Young Writers Society

Chapter Three

Alone for yet another night in my house, I tossed and turned in bed. I had trouble falling asleep. Outside my window, the trees’ bare branches cast strange, intricate shadows on my floor, the moon glowing white from behind. Images taunted me, memories submerging that I’d fought so hard to bury. My sheets tangled around me, until I was sweating and the bed was a hopeless mess.

“Blake,” I whimpered, in that place between waking and dreaming. In my mind’s eye I saw my childhood friend as he used to be to me: a thin, dirty little boy with faint freckles across the bridge of his pert nose. I was too weak, too tired to fight off the days in the vineyard, the happiest days of my life when all I knew was the trees and the smell of grapes and… Blake.

“If we don’t try it now, we never will,” he told me, sounding impervious and old, despite the fact that he was only a year older than my seven-year-old self.

“But what if your dad catches us?” I worried, chewing my bottom lip as I often did. “He’d kill us.”

“Aw, your dad won’t let him touch us. Besides, this will work. Look how soft it looks.”

It did look soft. We’d spent the entire morning pulling one of the huge containers of smashed grapes outside, just under the spot on the roof we were now standing.

“But what if I miss it when I jump?” I asked now. Usually I did all I could to make Blake think I was as tough as him, but now my voice rose in pitch and I couldn’t care. We’d never tried anything like this before.

As if he sensed how very real my fear was, Blake’s thin face softened. “Come on, Kate. It’ll be fun. And just think of the stories we’ll be able to tell all the other kids at school! We’ll be heroes!”

I didn’t want to be a hero. I just want to be with Blake. And if I didn’t do this, I might lose him. “All right,” I said quietly. “Let’s do it. And… I’ll go first.”

“Really?” Admiration for me lit up Blake’s face, and my little heart fluttered.

“Yeah,” I said. “Then you follow. Okay?”

“Heroes!” Blake hooted, pumping his fist in the air. “Richard will be so jealous!”

I laughed nervously. “Even though you did this with a girl?”

Blake lightly punched me in the shoulder, the way his big brothers did to him. “You’re not a girl, Kate. You’re one of us!”

Not knowing whether I should be pleased or unhappy about this, I only smiled at him. My lips wobbled a bit, and I tried to hide it. “Well, guess we’d better do this,” I said. “Now or never, right?”

His blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled at me. “You got it. I’ll count to three, all right?”

I took a deep breath and nodded. Arranging myself carefully at the edge of the roof, I looked down at the bowl of grapes. It had been so big while we were pushing it there, but now, looking at it, I thought that it seemed like it had shrunk a lot.

“One…” Blake began.

My heart pounded against the walls of my chest.

“Two…”

My palms broke out in a cold sweat.

“Three!”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I leaped off of the building. I didn’t scream until I’d fallen about halfway down, and all I could think when I hit the ground and the world flashed around me with a white pain, was that I’d missed.

My cell phone blared through the silence. I ignored it and rolled over. It stopped for a little bit, then started again. Air hissed through my teeth as I exhaled, and I dived for the phone on my nightstand. It didn’t matter who it was on the other side; I’d never been a morning person.

“It’s Saturday morning,” I growled when I’d flipped it open. “What do you want?”

“Morning, sleepy head,” Charles chirped in my ear cheerfully. “It’s seven a.m., and we’ve got some swans to find in the Mississippi.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“No, you aren’t. You told me you wanted to find the swans with me. This is your chance. The Northwest RBA reported sightings today, and we’re going to be one of those lucky people!”

“If I see you at my front door before ten a.m., you’re dead to me.”

“Don’t be like that, Kate. Come on. Life is short, and we need to spend it constructively.”

“Says the guy who works one hundred hours each week.”

“Can I forget about work for one day, please? Come on, we planned this. My car has been running for twenty minutes and it’s nice and warm. Now get out of bed, get dressed, and get out here. We’ve got birds to spot. And I bought you a pair of binoculars from Wal Mart, so this time you don’t have to steal mine.”

“How thoughtful.”

“Isn’t it, though? Now hurry up.”

There was a click, and after a moment, a dial tone sounded in my ear. I closed my phone, moaning and flopping my face back into my warm pillow. Part of me thought about just staying there and ignoring Charles, but the other part, the part that actually separated my own desires and what the right thing to do was, knew I couldn’t. Because Charles just wasn’t the kind of guy you could let down. There was something about him, a faith in you that was unswerving, completely unjustified, of course, but constant. I would never forget the first time I’d met him. The circumstances had been so strange, the night so surreal and cold.

“Looking at the moon?”

I’d jumped and whirled around to face the intruder. A boy—a man, I realized on closer inspection—stood a few feet away, not even looking up me, but up at the sky, a slight smile on his face. His hair was tousled, as if he’d just gotten out of bed, too, though he was wearing jeans and a dirty t-shirt.

I clutched my blanket tighter around me, wary. “No,” I’d replied. “Just needed some air.”

He looked at me now. “Yeah, I suppose the old Miller house does get stuffy, even in the summer. The ventilation really could use some work.”

I’d taken the moment to study him. He was tall, with honey-blond hair that looked white in this moonlight. His fingernails were dirty, as if he’d been doing some kind of construction work, and his eyes were light and open, framed by long pale lashes. Where had he come from? Should I scream, or kick him in the shin?

“Do you live around here?” I asked hesitantly. My instincts weren’t warning me away from him, and he didn’t even seem that interested in me, so I tried to relax.

The man smiled. He nodded at the little house next to mine. “Sure do. Right there. My mom is Tina. She works for your dad.”

“You’re Tina’s son?” I felt like an idiot as soon as the words were out, because he’d just told me so, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

“I’m not around much. I work all day, and usually I don’t get home until everyone’s sleeping.” Tina’s son suddenly flashed me a grin, and it transformed his entire face from a serious, thoughtful expression in a sort of mischievous one.

“Yeah, Tina did mention a son one time,” I realized, thinking back to one of the few times I’d helped her in the kitchen. What had she said his name was? Chuck, Charlie…

“Charles,” I remembered.

He nodded. “Kate. Nice to meet you.” He didn’t offer me his hand, as if he might have sensed my uncertainty, but he was still smiling. “Tina said you’re like no other teenager she’s ever met.”

“What did she mean by that?” I was abruptly tired; my muscles had involuntarily relaxed as I’d been trying to get them to do all along, and now I looked up at the stars as I spoke with this man I didn’t know. But he was Tina’s son, and already I was beginning to get a feeling about him, a feeling that I could trust him.

Charles moved so that he was standing beside me, a few feet away, his hands shoved in his pockets. It was cold out and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. “She didn’t tell me. She’s very private about your family, and if I had asked, she probably would have told me to ask you if I really wanted to know. But I think I see now.”

From any other person, this might have sounded strange, scary even, but the night was so strange already, and my mind was so far drifting, that I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t reply and kept my gaze on the stars. The moon didn’t interest me, as Charles had assumed. Maybe the moon was what other people looked at most of the time. But the stars were so bright, so numerous, so full of possibilities, I’d always found them more fascinating.

Charles didn’t speak again for a few minutes. We stood peacefully, us two people who hardly knew a thing about each other, as if we’d been friends for years. Our breaths made white swirling clouds in the freezing air. When I was unable to hide my shivers, Charles finally spoke again.

“Do you know why stars twinkle like that?” he asked me. So he had noticed my enthrallment with the stars.

“No. Enlighten me.” I smiled faintly.

“Well, that light we see coming from them really travels through the atmosphere around the earth, and there is turbulence in the earth's atmosphere.”

I turned my head to look at him, brows raised. “I don’t even know what any of that means.”

He grinned again, and I decided I liked his face better when he was smiling. He seemed younger. “It’s better that way,” Charles said. “Who wants to know the science? When I was a kid, I used to think it was magic. Too bad things just couldn’t stay that way.”

“Why can’t they?”

Charles motioned to me to walk with him, and I complied, shivering more obviously as I moved. “Because the truth always catches up with us, one way or another,” he told me as we walked towards my house. “Whether it be in the classroom or anywhere else.”

“You have a sad way of thinking,” I murmured. The grass rustled beneath our feet.

“Ah,” he raised one finger in the air teasingly, “not sad. Realistic.”

“Is there a difference?”

He laughed. “I really am starting to see what Mom meant. Better get inside, Kate, before you freeze to death. Summer nights in Minnesota can get as cold as the winter, sometimes.”

He’d walked me to my front door. I smiled at him once more, facing him. “Good night,” I said. “See you when I see you.”

Charles gave me a little wave, turning away. “I’m sure that’ll be soon. I like you already, Kate Raleigh.”

My door shut firmly, but I could still hear him cheerfully whistling as he went to his own warm bed.