The back of our new house overlooked a rolling and rather sparse slope of a hill that flowed into a field that ended abruptly at a silvery line of mostly pine trees. At Christmas it was the kind of thing you could gaze at peacefully for a while, ideally with a cup of cocoa or coffee in hand and with the living room orangey-lit and noisy behind you and the snow icing-perfect over everything.
The rest of the year, the tree line was mostly pretty and pastoral. But from 6:45 to 9:00 or so on some evenings (give or take an hour depending on the season) the dark space beyond the entrance to the forest was sinister-looking enough to seem like a joke, something intended to frighten people. My visiting aunt, soon after we first moved in, stopped in her tracks upon her first glance out the back window. Then she said “Jesus!” and looked at me and started laughing, which made me laugh too and feel a little better. Already I could barely stand to look out there at dusk. I didn’t understand how the adults could bear to sit out there for hours on the back porch those first summer nights, ice clinking in their glasses while the citronella candles made everything beyond their glow look all the worse. They glanced at each other as they spoke, not surveilling the yawning woods at the end of the field before them like I felt they should have been in the interest of caution. I preferred to use the backdrop of their conversation as comfort on nights like that while I wandered around the front of the house, caught bugs, swung on the swing set, and watched the cars go by, the people inside blissfully mobile and going away.
The halting fear I felt about the shadowy tree line was activated only at certain times at certain points of the year, when it looked wrong. I was always an explorer, though. The woods behind my house were too busy and enticing to resist in those boring summer midafternoons when nobody interesting or near my age was around and I was left to my own devices while my parents (and sometimes a visiting friend or two) took over the house with their laptops. Irritated by the need for quiet during their conference calls, occasionally summoned across the house via yell to bring them this or that while they worked, I liked to be as far away from them as possible and take the days for myself, occupying myself until dinner or until it was late enough to begin thinking about asking them to build a bonfire. When that happened, I could count on s’mores, the smell of their coffee, and on everyone becoming more interesting, story-inclined, and focused on me, at least for a while.
But the days were dull otherwise, and the frigid canned air within the house had nothing on the steamy-cool green fairytale of the woods. There were even some streams back there—so far, I’d found two, and was holding out hope for a waterfall or some fish while I waited for the sun to set and everyone in my house to log off for the night.
One evening, they worked a bit later than usual.
I think this was the evening I’d finally found a third stream, and some fish. The discovery had taken me over for the better part of the afternoon, and I was so thoroughly wrapped up in my plans for a long-term base camp that the time of day simply hadn’t occurred to me. That was until I noticed that the dappling of the sunlight was missing around me and that it had become a little hard to see. The books I’d brought with me, I noticed, were probably no longer readable by natural light. I also noticed that in following the stream I’d wandered into the woods deeply, too deeply, to recognize anything or hear any activity from my yard or from the street in front of my house, and that the only noise available to analyze for location was that of crickets and frogs.
As the first owl hooted, I consciously leveled my panic and scanned the cleaning around me. Nothing was recognizable but I decided that something was, and I struck off onto what looked like a gently worn path. A good start, I thought. I told myself that I was calm and capable, that I could go back for the books in the morning, and that it looked much darker than it actually was because the trees were so thick. As I walked, I allowed myself only to feel miffed for the moment. I thought my parents should have been more concerned about where I was, and that if they had been I would have felt it.
I didn’t let myself consider the possibility that I was going further into the woods and therefore further away from my house, but continued to tramp through the trees with as much pep as possible and an overconfident speed. Maybe if I was sure about the way I was going, I thought, it would be right. Then I heard a rustle that I knew was a raccoon or a squirrel but that stopped me dead in my tracks and brought the sting of tears to my eyes, which I promptly fought back as I stood and clenched my fists. It seemed unreasonable to me that there was no way to let anyone know where I was. No way. Even if I’d been allowed to have a cell phone yet, I thought, I bet I’d have no service—my parents complained about it all the time when they went out behind the house. Impossible. I spun to a random direction to my left and kept walking, deliberately forward but more slowly, finally letting the tears start but telling myself that it didn’t mean I was scared, only frustrated.
In a couple of minutes, or it could have been an hour, it had become very quiet immediately around me, though the wildlife hum was audible at some distance. I noticed that the sound of my breath seemed very loud and that it had gotten almost cool for June as I started towards a clearing that gleamed bright with moonlight through the trees. I stepped into it and, for a moment, felt only transfixed by how silvery it made my hands look and how I bet it was bright enough to read a book there.
I felt more than saw a thin and dark shape, across the clearing and to the left, that seemed too tall to be a person but too narrow to be a tree. I thought it might just be a shadow for a second—but it looked too dark somehow, too opaque, to be anything but solid. Without thinking, and with an overflow of pure curiosity and the wild bravery of nine-year-olds, I stepped towards it. It took what looked like a small quiver-step towards me, but I even as it got a little closer it became no brighter, no more clear, even in the stark moonlight. I didn’t have time to question any more before I blinked and noticed that it was a person. A woman. Right across the clearing from me, and not exactly where the shape had been. The dark shape was gone, and she was there instead, looking at me.
I jumped, came just short of yelping, then felt absolutely awash with relief. For a minute.
“Hello,” she said.
Her voice was extremely clear. I saw her standing across the space several yards away from me, but heard her voice like it was a low bell ringing right next to my ear. I saw the pale flow of her hair glow faintly in the moonlight and the glinting of her big dark eyes and told myself that this was good, that I had found another person.
“Hi,” I said. I wondered if I was talking loudly enough—people always told me I needed to speak up, or shushed me, it just never seemed quite right—but I couldn’t bear to raise my voice much. Everything around us just seemed so dully quiet with her voice still swelling in my head. “Are you lost too?”
“No,” she said.
I saw that she was tall for a woman, certainly taller than my mother or any other woman or girl I had met, and that she was wearing very dark clothes of which it was impossible to detect any detail, sleeves that covered all of her arms and pants that went all the way to the ground.
I swallowed thickly. “Sorry for jumping. I didn’t know anyone else was here.” I paused to give her a chance to say something else but she said nothing, just looked. I tried to step backwards subtly and realized I couldn’t quite motivate my legs to do so.
“Do you know what time it is?” I tried again, not wanting to seem rude.
“It’s not a good idea for you to be out here,” she said.
She wasn’t moving at all, not like a person wandering through the woods at nighttime should be, but was still, still, still—and dark. The shadows around her seemed like the deepest part of the nighttime, like she and the trees behind her were emerging from diluted ink. She was staring right into my eyes in a way that made me feel staked to the ground despite my discomfort, like the tent my uncle had rented for my cousin’s 15th birthday that snapped so hard against the spring wind but never uprooted. I blinked once and she had gotten closer. Startled, I blinked again, and she was even closer, but I hadn’t heard any walking.
In the moonlight, with now only a yard or so between us, I could see her face plainly. I saw now that she was terribly, terribly beautiful. It made me feel shocked, like I was swallowing too much ice too fast, or was holding my breath and staring at the too-perfect surface of a still lake, thrumming with a surface tension that could shudder into ripples at any moment.
I saw that she was shaped like a woman, that she was maybe a little more elongated-looking than a person should have been, though I paid this little mind. And I noticed that she was too neat-looking to have been walking through the woods for any considerable length of time. Even as a child who hadn’t yet developed an eye for the upkeep and grooming of others, I noticed that.
Taking a real step, she got just a little bit closer, then stopped at a kitchen table’s width away.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother you.” I knew that something was off, that something about her felt wrong, but that I couldn’t look away long enough to give myself the chance to think about it. Maybe, if I kept talking, something would click and feel okay. “I come out here a lot, but I went too far and got lost. It got dark, so I’m trying to find my house.” I saw her fingers move a little at the end of her sleeves, now only a couple feet away from me, and noticed that her hands were those of a woman too. I let myself be comforted by that while pointedly ignoring the slightly unnatural length of her fingers.
I made myself breathe normally and stand as casually as I could, for what that was worth. I barely moved my face into what I hoped was an acceptable smile. “I really am sorry.”
Finally, she smiled. It made me shudder. At least she didn’t seem angry, but her grin was a tiny bit too wide to seem completely alright.
“It’s okay,” she said. She swayed a little from side to side, as though a breeze had nudged her, though the air was still. “There usually aren’t any people here at night.” She blinked long and slow, like the sleepy leopard I’d faced off with at the zoo last week. “Especially not little girls all by themselves. You surprised me.”
I started to say I was sorry again but it caught in my throat. She leaned forward a tiny bit, across the invisible table, her face blank and somber again. I felt something inside me freeze up. “You aren’t safe out here at all.”
I barely wheezed out a breath, then felt the frozen thing inside me crack. If I’d felt able to move at all I would have begun to shake, pre-class-presentation-style.
She blinked again. “You’re crying.”
I was. I couldn’t quite bring myself to move enough to wipe my face, but realized that my earlier tears had never quite stopped.
“Are you scared?”
Yes, but was that a good idea to say?
She was abruptly right in front of me then, and I braced myself, but she was only cupping my face in her hands.
“Oh,” she sighed. “I am so sorry.” Her fingertips brushed my cheeks with a pressure I could barely, barely feel. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay.” Maybe it was. It seemed like she wanted me to feel better. My voice crackled out finally, almost too afraid to talk but too curious not to. “What are you doing here at night? If you aren’t lost?”
“Me? Oh,” she said mildly. Her eyes were sweeping over my face. “I’m just enjoying myself.” The corners of her mouth twitched upwards. She brushed her thumbs under my eyes, then over the rim of my ears, down to my chin and up my jaw. Gentle, gentle.
“Do you live here?”
She tilted her head and smiled brilliantly at me again. “I’m always here.”
“Are you a person?” I couldn’t not ask.
“No,” rang her bell voice. As easily as if I had asked her if it was raining.
I realized I had stopped crying, and that she was stroking my hair and the side of my neck very tenderly with one cold hand, like someone might do to comfort a person with a fever. Inexplicably calmed, as I always felt when adults said things that were honest, I finally breathed out in a way that felt almost normal.
She giggled, lifting my hand up to her face and rubbing my palm with her thumb. I blinked back fresh tears at the sickening loveliness of her laughter. “You’re all dirty. What have you been doing?”
I blinked, briefly embarrassed, but I couldn’t not laugh with her because she seemed so nice all of the sudden, and amused in a good way, not condescending or annoyed like another adult might have been at the earthy evidence of my escapades. It was like she really wanted to know how I spent my time.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just playing, I guess. I like to come out here and figure things out. Important things.” I pointed behind her back, in a random direction that I thought might be close to where I’d been earlier that day. “There’s a new stream over there, so that took up a lot of time.”
She gazed at me with her black eyes glittering and almost liquid, like she couldn’t possibly be any more interested in what I was saying. I went on. “It gets boring just being at home during the day since I’m out of school, so I come out and walk around and explore. I kind of lost track of the time.” I glanced briefly down to try and see what her shoes looked like, was unsuccessful. “Then I found you.”
“You did,” she said. “Good thing you did, too.” She brushed at my shoulders, straightened the sleeves of my shirt, and moved some hair out of my face, like I was her disheveled child that she was about to walk into church with. Now she seemed serenely pleased, her features almost twitching with what looked like barely-contained joy as leaned down to speak into my ear, like we were conspiring together. “There’s so much worse out here than me.”
Despite my newfound verbosity, I knew that my eyes were wide as I grappled with what she was saying and fought against the lull of the way she smelled—cold and sweet, like the inside of an ice cream store. It felt important to stay alert, but it was hard. “What do you mean? Are you bad?”
“Yes, very, sometimes,” she said.
Stepping back, she took both my hands in hers, smiling in a way that bordered on comforting. Her hands were cool and smooth, like twin stones under the dirt.
“That’s ok, isn’t it?”
I stared at our hands touching, registered with distant alarm that this was what people told you not to do with strangers, and that I had gone and done it. I felt much more comfortable than I should have with this awful, wrong, beautiful stranger that probably wasn’t actually a woman but that didn’t seem to have any kind of sinister agenda, at least not one I could work out right then.
She asked if she could walk me home.
“Yes, please,” I said, and I’d barely finished speaking before she let go of one of my hands and started off in the opposite direction I’d been going. I swallowed and glanced behind us. “You mean to my house, right?”
She laughed loudly. “Of course.”
I don’t know how long we walked, but if it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t have been able to see without tripping. “Tired?” she asked, and when I stumbled over some bramble and hummed a yes she carried me, something I was too out of it to protest even if I should have. She whispered to me the whole way out of the clearing, through the woods and towards the back of my yard, things I can’t remember the specifics of now but that had to do with all the birds and animals sleeping in their nests and dens at night, about all the stars above us and what they meant, who they were, where they went during the day. I’d almost reached the point in my life where I felt embarrassed to be carried, or at least to be seen enjoying it, but had never felt so tired in my life, and turned my face to be closer to her neck and her odd voice while we walked.
I started to wake up properly when my back touched the wet grass at the tree line behind my house. Outside the woods, the sky had barely reached dusk. Traces of red and pink still streaked towards the horizon. Something had happened with the time, something was weird, but I was too sleepy and disoriented to think about that until the next day, when I would wake up all at once and sit immediately upright in my bed, blinking and incredulous in the 10:00am light of my room with the sky a deep, winking blue out my window.
Her fingers stayed curled at the back of my neck once she’d laid me all the way down. I raised up on one elbow and rubbed my eyes.
Her teeth glinted in the fading light. She touched my cheek, then my temple, and let go. “Sweet dreams.” Everything sounded like we were underwater.
“Don’t worry,” I croaked, “I won’t tell anyone about you.”
“You can tell whoever you like.” At the tree line, frogs croaked in the dewy grass. The breeze puffed warm at my face. Like she had never been there at all. When I wandered up to the house, there was only some good-natured ribbing from everyone on the back porch about how I must have been having so much fun to have almost missed dinner, and about making sure I was being careful about wild animals in the woods.
I didn’t think it had been a dream, but it didn’t feel like an exact memory, either. For the next couple of weeks, I ignored it easily.
Earlier in the summer I’d begun to befriend a sister and brother who lived in one of the bigger houses up the road, a stone one with the kind of big, smooth front steps that begged to be drawn on with chalk. They were often outside, and interested enough in playing the types of games I preferred (things like war, tag, and making detailed plans for a treehouse that wouldn’t ever happen) that meeting them in the middle of the grassy knoll between our houses became something of a midmorning routine for us early in June. I loved that because it made me feel like a character who was part of something. We spent even more time together after I learned of their miracle of a swimming pool, and I avoided the woods entirely for about half the month just because I was busy water-fighting with new friends and getting sunburned.
One particular afternoon, I’d been kept back from the pool to help my mother and her friend deep-clean the first floor. I had a distaste for summer Sundays for a number of reasons, but especially because cleaning always seemed to be remembered during periods my parents were spending a lot of time lounging in the house. It was, to my mind, like they were incapable of getting too happy or relaxing too much without feeling like they ought to ruin it. Despairingly focused on the cloudless sky and lovely dry heat of that day, I scrubbed the kitchen baseboards feeling absolutely enraged. It was approaching evening, and I had missed the hottest part of the afternoon. The day was to me completely wasted at this point.
“You’re going to have to start keeping up with things like this eventually,” chirped the visiting friend to me. She and my mother conversed pointedly about how it must be nice for some people to not have to do anything that wasn’t exactly what they wanted to do, whenever they wanted to do it. I remember that was the first time I felt mad enough to actually see red.
I’d wandered out the back door before I realized that was what I was doing, mumbling something about rinsing my rag out in the water hose. My friends’ house was situated near the top of the tumbling hill that ended at my front porch, but I could hear their splashing and yelling clearly as I dropped my rag to the ground and kicked it. It fell a little down the hill, and I looked up, toward the tree line. With a weak flame of nausea flickering to life in my stomach, I could already tell that it was going to look bad later. I ambled down the hill and through the trees, casually, like I was trying not to make too much of a thing of it. That’s the first time I remember winning a fight against an instinct.
The woods made me feel sick, especially as I got further in, but at least it was quiet and nobody was dusting and making remarks. I was walking with no sense of goal or direction but figured that there would eventually be a logical stopping point. It must have been further off my usual track than I’d thought, because I passed the point in time where I should’ve reached at least the second stream.
The forest canopy sparkled green and gold but none of the late sunlight reached this far down and far back. It felt kind of like a gigantic house, I thought as I walked. It was better than an umbrella for the summer. More people ought to take advantage of that. Why, I wondered, did people try so hard not to be outside when out here there was everything you could ever need, even companionship if you were quiet? It was just me and the birds and squirrels, but I didn’t even feel alone.
It turned out that I wasn’t. I had turned to look over my shoulder, to see if the stream was still visible, and when I faced front again she was right there. And close, too. This time, I didn’t jump.
“Hi again!” I said, pleased.
“Hello you,” she said. Tall and dark like before, she leaned down to look at my face, a bit elastic like a sapling being bent. “I was wondering if you’d find me again.”
“I think you were the one who found me this time.” I smiled, tried to swallow my nausea, and clasped my hands in front of me, shifted my weight from foot to foot. I felt more relaxed than before. Now that it was light out, and she was at least an acquaintance, things felt less precarious. “What are you doing?”
Her jaw flexed as she gazed at me, not blinking but just swaying a little. Very smoothly, she folded her hands together like I was. Copying me. “Waiting,” she said.
“Waiting for what?”
A smile unfurled across her face. “For you,” she said.
“Oh.”
The trees rustling around us, I took a small step toward her. Committing to whatever this interaction was.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked, my voice small but steady.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I looked at her closely, at her perfectly smooth face and big, waiting eyes. Her face told me nothing but what she looked like, and its blankness made my heart skip like a rock. “How many years, I mean?”
She repeated, “I don’t know.”
I narrowed my eyes. “But how old are you?”
“Very old,” she said.
It was nice to be able to look at her in the light; even though I had to crane my neck up a bit. As usual, she kept herself very still. I stood still now, too. It seemed important to try and match what she was doing, how she was moving. “No sudden movements,” my parents told me around strange animals and aggressive dogs, “or they could get scared and bite.” It didn’t seem like she would do that, though—that is, do anything to me, or get scared. I remembered that she had told me she wasn’t a person, but she more or less looked like a human—looked like but didn’t seem like. It was unsettling in a way that I’d never experienced before, that I couldn’t compare to anything else up to that point. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop talking to her.
She made a noise that was kind of like a breath. “You smell funny.”
“I was cleaning,” I said.
“Oh?”
I kicked at the ground. “It wasn’t my choice.”
“That’s a shame,” she said. “Are you lost again?”
“No, actually.” Grappling with how honest to be, I landed on “I was just coming back for my books.”
If she knew I was lying, she didn’t let on. “I see,” she said. “I can help you find them.” She reached out her hand to me. Even though it was light out this time and I wasn’t lost, taking her thin, clean hand of my own volition didn’t necessarily seem like a good idea, but walking away seemed worse. I closed my fingers around hers.
We started off very decidedly in a new direction. She walked so smoothly that I stumbled in comparison. All too soon I heard the bubbling water of the third stream, and we stepped out into the cleared space in the woods where I’d been playing before. She leaned down to pick up my books, which were almost right next to my feet, and straightened up to hand them to me. They were unexpectedly fresh, and to my surprise weren’t even waterlogged despite the hard rain that had washed a ton of the humidity away that previous weekend. I guessed the canopy of trees was thick enough to protect anything from the elements. Impressed, I opened one of them and inhaled the powdery new-book scent that I loved. Making a mental note to lay them conspicuously down on the kitchen table later, to demonstrate to my household that I could in fact keep track of and care for my things, I tucked them under my arm and looked up at her gratefully. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She scanned the little clearing with mild interest, like it was quite new to her. I enjoyed watching her look around because she was actually looking at things—not exactly like a kid would, but without the distracted blindness of, say, one of my parents or my friends’ parents, who would probably remark how nice the shade felt but see none of the other possibilities of the space.
I noticed that her clothes looked kind of like velvet, but they were too deep a color to just seem like an outfit, especially because there was no lint, no specks of dust or pieces of leaf.
She rested one of her hands on the branchy frame I’d begun to weave together for a shelter.
“This is good,” she said.
Blinking with pleasure and pride, I said, “I made it.”
Her steady stare moved from the woven frame over to me. “Impressive,” she said. “Make sure you finish it.”
“I definitely will,” I said, and suddenly remembered a good conversation piece: the silver fish I’d found the other day. I beckoned her over to the stream. “Come look at this!”
To my disappointment, the fish weren’t out that day—not even any frogs. Hiding my disappointment, I made a halfhearted attempt to describe them to her, which she took in without comment. I sank down into a sitting position alongside the stream to at least run my fingers through the cool water, and she sat in front of me, legs crossed about a foot away from mine. I silently noted the complete lack of birdsong but thought little of it. I felt her looking at me, like she was waiting again.
“Where’s your house?” I asked.
“I don’t have a house,” she said.
I peered at her incredulously. “But where do you go at night, when you get tired?”
She grinned, didn’t say anything.
I wondered if my phrasing had been confusing. “I mean, when you have to go to sleep.”
“I don’t do that,” she said. She looked off to the side for a second. “Actually, that’s not true. Sometimes, I sleep for a very, very long time.”
This mostly satisfied me. “I hate sleeping,” I said, “but sometimes I have to, if I get really tired.”
She nodded gamely. “That’s good.”
“Do you live with your family?” I asked. “Other people?”
“No,” she said. “Only me.”
I’d never really thought about somebody living totally alone. It sounded boring but also kind of nice.
“That’s interesting,” I said. “Who do you hang out with?”
“No one.”
“Don’t you have any friends?”
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked, alarmed. “You could have more fun.” I felt like I needed to explain this further, convince her of it somehow. “Having friends is good because you can do things together that you like, you know? With people who are kind of like you.”
“There is nothing like me,” she said levelly.
But—“Don’t you get bored?” I asked. “Lonely?”
She licked her lips, patient and still as could be, like a cat in the sun. “I don’t know bored,” she said thoughtfully. “But I think I am lonely.”
Suddenly I was terribly sad.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I hoped she would say something else, but she didn’t. Just stared. It still unnerved me, but I began to wonder if being alone was part of the reason she was so strange. I knew that she was something other than a lady, and that she scared me, but I was beginning to regard her with something approaching empathy. I thought about how I’d felt when we first moved into the new house, how it felt to be spending so much time in my room listening to other kids playing at a distance while we unpacked. It didn’t feel possible to join them until I’d settled in on my own. Even if she wanted to be by herself, it made me sad to think that she was always alone. I wondered if maybe she just hadn’t had enough time to settle in yet.
I looked at her to get a sense of how she felt about lonely, but there was nothing like that in her face, nothing. Just the smooth heart shape of it, the deep black of her eyes, her wide rosy mouth, emerging teeth that I registered as straight, very white, and a bit sharp. She had begun to smile again. My heart pulsed from its new position in my throat.
“Don’t be sad,” she rasped.
She had leaned toward me a tiny bit, her eyes glistening as though wet, her face pale and devoid of flush. I had continued to push down nausea, which seemed to worsen as she got closer, but it was impossible not to meet her eyes. “You’re pretty,” I breathed.
She leaned back. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very nice of you to say.”
“Didn’t you ever have any friends?” I pleaded. I was increasingly desperate to know she wasn’t alone.
“I think there was someone once,” she said. She tilted her head a bit and studied me like she was thinking. Between us, her fingers stroked the dirt like she was handling a pet. “Someone like you, maybe. Someone sweet and new.”
I laughed, flattered by the compliment and delighted by her funny phrasing. “New? You mean someone young?”
She kind of shrugged.
“Like, someone my age?”
“Might have been,” she said. “I don’t really remember.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “Well. Did they know how to read and write?”
“I don’t think people knew how to do that yet,” she said.
That was the sort of thing that may normally have made me want to ask more questions, or laugh, but I was somehow certain that she wasn’t joking or lying. For some reason, it dug a crumbling pit in my stomach.
Swallowing against the choking in my throat, hoping it wasn’t insensitive, I asked, “Did they die?”
“Yes,” she said. And her face moved into what could have been construed as sadness, like the kind you felt when remembering someone you loved who was now gone. But it was so composed, like a drawing or a mask. I noticed that, above us, the sun had lowered a little bit, and that the shadows had gotten deeper. And that she had moved infinitesimally closer to me. Her fingers moved in the dirt. She could have easily touched my shoe, or pulled me to her.
She whispered, “What’s your name?”
Even with her voice ringing in my head, I said honestly, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you.”
“Mm.” She looked down.
“It’s Jess,” I said, immediately feeling bad.
“Oh, that’s good,” she said. Then, with some gravity, “Thank you, Jess.” Like she was opening an expensive gift from me.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
She was so close now that, taking my chances, I slowly brushed the back of her hand with my finger, up and down a couple times, trying to be friendly in the most cautious way possible. Petting a feral kitten. Immediately, she turned up her palm so I could trace that too. It was dry and cold.
As I drew stars on her hand, I ventured, “What’s your name?”
In the dimming light, it had become increasingly difficult to see the whites of her eyes. But they still glistened like wet black stones. “I don’t have one.”
I sighed, “Sorry about that too.” I should have expected it, but still.
“It’s alright,” she whispered, “Jess.” There should be been crickets and frogs chirping by this time of day, but all I could hear was a dull roar in my ears. She was just holding my hand now, gently, not letting go. She let out a long, low sigh. There wasn’t any breeze, but it was positively cool out now, and I shuddered. I saw her teeth flash briefly in the low light and my pulse pounded hard in my ears.
She squeezed my hand a few times in rhythm with my heartbeat. “That’s nice.”
“Thanks,” I said, “Um. I think I should probably go home now.” My voice, betraying me, shook a tiny bit.
It was almost too dim to see, but I could still feel her black eyes. “Are you cold, baby?” Her voice scratched through my skull like a dry leaf.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “And my mom is probably looking for me.” She seemed unaffected by the drop in temperature. “Don’t you feel cold?”
“No,” she said. “Just hungry.”
A discussion for another day. I reached out to touch her face. I really didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “I’ll come visit you again,” I said. “Promise.” Next time, I would make sure to come in the morning. Maybe she’d like it if I brought out breakfast.
She pointed me in the right direction, told me I wouldn’t get lost if I just kept the moon in front of me. The moon. I felt so relieved at the prospect of being out of the dark woods that I was barely worried about the amount of trouble I’d be in for having been gone for hours. Hopefully, I thought, I’d get some time back, like I had a couple of weeks ago. Maybe the sun would even still be out.
I nodded at her and tried to smile.
“Don’t forget your books.” She held them out to me. She just stood there, so I took the few steps between us to get them. “Thanks.” I would have hated to be without them any longer. “Almost forgot.”
Her cool hand brushed mine a final time as she handed them off. “Bye-bye,” she said. “Be careful going home.”
“I will.” Hesitating, I wracked my brain for good parting words. I wanted to leave on the right foot—it felt important. I didn’t want her to think I wouldn’t return. In addition, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of turning my back to her without a positive close to the conversation.
I lifted my hand and gave her an awkward little wave. “Friends?”
She echoed, “Friends.”
When I stepped through the tree line, yawning, the sun had lowered since I’d left, but it was still out just like I’d hoped. My name was being called, my mother’s voice, but lazily and mostly unconcerned, like she’d just begun to look for me. When I yelled that I was coming, my mother came around the corner. “Jess,” she started, rag I’d dropped dangling from her hand.
The wind in my ears echoed, Jess.
My mom glanced up at the sky and shaded her eyes with her hand. “I think it’s going to rain again.” The wind blustered the rag from her grasp, and she groaned. I ran to chase after it. I loved when the wind actually did stuff like that.
Jess, the wind sighed. Jess. Jessjessjessjessjessjessjess.