, you have to make it last," he instructed, drawing out the final word. And then before he could bring it to his mouth again, two of the wild dogs that ran around our land raced past him, bumping him forward so he stumbled and dropped the sugar in his hand onto the dirt. The dogs ran over them both, grinding them into the earth as they ran away barking.
For a second I just stared at the crushed sugar ground into the dirt at our feet, and then up at his shocked face, his mouth hanging open.
I burst out laughing so hard I had to double over so I didn't fall down.
I looked up at Xander and the look of shock was replaced by a small tilt of one side of his lips, right before he started laughing, too, both of us howling away under the bright, late-afternoon sun.
That was one thing about my friend, Xander—he knew how to laugh at himself, a trait I had already figured out most adults still needed to work on.
"Aw, come on, sugar breath," Xander said, taking off toward the main lodge where we had planned to sit to get a good look at the new bride everyone wanted to see so badly.
"I hear she has the face of an angel, and the body of a goddess," Xander said, reverently.
I nodded my head. "That's what the foretelling said."
"I bet she looks like one of those ladies from the Academic Awards," Xander guessed, squinting upward as if picturing the People Magazine he'd swiped a couple months ago, the one we'd looked through together, hiding behind his cabin, the one with all the pictures of the painted ladies in long, bright colored dresses holding little, person-shaped, gold statues.
I shrugged my shoulders. "Nah, Hector wouldn't marry one of them," I said. "They're too," I paused, trying to think about what they were too much of for our family, "colorful," I decided. Although they must be plenty smart to have won such a big academic prize.