Banner Park used to have swarms of kids during the summer, or so I’ve heard. At one time it had the only baseball field in town, so I’m sure it was popular enough in its day. But since then the new pair of fields had been built closer into town at the recreation department, and most things on the north side of town had fallen away to varying degrees, fading as they were replaced by newer businesses and restaurants elsewhere. That being said, the park wasn’t too bad. Overgrown to be sure, and probably home to more snakes that any of us wanted to think about, but there were worst places to sit for a moment and gather our thoughts.
We had all read what was written on the paper, but as soon as Sara placed it and the accompanying rock back into the grass, we silently began making out way back out of the woods. We didn’t run, but we moved quick and steady, walking as if a wild dog stepped at our heels, waiting for us to make a break so he could take us to ground.
I breathed easier when we broke the tree line, and easier still when we settled onto the splintered wood bench in the dugout of Banner Park’s weed-choked field. Looking out at what I thought had probably once been the pitcher’s mound, I forced myself to start.
“So she asked when she was going to die.” I saw Everett nod out of the corner of my eye. “And the cave told her Thursday. Tomorrow.”
Sara spoke up, shaking her head. “We don’t know that. It could’ve been there for weeks.” I noticed that her first objection wasn’t that it wasn’t true, but only that it could have already happened. I let it pass and went on to state the obvious.
“It was pouring yesterday. That paper hadn’t been wet. So that means it was put out today. Had to have been.”
Everett broke in. “Do you think it’ll really happen?”
When I looked at him, his eyes had grown big as saucers, and I laughed in spite of myself. “Calm down, man. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a bunch of mean kids playing a joke…”
“It’s not just a joke!” Sara was yelling, halfway to standing before she caught herself and sat back down, her voice softer. “We all know there’s something to it, don’t we? Don’t you both feel like it’s not just a joke?”
We both nodded, all three of us falling silent for several minutes before Everett stood up and walked to the rusted pole that served as half the doorway into the dugout. He looked back at us, his face dark.
“We need to find out who it is. Help them.”
“How’re we going to find out who it is? It looked like a girl’s handwriting, and it was probably someone around our age, but maybe not even that. That’s a lot of people.”
“But…”
I raised my hand to continue. “And even if we did find them, what could we do? We don’t know how they’ll die anymore than they do. And what if they’re supposed to die? If that’s what is meant to happen?”
Sara gave my arm a shove. “You think some poor girl our age is just supposed to die?”
I frowned at her and shrugged. “Sure, maybe. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because we don’t know who it is, and don’t have any way of finding out. All we can do is wait and see.”
Everett started to say something else, but in the end he just nodded and looked away. We walked back to our side of town together, the conversation slowly picking up again as we went. We talked about what to do with our afternoon and with the rest of our fast fleeting summer days. We didn’t talk about the cave, or about the girl that we all believed was about to die.
Autumn Lester loved to dance. She had taken her first ballet lesson at four, and had fallen madly, passionately in love, though she didn’t realize it at the time. Some people danced for attention, or because they had some unrealistic dream of being rich and famous. She knew plenty of girls like that, and she could understand both motivations. But for Autumn, it only felt like she was really and truly her when she was moving from position to position, flowing from one movement to the next. That was the only time she felt real.
She would practice for hours during school, but during the summers she had the freedom to really make progress. She had a state dance competition in December, and she knew that she had a strong chance at coming in first this time. She didn’t care much about winning, but according to Ms. Echols it would give her chances of getting a scholarship for college a really big boost.
Ms. Echols had encouraged her since junior high, allowing her to use the high school’s gym every morning to practice her routines. She had even given the girl a key to let herself in and out, even though Autumn was pretty sure that had to be against the rules. Still, Autumn was responsible, and she was proud that Ms. Echols knew she could trust her.
This morning hadn’t gone well. She kept missing her changes, and her mind was too preoccupied for her to focus on really correcting the mistakes she kept making. Her father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer last week, and then yesterday happened...After three hours she gave up, heading to the locker room for a shower.
The girls shower consisted of opposing walls with five shower heads each and two “privacy showers” along the adjoining third wall. The privacy showers consisted of two seven foot steel walls and a floor length steel door with a bolt on the inside. It always reminded her of something from a prison movie, but she always went to them, even when she was the only one around.
She stripped and entered the shower, shutting the door and finally getting the bolt shot home after nearly a minute of tugging. Starting the shower up, she yelped as cold water hit her, dancing around on her tiptoes until it warmed. She was halfway through washing her hair when she learned that the boiler’s thermostat had shorted out.
Later the fire marshal would make the comment that even with the older boilers, the chances of a short out causing the water to heat instead of cool were a thousand to one, easy. But when the thermostat went two days earlier, the boiler’s temperature had started rising, and it had continued to do so until the fire department shut it off. The gym’s water ran off the main building, and there were nearly a hundred yards of warm and cold water between the boiler room and the shower where Autumn was singing a song she had been hearing on the radio all summer as she tried to keep her mind on cheerful things. It took nearly four minutes for the boiler’s water to hit her, but when it did, it was nearly three hundred degrees.
There was a moment of stunned confusion as she felt her scalp begin to tingle and blister. Then she began to scream. If it had hurt a little less, or if she had been slightly less scared, she might have gotten the door open and escaped with a few scars. As it was, she only tried to move the bolt for a handful of seconds before the pain eliminated all reason. Thirty seconds in, her screams had been replaced with raw, warbling cries that tried for words and failed. They didn’t find her until mid-afternoon, hours after her question had been answered.
Death isn’t real for a child. At least not for the lucky ones. Even at thirteen, even after seeing how close Sara’s mom had come to death, none of us really feared death in a tangible way. It was an abstract concept that failed to signify, and when we heard about Autumn, it didn’t really register.
Yes, we were scared. We were sad for her and her family as well, even though Everett and I had never met her and Sara had heard she was a stuck-up bitch. But in the end, those feelings were just window-dressing for what truly lay in our hearts.
Excitement. Because now we knew it was all real.
From that belief sprang an understanding between the three of us—a pact. We never spoke of it in those early days, but we all knew. We were going to keep using the cave. We would only go as a group, and we’d never tell anyone else, but we’d go back. And we did.
As fall came on we became caught up in the day to day routine of school and hanging out together. I tried out for junior varsity football and made the first-string, but I quit after a week of practices out of boredom.
While it didn’t seem strange at the time, in retrospect I wonder at the fact that we didn’t visit the cave more often in those first few months. Between that first time in mid-August and Thanksgiving vacation we only went three times. In the end I think the reason we didn’t go more is because we knew it wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a toy. We knew it was real, and that it was serious, so we only went when we all had serious questions to ask. We never talked about each others’ questions after that first time. We didn’t even talk about the cave itself during those first months. Anything can be accepted into your life given enough time. Our trips into the north woods every month or so seemed as natural as going downtown for a matinee on Saturday afternoon.
No. That’s another lie. We knew it was…off. We fucking knew, but we were too stupid or selfish to care.
It doesn’t matter now.
Back to those first months. My second through fourth questions were as follows:
Will I be successful when I’m grown? Answer: You will accomplish much.
Will the three of us always be friends? Answer: You’ll all be connected as long as you live.
And then, my face hot as I tied it to a heavy chunk of granite, Will Sara ever love me? Answer: Yes. In time she will.
That night I could barely sleep, my head spinning and my stomach churning. The next day was Thanksgiving, and it would be that afternoon before the three of us got together. I felt sure that I wouldn’t know what to do or how to act around her. Intellectually I knew that nothing had really changed. But it didn’t matter, not that night. I listened to the wind outside my window, shadows shifting across my ceiling as I thought about the cave, silently thanking and praising whoever had made me so happy.
That next day was uneventful, and after a few minutes of awkwardness I fell into my old routines with Sara and Everett. This strange and wonderful secret had grown up between the three of us, coiling its vines around our arms and legs, plunging its roots deep into our minds and our hearts. It grew bigger as the months passed and the seasons changed, binding us closer to each other and to itself. Yet, at the same time, it was invisible to us, or nearly so. Our lives weren’t so different now than they had been before, not really. On the surface, we were just like anyone else, and the cave and the questions were just something that happened in our lives.
That’s the way it was for nearly three years. We were all juniors in high school now, and it’s true what they say. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was still the most outgoing of our group, the most popular. Sara was the smartest, well on her way to winning several state scholarships, including one for track. Everett was still the kindest, and thus the most easily preyed upon.
Yet at the same time, Everett had changed the most out of all of us. The physical changes were the most noticeable. He had shot up to well over six feet, and he had taken to working out every morning by himself, even though he had no interest in sports. Girls had started noticing him in spite of himself, but he still rarely dated. Not that I was surprised. He was in love with Sara, after all.
Who could blame him, really? It wasn’t anything that I hadn’t known or at least suspected for a long time. One afternoon during spring break he came to me, his idiotic cocker spaniel following behind him with a gleeful bounce as he walked up to where I was laying in the hammock, taking a break from cutting the grass. I raised my eyebrow as he approached, already knowing that something was wrong. We weren’t supposed to meet up for another three hours.
“Hey, what’s up man? Little early, aren’t you?”
He nodded, his eyes downcast and his hands jammed into his pockets as he told Sandy to quit jumping up on the side of the hammock.
“Nah, she’s fine. What’s up? Something wrong?”
I saw him swallow, stalling for time. I wanted to scream at him to get it out, whatever it was. Just stop being a coward and say it. Then he did.
“I love Sara.”
I almost laughed, but managed to resist just barely. “Yeah, me too. She’s the shit.”
He shook his head, his big mop of brown hair swishing from side to side like a sheepdog. It made him look stupid. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m in love with her.”
I felt something crawl in my stomach, but I pushed it down. I had nothing to worry about. The cave had already told me all I needed to hear. I'd just humor him. Poor guy couldn’t help it.
“Well, I don’t know what to say about that, man. We’re all so close. I mean, she never dates anybody for too long, and I guess it makes sense that one of us might end up with her…but…” At that point, I should have left it alone. But I couldn’t help but twist the knife a little, giving in to morbid curiosity. “But did you ask her if she feels the same way?”
He nodded, and now he did look up, if only for a moment. I could see tears shining in his eyes and I felt as though I’d been hit in the chest. Next to Sara, Everett was my best friend. I should be making him feel better, not making it all worse. But now it was done. I had to bring the subject to a close and then never bring it up again.
Looking out into the yard, I asked. “So, what did she say?”
“Sh-she said she loves me too. In love, I mean. She said she’s in…in love with me too.”
I know I didn’t speak for at least thirty seconds. I couldn’t ask him to repeat it. It’d be too obvious, and I knew what he had said. But still, I had to have misheard it. Or he was wrong. Or this was all a nightmare. Or something.
Only I knew none of that was true. That was why he was so upset. Because he knew it was true, and he knew what it would mean to me. We had never talked about it, but he knew how I felt about her. And he was crying for me. Crying.
When I pulled it together enough, I turned back to him and gave him a smile that I knew had to look more like a grimace. Yet he bought it, or pretended to, and he smiled back at me through his tears.
“Well, what can I say? Big news, I guess. Congratulations. To both of you.”
There were a million questions I wanted to ask, knowing I didn’t want the answer to any of them. When had they fallen in love? Had they fucked yet? Did they lay together naked and laughing, making fun of me? Why was any of this happening in the first place? How? This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be! But I knew better than to ask anything, and I knew that none of it mattered. My anger was already being replaced by a confused numbness, washing out the world around me.
Everett looked worried but said nothing for several seconds before calling Sandy back over from where she was exploring the bushes at the edge of the back yard.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to stuff. Just wanted to let you know. You’re my best friend, so I wanted to share the good news.”
That was a damned lie. He was coming to give me his fucking condolences.
I nodded and grunted in response.
“We still on for this afternoon? Three of us fishing?”
I nodded again, forcing myself to speak. “Sure thing, man. Wouldn’t miss it. Later.”
We had been planning on going fishing since the previous weekend—one of those random things that you practically never do but that suddenly seems like the best idea in the world. And it had been at the time. When Sara had suggested it, Everett and I had both been excited, but that was a week before. A week ago, there weren’t awkward silences when the three of us were together. A week ago, I wasn’t constantly gritting my teeth to keep from screaming while Sara looked uncomfortable and Everett looked worried. A week ago, images of them together, laughing, fucking, hiding from me, weren’t flashing through my head like an obscene shutterstop light show.
We hung around, catching little and staring out at nothing, avoiding each others’ gazes. I knew that they had already talked about it. He had probably broken his neck running to tell her all about it. Then they had hugged, agreeing that they would give me the time that I needed to get used to it. Because they both knew how I felt. Because they wanted to spare my feelings. It made me want to vomit.
It was starting to get dark when we left the pond, only about a mile and a half southwest of Mystery Cave. The awkwardness of the whole thing becoming more apparent with each hour that passed in near silence. Both Everett and I had both gotten cars in the last few months, but Sara had suddenly decided that we should ride our bikes down anyway. As we trudged down the dirt road that led to where our bikes lay hidden in the bushes, I found myself hating both of them. Not just out of jealousy, but because they had ruined something so precious. I had a lot of friends at school, and I did fine with other girls, but none of it actually mattered to me. They were all just part of what I had to do to make it through the day—a means of social lubrication and passing the time that made the pill of daily life a little easier to swallow.
But this…What I had with Sara and Everett was different. As much as I picked on him at times, Everett was my best friend. And Sara…I loved her so goddamn much, even then. They were the only ones I felt safe to be myself around, without all the bullshit posturing and games of high school. They were what made my life real and gave it something approaching a meaning. And they had spoiled it all.
When we parted ways, Sara went with Everett even though her house was closer going my way. I saw him cast a guilty glance my way as they went off into the twilight. I decided right then and there what I would do. I’d refuse to see them or talk to either of them. I wouldn’t explain myself, and I wouldn’t get into any conversations about what was going on with them, but they’d know what it was all about. Then, they’d either prove themselves to be loyal, good friends and break off their stupid romance, or they’d stay together in spite of losing me, and show themselves to be the traitors they were.
It was a good plan, even if it was going to be hard to do. But I was determined, and I vowed that I wouldn’t see either of them again until they had fixed what they had done.
It didn’t work out that way.
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Credits
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