The Woods

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

         The mid-autumn sunset gave the whole park a tawny glow like a vintage photograph. It was squeezed between the seldom used main road and row after row of townhouses like some kind of miniature suburban Central Park. There was no water though, just grass, a little jungle gym, a few benches, and a patch of trees on the far side that we called the woods for lack of a better name. It’s not really big enough to be called the woods, but not small enough to really be called a patch of trees either. I like to imagine that generations ago, when the first little kid to ever go exploring behind the park got in trouble for coming home late and his parents asked him where he was, they smiled that ‘aw, isn’t he naive’ smile when he answered “the forest.”  He had seen that look all too often on his teachers’ faces at school every time he got the wrong answer so he wasn’t going to make that mistake twice. While awaiting his sentence for breaking curfew, he overheard the phrase “the woods,” and from then on the name was stuck.
         Marceline and I were sitting on the bench closest to the woods, silently watching the clouds float across the sunset. She brushed her hair back and tilted her head to the side as if it would help her see further down the road. “Okay,” She said, “The coast is clear. Let’s go.” As she stood, she grabbed my hand and pulled me off the bench. I was led on like some little puppy. I had never been in the woods with someone else before. I explored it plenty on my own and it was easy enough to guess by the little piles of broken glass, beer cans, and occasional condom that there wasn’t a lot of bible studying going on back there. I was finally going to be let in on the big secret. My anticipation, however, was rivaled only by my fear. It was the condoms that scared me most and I started to worry that she was expecting so much more than I could ever give. It only took a few seconds to get to the well known little clearing between the bushes, so I didn’t have very long to be just anxious. All I could think about was stalling for time.
         “If you had to sum me up in one sentence,” I blurted out, “what would it be?”
         She sat down Indian style and pulled me down next to her. “What do you mean?”
         “Like if a news reporter asked you about me, what would you tell them?” I held my hand out to her like I was holding a microphone and did my best impression of a reporter from an old timey black and white movie. “Excuse me Miss Hadin, we’re doing a report on the recipient of this year’s author-of-the-year award and wondered if you could spare a few minutes to give us the inside scoop.”
         She was busy rummaging through her purse to notice at first. When she looked up and saw my hand sticking out, a little chuckle of an exhale burst out. “What are you doing?”
         I went on with the act. “Miss, I’m just a small town reporter trying to get the scoop the a story of a lifetime so I can get out of here and see the world.”
         “I know what you mean. There’s nothing to do around here anymore.” Her hand finally came out of her purse and she reached out to replaced my imaginary microphone with a glass pipe. “So you want to be a famous writer, huh?”
         “Nah, I want to be a reporter,” I said and let out a forced laugh. I pulled a little bag of weed out of my pocket and started meticulously plucking out and filling the pipe. “But really, if someone asked you about me, what would you say?”
         She shrugged her shoulders and started looking around at the ground like the answer had fallen out of her head. “I don’t know” Her left hand reached down and pulled out a tuft of grass before she looked back at me. “What about you?” She asked, “How would you describe me?”
         “Umm, fun, smart, pretty, mysterious, exciting-“
         “Mysterious?” she broke in, “How am I mysterious?”
         “I don’t know. I never really know what’s really going on in your head is all. I guess you’re more of a mystery to me than you are mysterious. It’s not like you’re constantly disappearing without explanation to lead your double life as an assassin for the Yakuza or anything like that.”
         “Hey. I could totally be an assassin. You never know. Maybe I brought you out here because you already know too much.”
         “Is this thing poisoned?”
         “I don’t know. Why don’t you light it up and find out?”
         As I pulled the pipe to my lips and sparked up the lighter, I thought about my parents and the bogus story about staying overnight to finish a midterm project. It’s funny how the lies I tell are always polar opposites of the truth. The worse the truth is, the more positive the lie becomes. If I ever give you some driveling story about volunteering at a hospice to cheer up people dying of cancer and old age who have nobody else to talk to, then you better turn and run because I’m probably on a killing spree. It’s strange to consider where the lies end and the truth begins though. I do volunteer at blood drives and the animal shelter from time to time. Maybe next time I’m actually doing something good I should balance the score and tell them that I’m going out to steal from the K-Mart or spray graffiti on some bridge.
         I passed the pipe back and slowly let the smoke seep back out of my lungs. “Do you think we’re good people?” I asked.
         “Being good’s overrated,” She said before taking a hit. Mid-exhale she went on. “I mean, really, what’s the point of being perfect. Sure you don’t have to worry about getting caught or anything, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are who you are.”
         “Yeah but, okay, imagine that everyone on earth was ranked from best to worst. Do you ever wonder where you would fall on the scale?”
         “That shit’s for judgmental pricks who like to size people up so they can say to themselves, ‘I’m better than that person I don’t like.’ You know, I read somewhere that repressed people who donate to charity alot and follow the rules are more likely to steal money from a lost wallet.”
         “What? Where the hell’d you read that?”
         “Wait, maybe it was more like, if a goody-two-shoes were given a wad of cash and told that they had to split part of it with someone else but don’t have to tell the other person how much they got, they’d keep more of it to themselves than a delinquent would, like they think they deserve it more or something.”
         “Are you sure it wasn’t the other way around?”
         “Well, what would you do with the money?”
         “Assume it was stolen and turn it into the police.” I reminded myself of our own illegal actions and scanned the darkness for threats. “A wad of cash isn’t worth much in jail.”
         “What? No, I mean if this was like in a focus group or something like that.”
         “Oh, well, I’d probably split it even. I mean, if it’s not that much cash, then I’m not losing all that much, and if it’s a ton of cash, like millions, then I can afford to be generous. What about you?”
         “I like that. I’d split it even too.”
         We had passed the pipe back and forth several times and I was so high that the world outside the woods seemed to have stopped existing for a while. The conversation had meandered around between music, our hypotheses on the science behind light waves, dreams, and politics before coming back to money.
         “That’s what I don’t get about rich people,” I said. “It’s like, in order to be rich, you have to give up who you are and become some kind of greedy monster in order to earn it or keep it if it was inherited.  Sure they worked hard to earn their money. But what about all the people who work just as hard for peanuts?”
         “Who needs that much money anyway? I figured out once that all you need is seven million dollars and you could live pretty nice without ever having to work again.”
         “Yeah, but that would be boring as hell. If I had just a million dollars, I’d probably just use it to pay off my friends and family’s debts and then use whatever was leftover as general spending cash.”
         “You wouldn’t give any of it to charity?”
         “Yeah, some of it. I just wouldn’t know-.” A crunching noise off in the distance silenced me. “You hear that?”
         “Hear what? The leaves? It’s probably just a squirrel.”
         “Common, let’s get out of here.” I stood up and started patting down my pockets making sure I didn’t leave anything behind. “If it’s not a squirrel, I don’t want to be here to find out.”
         “No way. If someone’s out there, they’ll hear us leaving. Just sit down and be quiet for a second.”
          I looked towards the park trying to see if there were any headlights idling on the road, but all I could make out through the thicket was the moonlight and a little glint from the streetlamp. By the time I looked back down, Marceline was already taking another hit.
         Without exhaling, she said, “Relax, nobody’s there,” then blew out a thick cloud. “Are you cold?”
         “What?”
         “You’re shaking.”
         I hadn’t noticed and at first when she said it, I thought I was just startled. It was only when I pulled my jacket’s sleeve back and saw goose-bumps that I realized my whole body felt like ice.
         “Aw, come here,” she said with one hand pulling a solid little sack out of her purse and the other reaching out towards me. “This thing is a life saver.”
         “What is it?”
         Like something out of Marry Poppins, she pulled a full blanket out of the sack. “I got it last year when we went camping at the falls.” She pulled me down next to her again and flipped the blanket over our backs. “Come‘ere,” she said and shifted towards me, “this thing’s not that big.”
         I nearly swallowed my tongue when our hips touched. It was like waking up from a fantastic dream you wished you could live in only to find out that it’s real. From the first time I saw her I never thought I’d ever get this close. I was dragging my feet hoping that if I walked slow enough, the final bell would ring before I made it to French class. Marceline was caged neatly under her boyfriend’s arm while the two of them yakked it up with half of the junior varsity football team. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I can picture her there so clearly that I must have been staring as I passed by.
         I was still slightly shivering under the blanket and when she reached out and touched my hand. “Oh my god,” she said while quickly grasping both hands, “they’re like hand-sicles.”
         In my weakness, I tried to think of something debonair to redeem myself, but all I could come up with was, “I come from a long line of reptiles.” I immediately regretted opening my mouth and thought about faking a heart attack but it was too late for an escape.
         She laughed. “What?”
         I simply had to run with it. “Yeah,” I said with an awkward smirk, “My grandparents were iguanas from Italy. They came over during the war and opened up a little reptilian deli in New York. My dad was even born in their Manhattan apartment under a heat lamp.”
         “Born?” she asked, “I thought Iquana’s laid eggs.”
         “Yeah, well my dad was a bit of a rebel and never did anything the way it was supposed to be.”
         “A rebel? Really?” she asked suspiciously.
         “Well, I guess that’s why he’s such a tight-ass now. He knows just how bad us kids can screw things up. I just wish he’d figure out that I’m not his clone. I mean, really, he makes baseball bats for a living. ”
         “What about your mom?”
         I had gotten myself all worked up over my father’s misplaced concern and tried to shrug off an answer about her working in some law office around the clock. I never really thought too much about her work because she never really liked to talk about it. She was always more concerned with squeezing out every last detail of my life during the brief moments we were ever alone together. My dad, on the other hand, couldn’t shut up about baseball bats. I’m practically an expert on them by now and I hate the damn things.
         “Yeah,” she said, “my Dad’s a lot like that too. He’s always working and never likes to talk about it when he gets home.”
         “What’s he do?”
         “He’s a plumber.” She started looking off into the tree branches. “I think he hates it though. Every time I screw something up he always, after he’s done yelling my ear off, he goes on about how he isn’t fixing toilets so I can throw away my future and all that B-S.”
         We didn’t say much after that. We just laid back and stared up at the trees trying to find a star between the shifting leaves. She started to sing a song by Of Monsters and Men. “And those bright blue eyes can only meet mine across a crowded room filled with people that are less important than you.”  She whistled the chorus and looked at me in that nervous way with her eyes darting back and forth like they couldn’t figure out which eye to look in. Then she sang the final bar, “’Cause you love love love when you know I can’t love.” That’s when I felt her hand reach across our bodies and settle on the small of my back. I fumbled around with my arm a bit trying to get it around her shoulders which lightened the mood a little and she wrapped her leg around mine.
         She asked, “feeling any warmer?”
         I turned to answer but when I saw her eyes already there, waiting, I could hardly keep breathing steadily. I sat there staring for a while asking myself, ‘what do I do now?’ when her hand reached up from between us and slid gently against my cheek. I knew what we were doing here, what everyone does here, but I still couldn’t shake the pit in my stomach. I took a long blink and almost whispered, ‘this is so messed up,’ but when I opened my eyes, I saw her lips held apart like flower petals blooming. There was nothing left to do, so I closed my eyes again, tilted my head to the side, and we kissed. I was almost stunned with disbelief of what was happening. I pulled my head back and looked at her as if there might have been some kind of mistake, but she just looked at me, breathing in short bursts. Then she closed her eyes and leaned back in.
         For what might have been forever, I lost all sense of reality. I didn’t even notice when a gust of wind rattled the trees and blew off our blanket. Furiously at first, our hands explored every inch of each other’s body before we settled down comfortably. Her fingertips crept slowly down the side of my pants, inching their way towards the front, when the sensation shocked me out of my stupor.
         “Hold on a second.” I grabbed hold of her wrist and made some attempt to think.
         “I thought this is what you wanted.”
         “I know.” My head spun trying to figure out why I stopped her.
         “Here,” she whispered and started pulling at the button.
         “Wait.” I said between pants, “Wait. This isn’t right.”
         “Why?” she asked. “is it bec-“
         “Look, I don’t know why,” my head never felt so empty, “but it just doesn’t feel right.” I held her hands up between our chests. “I didn’t want to say anything before, but this is my first time and, you know, I didn’t really figure it would be in the middle of the woods.”
         She looked at me like a wounded animal and sullenly forced out, “oh.”
         I felt like I had betrayed or mistreated her. “You’ve got to know that I’ve dreamt about this for-, I mean, really, you’re like the hottest girl in school. But then I got to know you.” I couldn’t think, so I just spilled out whatever came into my head. “This is all I ever wanted, but I don’t want it to happen like this, us just going at it like animals in the woods, like everyone else.”
         She pushed herself off and got to her feet. “Is that what this is? Just screwing in the woods?”
          In a panicked reflex I answered, “Well, that’s kindof what it feels like right now.”
         “Fuck you,” she snapped off and started packing her purse.
          I stood up and tried to grab a hold of her but she batted my hand away. “God damn it,” I said, holding back from yelling, “now hold on. Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Will you just hold on for a second instead of storming off on me.”
         “I wasn’t storming off,” she said with a bratty attitude, “I was just getting my things together.”
         “All I was trying to say is that I’m just not ready yet. I thought I was, alright?” I took her hand in mine. “I really like you Marceline. You’re like my whole universe.”
         “Do you love me?”
         I froze for a moment, then smiled and said, “yeah, I guess I kindof do.”
         “Kindof, huh?” she said with a smirk, “Well, you know we won’t get another chance to be alone like this till next spring, so you’re going to have a long wait if you change your mind.”
         “That’s alright. You’re worth the wait.”
         “Common, let’s go home.”
         The darkness of night was our protector on the walk home. For once, going down the street through the gauntlet of windows, we felt safe enough to hold hands. I don’t think anyone would mind, but even when nobody was around and all the adults were off to work we never held hands during the day. It was as if every window hid a spy waiting to start their rumors. We were always surrounded.
         A cop car turned the corner ahead and we both let go. “Shit,” Marceline whispered, “I forgot to spray us down.”
         I was confused at first, and then I remembered that we probably still reeked like weed and I started to panic. I pictured my mug shot and the screaming match with my dad outside of the police station. I’d be disowned and shipped off to boarding school somewhere in Siberia. The worst thought was that I’d never be allowed to see Marceline again. She could see that I was freaking out and told me to calm down and walk normal and everything would be okay. “Just act natural,” she said, “and if he stops, don’t say anything.”
         Sure enough, the officer slowed down as soon as he caught sight of us in the corner of his headlights and rolled to a stop next to us. We froze and looked at the cop like a cow looks at an oncoming car. With his window already rolled down, the officer waved his arm signaling us to come closer. Out of fear and instinct, we obeyed. Once we were closer, I could see that he was a lot younger than I had imagined. I had a picture in my mind of the typical television stereotype cop with a rigid face and grey hair or a mustache. I don’t know how old you have to be to become a cop, but he looked like he was still in college.
         “What are you two doing out so late?” he asked. “Do your parents know you’re out wondering around the neighborhood at 3 o’clock in the morning?”
         Marceline took charge and stepped forward to answer. “We were just working really late on a midterm project for school at our friend’s house and we lost track of time. We’re on our way home now.”
         “What are your names?”
         “I’m Marceline Hadin and that’s Jordan Moretti.”
         “Don’t you know it’s dangerous for two young girls to be walking around this late by themselves? Why don’t I give you two a ride home?”
         “Oh, that’s okay. We live right over there.” She pointed down the street towards her house.
         “Which one?”
         “The one with the Marvin’s Plumbing van out front.”
         “Well, then, I’ll just follow you then to make sure you get there safe.”
         Marceline smiled and hooker her arm around mine. “Okay,” she said, and we marched the rest of the way to her place and nearly collapsed laughing when we got inside the door.
         She hushed me and whispered “Shut up. You’ll wake my parents up.”
         “O crap,” I whispered back. “You’re right. What are we going to tell them in the morning?”
         That’s when we noticed that there was a light on in the kitchen. We found Mrs. Hadin sitting there waiting for us. Both of us ended up grounded through Halloween that year.