The Forest Read online

And that particular well hadn’t run dry, either. Tina Louise came out with a red bundle in her arms. Alex saw that color, and felt Trish’s hand clench so hard that he was certain he would have bruises.

  That color was one they knew well. As bright as Tina Louise’s hair, and seeing it Alex was rocketed into another First. A good First. The day he and Trish found a friend, and also met the first person who was smarter than them.

  10

  (When Alex Was Young)

  Alex stared at the new guy’s bag. “That’s quite the shade of red,” he said.

  It was actually the first thing he noticed about the new guy – the backpack that was about the brightest shade of red Alex had ever seen. It looked like a neon fire engine driving over a pair of jeans and a button-up shirt fastened all the way up, so close to the guy’s neck it pinched the skin.

  Then Alex noticed the guy’s eyes. A color that washed right past you without being noticed. A way of looking at you that could not be missed by anyone with half a brain.

  Alex prided himself on having a whole brain – or at least three-quarters of one, since that last twenty-five percent was devoted more and more to thinking about Trish. The way she smiled, the shine of her eyes. And that was saying nothing of the way she was filling out in all kinds of interesting ways.

  Not now. Get your mind out of your pants, man. She’s your best friend. She’s like your sister. So –

  New Guy spoke. He had a voice as arresting as his eyes, and Alex cursed his dumb teenage testosterone for taking so much of his attention. What had everyone been talking about?

  “Yeah, the backpack is cool, ain’t it?” said the new kid.

  Alex barely heard the words. He was too busy backtracking through the hormone weeds that had momentarily choked out the usually well-ordered garden of thoughts he cultivated. So he fell back on what he had been thinking a few minutes ago – the thing he thought before seeing the backpack, when he was pretending to read while thinking about Trish, then pretending to think about Mr. Angle’s dumb question while thinking about Trish, then pretending –

  DUDE! Easy!

  Too late. He was totally short-circuited. So he did what teens – and, he would someday discover, adults – almost always did when confused: he went on the offensive.

  “Yeah. The stuff you said was nonsense. If you’re going to account for variables like planetary rotation and orbit in order to compile an answer to a ‘how fast’ question then the end answer approaches infinite variables and null and is pointless for the question. Facts are only useful for thought games at a point where comprehension is possible.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said New Guy. “But sometimes spouting purposeful nonsense is the best way to shut someone up, don’t you think?”

  “What kind of –” Alex cut off, not really sure how to respond to that one; not sure if his failure to speak was because New Guy was wrong or because he was right.

  It’s what we do, isn’t it? We spout “purposeful nonsense” all the time to get people to shut up, or to ignore us.

  Who is this kid? Do you think Trish will like him? Like, like him?

  Alex realized that Trish wasn’t joining in the discussion. Probably because she was a girl and so, unlike him, didn’t struggle with sex thoughts that derailed him seven or eight times a second.

  But she had been derailed by something, Alex noted. Specifically, the books that this Sam kid was pulling out of his blindingly red backpack. She started reading titles.

  “Fundamentals of Quantum Physics; Heavy Quark Physics; Non Trivial Integrals and Perturbative Renorm –” She looked up. “I’ve never even heard of that one. How did you…” She frowned as Sam brought out yet another book from his seemingless endless stack. “What’s that one?”

  Sam said something Alex didn’t understand. Not comprehensively, but linguistically – it was literally a different language.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Alex. He was a little confused and more than a little irritated. He didn’t understand what was going on, though a glimmer of comprehension had started to form, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about the possibilities being suggested here.

  “Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte,” Sam repeated. “It’s the gold standard for understanding the Pyramid Texts, in my opinion.” Sam smirked. “Which makes it kinda the German bible of ancient Egyptian religious rituals describing transformation into Akh.” He laughed as though what he had just said was terribly funny.

  The glimmer exploded into a bonfire. Alex sighed. “Sonny, pretending like this ain’t cool.”

  “Uh, Alex,” said Trish. She was flipping through one of the texts that Sam had produced. “You –”

  Alex barely heard her. For once he wasn’t thinking of Trish and –

  (The way she’s started to look and act and things like her eyes and smile and also the way her t-shirt keeps stretching and –

  DUDE! Respect! Sister-thoughts!)

  – he was thrilled to be able to fixate on something else. “Pretending like this just proves you –”

  “Alex, he –” Trish broke in again.

  And again, Alex rode over her words: “– are a bigger fool than you would be if you just came into class admitting you were a moron.”

  “Alex, you should –”

  “I mean, maybe you’re ahead of the curve, but you aren’t –”

  “Al-lex.”

  Alex spun to look at Trish, surprised to see that in spite of her strident tones, she was still looking at the books she held in her lap and several she had tossed open on the bench beside her. “What?” he barked.

  He was ashamed almost instantly. He never talked to Trish like this. Not even before –

  (She turned into a babe.

  DUUUUUUDE! Keep it in your PANTS!)

  – they started high school and settled into the most annoyingly boring phase of life in the already-annoyingly boring world of Sunrise.

  “Sorry, Trish,” he said.

  She didn’t seem to notice the apology. She looked up and said, “Alex, there are notes. Good ones.”

  Alex felt like the world took a big step forward under him while he stayed rooted to some cementlike singularity in space-time. He looked at Sam, who had stayed silent during Alex’s aborted tongue-lashing.

  Alex knew what Trish was saying with her comment. Of course he did – they always understood each other, even when Alex’s gonads were screaming for attention. “There are notes,” she had said. Then added the clincher: “Good ones.”

  Alex knew that it was easy to own the trappings of anything: you could look rich, you could look important, you could look popular. Heck, high school itself was basically a cult that worshipped at the altar of False Pretense. And looking clever was easy, too. Talk about your future plans to go to the right schools, mention your past test scores (real or imagined), or even just… have the right books in your cringey red backpack.

  Pretense was easy.

  But actually being rich meant you had to have money. Actually being popular meant you had to be crowned Homecoming Royalty. Actually being clever meant not just having the right books but a) understanding and b) being able to coherently comment on and discuss the subject matter.

  Trish revised her earlier comment. “At least, I think they’re good notes.”

  Alex spared her a quick glance before returning to Sam’s laser-gaze. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he understands this stuff. At a level I don’t.” She looked up, and Alex would have sworn that joyful tears were in her eyes. “Someone finally came to Sunrise who is actually smart.”

  That was really all it took. Trish believed the new guy was smart, so Alex immediately believed it himself. He had yet to disagree with Trish about anything of import.

  He looked at Sam with new eyes. Less hostile, more honestly appraising – though he had to admit he was feeling a pinch of jealousy at Trish’s response to the guy’s apparent brilliance. He managed to quash it, though, with the help of m
ore than a little curiosity. He shuffled closer to Trish, craning his neck to look over her shoulder while standing in front of her. He craned his neck less as he sat down beside her on the bench, his eyes never straying from the book she held.

  Then he craned his neck not at all, because he had pulled yet another book out of Sam’s bulging red backpack, put it on his lap, and begun skimming both the text and the copious notes the new guy had made in the margins.

  He looked at Sam. The dude was still standing there, hands now shoved deep into his pockets, looking at Alex and Trish with a strangely blank expression.

  Alex opened his mouth to say something. Maybe “What does this mean?” maybe “Who are you, man?” or perhaps, “What test tube did you say they made you in?” But nothing came. He said nothing at all, and reflected that this was the first time he could ever remember being at a loss for words. And he remembered everything, pretty much from potty-training on.

  He realized Trish was looking at the new guy, too, and knew without looking that she was going through the same strange wash of emotions. The same questions were on her lips, but just like Alex, her brain couldn’t manage the leap to actual word-sounds.

  Sam looked a bit embarrassed. No, that was wrong. Not embarrassed, just shy. He looked down at his feet, then – apparently only through an act of sheer will – looked up again. He pointed to a page on the book Trish was holding, which was covered by equations and text, with notes occupying every other available millimeter, and said, “You want me to tell you what I meant when I wrote that?”

  Alex experienced something strange. He knew, suddenly and completely, what the new guy meant. He had never felt this way with anyone but Trish, and he knew that was, at least in part, because he had never met anyone as smart as him before. Not the other students, not the teachers. Occasionally he felt like his mother might be that smart – she never acted like it, but in between chain-smoking and biting her fingernails to nubs, glaring at Trish’s dad whenever she saw him, she occasionally made some observation that led Alex to believe she knew a lot more about history, math, science, and a bunch of other subjects than she ever let on.

  But that was it. Just him, Trish. Maybe his mother (and, Trish said, maybe her father as well, though she was as unsure as Alex was of his own parent).

  They had never before met anyone else like them. Anyone else truly smart.

  Until now.

  So Alex knew what Sam was really asking. It wasn’t “Want me to tell you what I wrote here about the value of chromodynamics as applied to the Pyramid Texts?” or even just “Want me to discuss the curve ball I tossed Mr. Angle?”

  It was everything. It was, “Do you want me to explain anything you don’t know about in those books?” It was, “Do you want me to tell you my own personal conclusions?”

  It was, simply, “Do you want me to tell you everything I know?”

  “Yes,” said Trish, and Alex echoed, “Hell yes.”

  That was all it took.

  Sam went to the bench. He shimmied between Alex and Trish – something no one had ever dared before – and then grabbed the book Alex was looking at. He flipped through the pages. Frowned. “There’s a better one in my bag.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Alex. He pulled the bag open, surprised at the number of books the bright red eyesore still held. He also noticed something he hadn’t seen before.

  “Why do you have pants and a shirt in here?”

  Sam shrugged. “Just in case.” He shrugged again. “You never know.”

  “In case what?”

  Sam shrugged. “In case my mom turns out to be right.”

  That was all he said on the subject. He reached across Alex and pulled out another book. Flipping through it, he said, “Okay, let’s start here.”

  Alex listened to Sam. A moment later, Trish asked a question. Alex followed up with an observation. Trish challenged it, posited an opposing conclusion – one Alex admitted had more merit, but which he also knew Trish would not have come up with had she not first heard his idea. They bounced ideas off each other like this all the time, neither of them quite sure whose idea they settled on, because there was no making a decision or coming to a conclusion before both had contributed, crafted, refined.

  Sam frowned. “I think you’re both right, but in a way that brings us to a third position.” He frowned, then rummaged through his bag, drawing out a book. “Here, Schwarz makes a decent point of it when he says…”

  He was reciting the passage before he even opened the book – another thing that Alex had never seen anyone but him and Trish doing.

  They talked, on and on. The bell rang for class to be over, and when the following bell marking the beginning of the next period came, they were still sitting at the bench. No teacher came to fetch them, and Alex knew in the back of his mind that no teacher would bother.

  The bench became school. The three became teachers and students to one another.

  By the end of the second day, Alex was worried that he might have a rival to his burgeoning affection for Trish. By the end of the third day he knew it was a non-issue, because the three of them had moved beyond questions like that. By the middle of the fourth day he realized that Sam was bonded to them, and they to him. He had started thinking of Sam in the same terms as he did Trish. Not the beauty, of course – Trish was still the one thing Alex’s body ran to whenever it could convince his brain to turn away from friendship and turn to other, more basic appreciations – but Alex had started to include Sam in the “we” that shaped his universe.

  Alex.

  Trish.

  Sam.

  Friends, he knew, forever.

  But of course, Alex was a teenager. He could not know that “forever” was quite a different thing to experience than it was to think about. He could not know, either, that “forever” would take a dark turn the next day – the day Tricia found her home violated and her pets killed; the day they met Sam’s mother.

  The day they followed Sam into the trees, and fell into the only true “forever” – the dark eternity that could be found only in the forest.

  11

  (When Tricia Had Grown)

  Tricia stared at the bright red thing in Tina Louise’s hand. Brighter than the brightest parts of the diner-owner’s hair. Brighter than an apple, new from the tree and polished to a sheen. A shade of red she knew she should hate, but which she could only love.

  Or at least, a shade she had loved. She didn’t know if she loved anything anymore. Love, she had discovered, was more than a feeling – more than a noun with abstract, vague qualities. It was a verb. It was actions.

  But she hadn’t been able to do much of anything since losing Sammy. She had pushed through the pain at first, but soon she found that just showing up to her job and continuing to work at a level that would let her keep it took almost all of her strength. When she got home, all her powers to act were exhausted. She sat in front of the TV, and did as little as possible. And, doing little, she felt even less. Everything that had been so bright and vivid – even after the forest, and maybe in a way because of the forest – slowly faded. Entropy set in, and the world tranformed to shades of gray.

  Seeing Tina Louise’s Diner had reminded her of Firsts, and that brought a few shades of color to her life. Holding Alex’s hand had been hard, but she knew it was right. More of the gray disappeared – enough to see Tina Louise’s horrific, laughable, and somehow perfect hair.

  The colors were still faded, and much was still gray, still lost in mist. But it was a start.

  And then the package Tina Louise held. The bright red thing that reminded Tricia of Sam’s backpack.

  Was he wearing it the last time I saw him? Or had he lost it?

  But that wasn’t all it reminded her of. It also brought to mind the boy they had named for the lost friend, and the toy they had bought their child. It was red, just like the backpack, so of course they had to get Sammy the little plush unicorn when they saw it.

  It had b
een lost, too. The same day they lost Sammy, the same place they lost their friend. The red was gone, the color washed away, lost to a forest where everything was –

  (Silver. Glowing. Like mist.)

  – done up in shades of black.

  Tricia shivered. Alex’s hand tightened on hers, and she knew he was thinking of the same reds she remembered, the color that matched the thing Tina Louise now held.

  The diner’s owner moved some plates to the side and placed the parcel on the table. It was about two feet long, about eight inches high and eight inches deep. Two lengths of black webbing were affixed to it, sewn to the red nylon fabric in inverted u shapes that served as handles.

  On the top, on the end of the thing nearest Tricia and Alex, a laminated image had been glued. It showed a family – father, mother, son, daughter – smiling as they grilled hot dogs on a barbecue, the object in the parcel standing upright behind them.

  “Tent’s mine,” said Tina Louise. “One of my kids gave it to me. Maybe my brother. Hard to remember sometimes.” A strange look came over her, and Tricia felt suddenly like she was in danger.

  (I’m seeing the man in the tree.

  But he had no expression. He had no face.)

  “It’s… nice,” said Alex. Kind Alex, dear Alex, who was always looking for a way to be nicer than he felt like being. Tricia looked at him. He was flushed: confused, embarrassed, scared. Just like her.

  Tina Louise looked down at the red nylon package that held a four-person dome tent. She played absently with the handles, looking for a moment as though she might grab them and take the thing back into the kitchen.

  “It was a present,” she said again. A moment later she seemed to come to a decision. She slid it a bit farther onto the table. The message was clear: “Here. Take it. It’s yours now.”

  Alex shook his head. “We’re not the camping types,” he said.

  “Oh, I know that,” said Tina Louise. “It’s just…” She searched for the words, looking from Tricia to Alex. “I don’t know. You’re here. You’ve got things you’re celebrating, and things you’re mourning. I don’t know how long you plan to stay in Sundown, but there are some nice places to camp just inside the forest. And I have a friend who decided to go on a trip and didn’t go with a tent, and wished he’d had one after that. It’s always good to –”