I leave my house before Mom and Dad get home from the country club, grabbing a sandwich on my way. It’s still light when I arrive at the cedar tree, but there’s no sign of Arleen. So I sit against it on the ground and wait.
I don’t know how long I’m there, but the only reason I know I’ve fallen asleep is when I’m startled awake by a voice.
“Hey.”
I flinch for a moment, and allow my eyes to focus on her. The sun has gone down and I have no idea what time it is, but she lightly kicks my leg and repeats her greeting.
“Hey. Wake up.” She gives me a sideways smile.
“Hey,” I repeat with a stretch.
“How long have you been here?” she asks.
A silence lapses when I realize I have a hard-on. Shit!
The leaves rustle and I can see the moon peeking through the swaying branches. “I’m not sure,” I finally say, discreetly placing my backpack on my lap. “It was still light when I fell asleep.”
She nods, sitting down beside me.
“So what was up with debate after school?” I begin, too curious to put off the question any longer. A part of my pride was still stinging. “Are you passionately against a classroom of all girls, or were you just trying to make a point about the pussies in the suburbs that get handed their diplomas?”
She shrugs me off, as if the question – or the answer – isn’t interesting enough to hold her attention. “Can we make a rule?”
“What? A rule?”
Looking out toward the dark woods, she chews the inside of her cheek. “Let’s not talk about school while we’re here.”
I can feel my eyebrows scrunch together at her randomness. “You’re bizarre.”
I see the gleam of her white teeth flash momentarily before she covers her mouth. Her smile fades quickly, and for the first time since she sat down next to me, she makes eye contact.
“I’ve been called worse.” She picks up a stick from the ground and starts fiddling with the pebbles in the dirt.
“So you’re not going to answer my question?” I ask.
She shakes her head and smiles. “Nope.”
I’m at a loss. We have nothing else in common to talk about. That’s what we do in high school: we talk about high school!
“Why do you come here?” she asks.
“Why have I always come here, or why am I here tonight?” I ask her teasingly.
I can’t see her blush, but her shifting has told me I’ve made her feel uncomfortable somehow. So I try to back up and answer her question.
“Sorry.” I feel my stomach turn a little at the thought of making her uneasy. “I come here to get away.” Looking around the crumbling structure, I find a memory to share with her. “When I was eight, my dad and I were out in these woods. We’d come here to try to find new plant or insect species that I could research.” I shrug and huff a laugh, trying to play off how pathetically loserish I must sound. “A storm came, and this was the only place close to take shelter. It was a pretty bad storm. A tornado touched down in the county to the east of here.”
“But you both ended up okay?”
“Yeah. Dad sprained his ankle, though. And we slept here until the next morning. Mom was really scared.” I look down in thought, remembering the way these woods looked then. They’re much denser now—or maybe it was because I was so small that the trees seemed farther apart.
Dad took his coat and propped it up using the cedar tree and some twigs to assemble a makeshift tent to keep us dry. We stayed awake, talking all night. It was that night I’d decided to put away my dreams of becoming Spiderman and focus on becoming a storm chaser.
But sometime a year or two later, I abandoned that dream as well.
“The night of the storm is the last memory I have from when my family was normal.” I try to speak easy, but the sentence comes out as more of a whisper.
I hear her swallow as she continues moving the dirt around with her stick.
I’m not sure what it is about her. Maybe it’s the fact that we met here, where I always felt safest. Or maybe it’s the fact that I don’t feel like she expects anything from me. But for the rest of the evening all I can do is mutter truths and stories from my past—random shit that shouldn’t matter but somehow does.
And she laughs when she should, nods when it’s appropriate, and doesn’t speak a word. She continues to let me ramble on and on about everything and nothing.
It’s the best conversation I’ve had in my life—which isn’t saying much, considering how few real conversations I’ve had in the past few years.
It isn’t until I’m home and about to sleep that I realize all the things we talked about were the reason I used to go to that place by myself to think. It felt good to get it all out—to feel like I could say those things without being judged. And to not worry about what signs or signals she’d give me.