She didn’t even give me a chance to be shy- she grabbed my hand after the briefest of introductions and before I knew it, we were running, laughing about nothing, her dad and my uncle forgotten on the driveway. Grass soft under our feet, we disappeared into the woods, dirt and rocks, then root and bark, scrambling for the slender crown of a cherry tree. We picked at the rosy tears of sap, rolled them into balls, pressed them to our earlobes, stuck them to our teeth, threw them at each other, before falling breathless to the earth below. 

           Her name was Jenna and we were both twelve going on thirteen, thrown together by parents who didn’t know what else to do with us that summer. Her parents were divorced; she lived with her mother in West Virginia. But her mother’s new boyfriend had entered the picture, so she’d been shipped North to spend the summer with her dad and his new wife. My parents, always eager to have me somewhere else, sent me to stay at my uncle’s house far out of the city. I can’t imagine why this made sense to anyone- my uncle had a young family and certainly had no need of an introverted tween moping around his house all summer. But in the mysterious ways of adults, it was decided, and chance threw us together. 

           Jenna and her father were waiting in the driveway and I loved her right away because she was everything I was not. She was blonde and tan, words tumbled from her mouth instead of dying somewhere deep in her throat. She was dimpled where I was bony, all smiles where I was pinched. She was the sun and I was the moon- meeting was as miraculous as a double eclipse. 

           Her father’s new wife had coal-black eyes, narrowed lips curled every time Jenna was in the room.  She’d snap at her about little things, no-things, no snacks, your feet are dirty, rinse that cup, fix that pillow. I’d freeze but Jenna would twirl from the room head, held high.

“You’re not my mom.”

“Thank fuck for that,” New Wife spat.

           We found sparklers and a lighter and played behind the rusted-out pool. We drew hearts and flowers in the night sky. She drew something bigger I didn’t understand. 

           “That’s my boyfriend’s name. He’s seventeen and he has a car and he takes me to the gas station when my momma’s not home. Let me get whatever I want.” 

           The sparkler burnt my fingers-I dropped it into the wet grass. 

           “You have a boyfriend? A grown-up boyfriend?”

           “Momma doesn’t know. She’d been too busy with Rick. Don’t tell; it’s a secret.”

             We played ghosts in the graveyard, chased frogs with a flashlight, pleaded for a sleepover. Her father never said no to her, no matter how much New Wife hissed under her breath. 

           “Do you have hair down there?” she asked as we lay in her bed that night.

           “I don’t know,” I lied, pulling my nightgown over my knees. 

           She pulled up her nightgown, pushed her day-of-the-week panties down just enough for me to see. “It’s ok. I’m a few months older. You’ll get yours.”

           She dropped her nightgown and curled up on my chest. “Boys like it, you’ll see. That’s how they know you’re old enough. Even before you have boobs.”

           “I don’t have boobs,” I said, hugging her to my chest. “Neither do you.”

           “I will,” she whispered, tickling me. “Great big ones. Next summer, you’ll see. He said so.”

           I played with her honey-gold hair until she fell asleep, in a strange house in a strange bed with this strange new friend in my sunburnt arms. That morning I didn’t have a friend in the world. That night, I would have died for her. 

           The days ran through us like prairie fire. We went deeper and deeper into the woods. Climbing trees, sword fighting with sticks, we built a teepee, then knocked it down. Far, far into the woods, the trees gave way to a wall of bushes, shoulder-high, prickers and poison berries, throbbing with the chorus of birds. 

           We crawled on our bellies, scratched and bleeding, until we reached the dark-tangled heart, surrounded by a murmuration, quizzical heads, darting black eyes, soft dry feathers. We lay for hours, watching them. Worms, bugs, fruit, grooming each other tenderly, but always one eye on the sky and the circling hawks overhead. 

           “This is our kingdom,” she said, tucking broken branches into my hair. “When we grow up, we’ll live here with the birds.” 

           “We’ll build a nest right here,” I said, burrowing deeper into the warm dirt. “They’ll each give us two feathers, one to keep warm and one to learn to fly.” 

           She closed her eyes as I painted her face with smashed berries and earth.

           “They’ll teach us the trick of how to eat the poison berries and not die.” 

           How glad I was to have met her, this witch child, this bird charmer. How safe I felt, then, in her dreams.

           My uncle taught us how to drive his go-karts. We played Dukes of Hazard, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Knight Rider, Smokey and the Bandit. Sweaty, sunburned, reeking of exhaust, we dug through a box of old clothes in her basement, found two swimsuits that almost fit. Nestea plunges into the rusty pool, peanut butter crackers and popsicles, New Wife angrily sunbathing no splashing, stop screaming, time to get out, take those swimsuits right back to the basement, they’re not yours. 

           Jenna’s cellar was a maze of half-dark rooms, elusive pull-chain lights, cold tile floor under our bare feet, her father always home early from work, around a corner, watching and waiting, look at you two, aren’t you pretty as a picture?  I walk those rooms again and again in my dreams, trying to find the place, the moment; to remember the color of my swimsuit, the smell of mildew, chlorine still burning my eyes. It’s a question of language: in that basement, I am four again and I don’t have the words. My parents have a friend and I’m terrified of him. I see a pull chain, dark paneling, a lap, white eyelet over blue and my memory hits a wall made of the only word I can grab onto. No. You try to tell your parents, but the only word you have to explain is no and at age four, no gets you in trouble. No gets you locked in the back seat of a car in the dark, where he finds you again and again.  No gets you spanked, sent to your room, told to cut it out, to stop crying, so you stop asking for it to stop. Your mind stuffs all that no into a puzzle box small enough for you to bear, locks it away in a basement room you’ll never be able to find again. And anyway, you don’t want to. 

           I stayed with Jenna that night but kept two watchful eyes over us until dawn. I thought the world would end but the sun rose and it didn’t. I slipped out of her house, ran through the dew, and curled up on my uncle’s back step where he found me on his way to work. I stayed in bed that day and the next and the next. Jenna threw pebbles at the window for days, my uncle told her I was sick, asked her to knock on the door instead. She gave up and went away. I heard her splashing in the pool but ignored her siren’s song for two more days. When I couldn’t anymore, I hid behind a bush between our houses and waited to find her alone. Before long, I heard the screen door slam, New Wife’s angry voice flushing her outside. 

           “Marco,” I called. A pause, the sound of flip-flops, and the branches parted. 

“Polo.”   

           I could see right away it was too late. Her eyes were hard and angry, I had become a useless thing to her, a no-thing, and all my shyness flooded back. The spells we’d cast together were broken beyond repair by strange hands, and I could not summon the words to put it right. I followed her around like a kicked dog, hoping for scraps, but she had no scraps to spare. 

           I tried to keep up with her for days. She raced ahead like gunpowder, a hot, angry blur. She didn’t want to play in the woods, didn’t want to swim, go-karts are for babies, you’re not a pirate, I hate trees, you can’t be a bird when you grow up. She used my uncle’s phone to talk to someone with a man’s voice for hours, I sat on the side of the pool in my clothes as she swam all afternoon, her father watching us, watching her, New Wife slamming back into the house. One day Jenna told me to go home and I did. 

           I spent my last days at my uncle’s playing with baby cousins, hiding in the abandoned greenhouse behind the barn, making rivers between rocks and broken bits of terracotta. I climbed our tree in the woods and made a giant ball of sap and left it for her to find. My uncle tried to play with me, catch and kick the can, and took me for ice cream. Do you want to race go-karts with me? But I couldn’t catch, couldn’t kick, couldn’t race, ice cream melted before I could eat it. The raised voices, slamming doors, and squealing tyres next door were all I could hear.

           I stayed at my uncle’s for two months or two weeks; who knows? Children’s time stretches and contracts in its own specific relativity. Summer nights grew cool. I was leaving that afternoon. I was glad to leave, I wanted to leave. I waited for my uncle, vinyl seats hot under my thighs, when she appeared in the driveway. It was just like the first day we’d met. The daring smile that had once erased my shyness now erased that which had driven us apart. I jumped out of the truck, darted past my uncle. Jenna grabbed my hand and we ran, grass and dirt and rocks- I’d have run into traffic that day, I was so grateful for her return- discarded socks and shoes, bark under my feet, the dark crown of the cherry tree waiting for us. 

           Her eyes glittered black amongst the leaves, outside voices called for us, closer. She held her finger to my lips, I held my finger to hers. 

           Promise you’ll come back next summer. Promise, no matter what, promise you still like me.

           I promise, I promise, I promise, Jenna. I like you best of all, no matter what.

           One eye on the tree line, the crunching of footsteps coming closer, closer, she held out her hand. It was the ball of sap I’d left for her. She’d rolled it with feathers, studded it with the birds’ berries, a poison apple of amber, a pomander against everything that circled us.

           That fall, my mother found the ball of sap where I’d hidden it in my closet and threw it out. When I discovered this, the fit I threw 

           no no no no that was mine it was for me it was ours

           got me grounded to my room 

           you think this is your house? your room? it’s mine and I’ll do whatever I want with you and everything else in it 

           The following spring- the spring we both turned thirteen- Jenna’s mother signed papers allowing Jenna’s secret boyfriend, the man on the phone who snuck her out for gas station snacks after school, to marry her thirteen-year-old daughter. He was twenty-seven, not seventeen. He pulled Jenna out of school and ran away with her. Forced to choose between a mother who didn’t want her, and a father who wanted her the way he did, I wonder if Jenna saw this as a kind of freedom, trading the grip of one predator for another. But then I know the lies you paint yourself with, the spells you cast to feel safe, the talismans you make and lose, make and lose, over and over again, just to make it to the dawn. 

           I never saw Jenna again. The crossing of our orbits was a rare event, chance and childhood intersecting across the vastness of time. I see her in my dreams sometimes, beckoning me into the woods, leading me to her nest under the hedge. She’s fast and dark- newborn wings of moonlight and amber and cherry blossoms shimmer down her back. We are free- weightless and wild. But I stumble, an unbearable weight pins me to the ground and she is lost to me in the night. I find myself back on the edge of the woods, flightless and alone, heavy with memory. Wherever she is, I hope she knows that no matter what, I will always like her best of all. I hope she’s learned the trick of the birds, to eat the poison berries and not to die. Most of all, I hope that somehow in those dark woods, my Jenna learned how to fly. 

^{A creative non-fiction}

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