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  His words were a soft melody in my ears, running through my brain like the sugary nectar that melted from the trees during the winter.

  Chapter Three

  I fell for Silas Jackson in the same way I imagine I would fall from a plane. Plunging hazardously down, quicker than could be seen. Elevating up as I reached for the parachute, floating softly and heavenly through the clouds, until I hit the ground, embracing the earth with all the affection in my soul, stunned at surviving the leap.

  Each day in the weeks that passed after that first day we had lounged at the creek, I found myself racing through the woods the moment my mother would pull into our gravel drive, barley waiting for her to come to a complete stop before plunging out the door of her car.

  I wore the roughly cut shorts that Silas had created out of my old jeans nearly every day, they had quickly become my favorite clothing item. The white threads that hung from their jagged hem now a striking difference to the sun kissed skin of my thighs, turned a warm honey tone from my time spent down at the creek.

  Some days we would hop into the water in our cutoff jeans, reaching our hands in deep to splash waves at each other, chasing each other down the steady stream, walking hand in hand back towards our hillsides, our feet splashing water droplets back up at us as we waded back down the middle of the creek. Other days we would stray away from the water, exploring the woods on either side, climbing the trees as far up as we could go. Silas always trying to push higher despite the lack of branches as we would near the tops dangerously. Most days we simply laid in silence on the creeks edge as we had done the first day, feeling the warmth of the sun warm our bones as the cold water lapped up at our toes, immersed in the beauty of young love and our surrounding whimsical wooden kingdom.

  I learned quickly that Silas did not speak much, did not allow his voice to cut into the tune of the wind touching the tree tops if he could avoid it. When he did speak, it was as if he spoke in riddles, his thoughts floating away, far beyond an average boy of thirteen. He would whisper to me as we lay against the earth, of the way the water worked around intrusive contents that plagued it, wearing glass into smooth stones, petrifying branches that had fallen in alive and bright. He knew all the names for the clouds in the sky, and the stars that we could not see during the light of day. When I screamed at the sight of a spider on his bare leg next to me and jumped away dramatically, he had simply lifted it into his palm and placed it on the earth opposite him, watching it as it scrambled away, as one would watch an old friend retreat into an airport, never to return.

  He was like no one I had ever known, and no matter how much time I spent by his side, I felt that I could never know him enough.

  Our conversations were those of a long-married couple, whom had shared a life time of love and laughter, small talk an unnecessary burden. Our contact however was innocent as the butterflies that swirled around us. We shared an intimacy that went beyond the throws of puberty, our hands knew the grip of each others like one knows the pages of a beloved book. Our hips were familiar as they touched on the soft dusty ground. We would hang off each other’s arms, embrace tightly as the day grew cold around us, tackle each other into the winding flow of the creek. Despite our age and the hormones that had begun to lower his voice and heighten mine, neither of us harbored a secret desire for more, so content were we in the moments we shared under the tree tops. Unfortunately, as we began to retreat up our separate hillsides later and later into the setting dusk, our mothers had begun to question our innocence.

  During a chilly morning meeting between my Mother and Silas’s Mother and Father, it was decided, without our input or knowledge yet, that they would begin to limit our time alone in the woods. They would allow us to be together at either of our houses, but did not want us running off all day into the woods as we had been doing all Spring.

  We solemnly agreed to their new rules, retreating into my living room to lie on the floor and stare at the endless ceiling my mother had painted with such detail you could never take it all in, no matter how long you stared into its depths. In the confines of my house, I watched as Silas began to change. It was subtle at first, he was vaguely moody, as I had never seen him before, if he would drop something, instead of leaping down to pick it up and continue on without pause as he usually did, he would stare at the floor aggravated, clenching and loosening his fists. The longer we stayed inside, the more morose he would become.

  Fed up with confinement, we retreated outdoors. We took to laying on the thin strip of grass that bordered the woods we were no longer allowed to enter. I would lay my head in his lap and stare up at the clouds, only speaking to ask him the names of each of them as they passed overhead. He would pluck the long thin blades of grass out from the dense sea of green beneath us and braid them together, fashioning me bracelets and crowns that would quickly wilt, from the clippings. They stunk as they dried, and began to fray and fall apart, but I kept them all, laying them in the sun along the porch railing on the far side of our house where I hoped they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  Silas was always calm, calmer than anyone I had ever known or would likely ever know, but despite his stillness, I could feel him growing restless. I shared in the feeling, wanting so badly to retreat to our kingdom in the woods down near the water’s edge, where we could once again laugh and splash and play and take in the beauty that would surround us entirely. I still felt happy being near to him, soft, warm, and familiar. It was the magic of the woods that had propelled our joyous excitement though, and without it now, time passed by slower, the sun felt less warm on our skin, our laughter came forth from our throats with less jubilance.

  Silas did not go to the same school as me, his parents having chosen to enroll him into the smaller and more modern charter school that had been built only a few years prior to his arrival. The few times he had told me about it, I had been absolutely green with envy. Unlike my traditional Junior High school, his small school only required him to attend four days a week. The days were also shorter, not beginning until ten in the morning, when I was already setting off to my second class of the day, and ending at only two in the afternoon, when I was still in physical education class, avoiding flying balls and walking around hurtles as people around me jumped cleanly over them with ease.

  This is how Silas had managed to convince his mother to let him back into the woods he loved so deeply, telling her that he only wanted to go and stroll through the trees a moment before school began, he wouldn’t go down very far he had told her, there was no point since I would leave for school hours before, at the dismal time of seven in the morning, when his house was only beginning the stir in their beds.

  He never told me about his time in the early hours of the morning walking through our yellow woods as I walked through the institutional yellow halls of my school, but I could tell, could see the light burning back in his eyes as it hadn’t in the days prior, could smell the warm smell of the sap in his hair. I understood why he kept it from me, not wanting to invoke jealousy, and he was right in doing so, I was jealous. I clung to him, buried my face in his hair for whole afternoons, inhaling the scent of the woods within it, my only connection to them that remained then. We could feel small bursts of the magic we had felt down in our kingdom in the woods, like little fireworks erupting all around us. We would roll in the small strip of grass, connected to each other, our limbs intertwined till be were more one person than two, invoking cautious glances from my mother who viewed us from the kitchen window. I would breath in the smell of the woods he carried with him, and we would laugh and laugh, until our sides burned and tears rolled down our faces, at absolutely nothing. Simply perpetually amused by a glee we derived from the scent of the sap that neither of us could ever hope to begin to explain.

  Eventually he gave in, whispering to me the secrets of his time in the woods, relinquishing his stories that made me physically ache for the feel of the water on my toes and the soft rotting stump against my head. We laid hand in hand in the
cool grass, our eyes closed to shield them from the sun that warmed our faces, and he had told me of his time in the trees. He had been making a surprise for when our parents finally allowed us to return to the creeks edge together, a rope that would swing us easily from side to side, over the water, allowing us to run wild without getting wet and inevitably being slowed down, ruining our childish play times, in which we would chase each other through the woods, pretending we were being chased by a massive fire devouring the trees behind us.

  I was skeptical of his plan to put the rope on a towering oak whose branches reached out across the river from the edge of his woods to mine. It was a daunting tree, its trunk thick and rugged, dotted with only a few scraggly branches until you reached the top where a thick arm like branch reached out across the water. It had swayed precariously under our weight when we had attempted to inch our way over its balcony of faded beige leaves the one time we had attempted the climb together.

  “I don’t trust that tree.” I told him indignity, thinking about the way it had groaned beneath me as I watched the creek below, knowing I would never survive the high drop into its shallow water.

  “You should. You should trust all trees.”

  I thought about it as I watched the clouds pass. My head moved up and down slightly as his chest heaved with his steady breathing and the tip of a small white cloud, that looked to me like a treacherous snake in the sky, came in and out of view as I laid against him.

  “When I die, I am going to come back as a tree.” He stated confidently, curling my hair around his fingers as he stared off into the woods below.

  I thought of him as a tree, it fit somehow.

  “If you left and came back to me as a tree I would lay beneath your branches everyday until I too became a tree. Then I would root into the earth beside you, I would arch my branches to reach yours and we would shade each other as we watched the earth end around us.”

  I watched his expression from my place gently resting on his lap as I spoke, it looked as if the sun radiated directly from his body alone, the way it glowed around his form from my view below. He smiled wide, turning his head to the clouds above.

  “I could never imagine a more absolute perfection.”

  He spoke up to the sky, before bending down to kiss me. My first kiss, the kiss I had avoided so long ago with Neil and felt sorry for myself for doing, and he was right, there was no perfection more absolute than us together for all eternity.

  Chapter Four

  I was crossing the sunny green field to my third period algebra class when I spotted my mother near the doors to the main office. My day had been as perfect as a school day could be, still high with infatuation from Silas’s lips on mine the night before. I had been floating through the morning, entirely unaware of the world around me as I replayed the moment over and over in my head. I should have been surprised to see my mother. Still in sweats she never wore out of the house and her hair in a tight bun that usually only topped her head in the early hours of the morning, when only I was around to see. But so abuzz was I with the ecstasy of young love that no unhappy thoughts could penetrate my mind as I bounded towards her.

  It wasn’t her defeated expression that alerted me, or the red swollen flesh around her eyes that signified tears had just been heavily running from them, that had snapped me out of my happy daze. It wasn’t her eyes meeting mine, her face filling with anguish. It wasn’t anything to do with her, I looked past all of it, still lost in my daydreams.

  It was the maple leaf. It had floated gently towards me, its fragile yellow surface caressing my face as it fell swiftly into my hands, that made me stop in my tracks, had finally made me see what was written all over my mother’s face as she approached me.

  I screamed.

  Before the words could leave her mouth, before any confirmation could be verbally made. I knew. I felt it with every molecule inside me, with every goose bump on my cold flesh, and I dropped to the ground, the scream of a dying soul escaping my lips as I went down.

  Silas Jackson, at only 13 years old, had died in the woods behind his family’s home in the early hours of that morning, after falling from the tops of a tree whose branches had given out under the weight of his small body.

  His mother had gone looking for him when he did not come inside to grab his books before he left to school as he had done on every other day, and had found him down near the small creek that backed up to their property, his body splayed awkwardly on the earth, his feet cutting through the current of the water. Stiff and cold as the freshly broken oak branch that laid beside him.

  My mother, upon hearing the sirens approach, had run the short distance from our home to theirs, just in time to see Silas’s father, cradling the limp lifeless body of his only son as he passed over the edge of the woods into the small vegetable garden to the side of the house. She had hugged his cold body, still in his father arms, stroked his sun lightened hair with her shiny purple fingernails, praying for his soul, and for mine before coming to get me.

  I could smell him as she held me, on the pavement in the field in the middle of the school grounds. I could still feel the warmth of his touch, the soft pressing of his lips on mine, could still feel his heart beating beneath my head. I held the crunched maple leaf with a desperate grip on the eternally long ride home, knowing as I felt its sharp edges cutting into my palm that he was gone.

  My mom didn’t attempt to stop me as I jumped from the car before she had even come close to a complete stop, stumbling slightly before I sprinted down into the woods, the leaf still painfully clutched in my palm. I couldn’t feel my feet touch the ground as I raced down towards the creek, I was floating over the leaves, and around the tree trunks, propelled by radiating disbelief.

  I’m not sure what I had expected to find, his body maybe, or him simply lounging against the tree, laughing at tricking everyone in such a vial way so that we could enjoy some time by the water.

  Instead, I found the rope, several ropes actually, all tied together in tight knots. Connecting them into one long color changing strand. I ran it through my fingers, unable to see through the tears any longer, trying to feel his hands that I knew had too run down it just hours before. I found the branch, split in several large pieces, invading the space where we had spent so many afternoons lounging on the water’s edge, where I had first seen him from my hiding place across the creek, that was now trampled down from our constant passing over it. Worst of all, I found his small knife, broken in half, gleaming from below the water’s surface. I plucked it out and ran the smooth blade against my cheek, knowing that I’d never watch him perform a simple task like cutting small slices from a wild apple again. Mourning for the ninety years of happiness we were meant to share.

  I hadn’t noticed my mother follow me down to the water’s edge, hadn’t seen her as she watched me collapse into a puddle of grief, a feeling she had grown to know well since my father had passed, but could still never begin to imagine experiencing at such a tender age. I hadn’t heard her as her cried silent tears, not only for the tragic loss of the little boy who she had watched love her daughter so sweetly, but for my innocence, which she knew was now gone away with him. The veil of my sadness was so thick, that I hadn’t even noticed the sound of heavy machinery growing nearer until I heard her gasp from behind me.

  She pulled me towards her silently, dragging me backwards from the noise as she held me tight to her body. I watched from her unbreakable embrace as Silas’s father, in a furious wave of grief, plowed hazardously down the steep hill side to the water’s edge in his big red tractor, taking out small trees as if they were simply dainty daisies fragilely sticking out of tender grass, as he charged through. He gained speed as he plunged downward towards us, the horrible grimace of a father who had gone into a prison of insanity to cope with the loss of his child on his face as he came into view. My mom kept pulling me steadily back, through the creek where I watched my legs float in front of me, wondering if they were still my own as I
watched, no longer in control of even my own body, up behind the trodden down bushes to where the hill began to incline.

  The tractor smashed into the tree that had taken the life of Silas Jackson with a tremendous crunch and snap, exactly where his father had been aiming it to go. It screamed as it snapped, a spiderweb of cracks forming at its base. The tree fell to the ground the same way I had fallen for Silas, snapping in quick succession, unable to control its weight, catching for a moment as it began to crack in half, propelling it higher into the air, then it had swayed, almost gently, to the ground below. It fell across the creek with a final deafening thud, now a bridge between our wooden kingdoms.

  Blood trickled from his father’s head down onto the green flannel cloth of his shirt as he slumped over the controls of the tractor that was still running, louder now in protest of the stump it was still up against. I thought for a moment, that he must be dead too, but then he rolled his head around, an almost sadistic look in them as they shot open wide. He managed to maneuver the tractor away from the stump, trying to dig at it with the bucket attachment, but the engine whined in protest, and just as the tree had, died with a one final booming thud. He stumbled out of the tractors cage then and kicked at the stump, began tearing at its broken bark with his bare hands, tried to grab it from around and rip it out.

  I screamed. I screamed for him to stop, I screamed for Silas, for his love of the tree, for his stupid trust in it that killed him, and my scream had stopped his father as suddenly as he had died.

  He turned towards me in an instant, his eyes locking on mine, the rage inside him pouring out into his skin in red blotches that appeared all over his face as he huffed insanely.

  My mother, who at the shock of the tractor hitting of the tree had stopped moving backward, but never released her firm grasp, began pulling me back up the hill again, her eyes locked on his, seeing what he was capable in that moment, she moved quickly, a wild animals retreat of survival, until she reached the edge of the woods and touched her heels to the freshly clipped grass that separated our houses from the trees, where she collapsed into the earth, pulling me down with her as she went. She held me there, pinning me to her chest and to the cold ground that poked my bare flesh, now abrasive feeling without the barrier of Silas’s warm body between mine and it, into the late hours of the night. Where once the dark had completely cloaked us in its heavy blanket, and the dew of early morning arrival began to wet our skin, she had carried me inside, and placed me into bed with her, where we had remained, unmoving except to squirm as we moaned and cried our eyes puffy and raw, for the following day and night.