Friends Short Story – When You’re Thirteen
Photo credit: kornrolla from morguefile.com
I ran into an alley, my pursuer, Zack Gage, seemed temporarily lost, as to my whereabouts. I peeked back, making sure that neanderthal was not behind me, waiting to pound my face in, like vanilla ice cream, melting in the sun. I climbed into the trash can except it was not a trashcan. It was a giant hungry monster with huge 3 teeth. I felt the teeth rip at my clothes and tear into my flesh. I screamed but soon I was devoured. I awoke. I sat up, clutching the my bedsheet. My knuckles were completely white. The top of my head forehead glistened with a lovely layer of sweat.
”I hate having nightmares,” I scolded myself. ”I’m thirteen years old; I’m way too old be having nightmares. What am I? Some kind of wimp?”
I got up to take a pee and tried going to bed. I lied there for a couple hours, trying to sleep but ultimately falling. I remembered the words my cousin, Clay, told me once. ”Everyone’s a philosopher at four in the morning.” Clay’s a funny guy and genuine too. He lives in Seatle and tours with his band, The Slobbering Dogs. He’s a guitarist like me but he was always way better than I’ll ever be. I thought about Sam, she’s my best friend. We do everything together. Some of the kids at school think we are going out or should be but we’re just friends. She did kiss me once. We were studying once at her house, in her bedroom and while we were studying algebra, she leaned over and kissed me. I sat there for a minute, blinking and trying to comprehend what had just happened. Neither of us have ever acknowledged it happened and I don’t plan to.
Sam’s such a free spirit and acts on whims half the time, she probably just did it as an experiment. She was the first girl I had ever kissed. I hated to admit it to myself but as I think of how soft her lips were, I felt a kind of longing for her. I shuddered. ”This is Sam, you’re thinking these thoughts about,” I reminded myself. ”Tomboy Sam, with the freckles and the backwards hat. I finally managed to fall asleep and when I did, it was Saturday. I got a text message from Sam, she said she needed to see me right away. She told me to meet her right away. Sam told me to meet her at our spot.
What she was referring to was this spot in Crystal Woods, where the two of us erected a sort of fort out of woods. Sam’s dad was a carpenter and she had helped her dad build a house before. Sam had pretty much built the whole thing, occassionally she would ask me to hold some wood or hold a nail while she hammered it; otherwise she was doing most of the work.
My dad was a librarian and I hated reading.
Sam loved to read. She was also a poet. She was really good. I told her she should write the lyrics to some of my songs but she refused. ”Poetry and music are two different entities and she had no desire to make music,” she would say.
When I got to Crystal Woods, sam was standing over the shattered remains of what once had been our fort. ”How could that creep do this?” Sam asked.
”What creep?”
Sam rolled her eyes. ”Zack Gage, who else?”
”Oh, how do you know he did this?”
”I caught him, but when I tried confronting him, he ran off.”
Her shoulders bobbed up and down and she buried her face inside her hands. ”How could he do this?” She whimpered.
I placed my hand on her shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. ”It’s just a fort. I mean, we haven’t really used the thing in over two years.”
Sam looked up at me like I was some sort of dimentia patient, in desperate need of a nice man or lady to escort me to my room because I had forgotten where it was. She shook her head and muttered, ”you don’t understand.”
With that, she turned and walked away. I tried walking after that.
”What did I say?” I asked.
‘She just said,” Go away, leave me alone!”
I tried texting her throughout the rest of the day but she never returned my texts. ”What did I do wrong?” I wondered. ”Poets,” I thought. ”There’s no pleasing them. I mean, it was just a stupid fort, right? Yeah, it was just a silly fort we played in as kids. She built it using the hammer her mom gave her before she died. It was the last gift she ever gave her.”
Suddenly it hit me. ”Oh no, I really made a complete fool of myself now. What an insensitive jerk I must have been.”
During this little conversation with myself, I had been playing my guitar, seated on my bed, my blue Les Paul propped up, using my knees to support the weight of the bulky instrument. I heard a knock on my bedroom door. I remained silent, for some unknown reason. The door swung open and I saw my dad standing in the doorway. He was dressed in white sneakers and an Ohio State Jacket and blue jeans. He was obviously ready to go to the store, either Howards or Meijer but most likely it was Meijer where he would wind up shopping. ”Sam’s here to see you.”
I saw Sam enter the room. I placed my guitar on my bed and hurried over to her and without thinking, I gave her a hug. She hugged me back.
”I’m sorry about earlier,” I apologized.
”No, I’m sorry, really. I guess you were right; it was just a dumb old fort.”
I hesitated before speaking. ”No, it wasn’t, it meant a lot to you.”
”It meant a lot to both of us,” Sam corrected me. ”It was the symbol of our friendship and it being demolished, symbolized the end of our childhood.”
”Oh,” I muttered. ”I thought, well, nevermind.”
I hung my head. I too now started to feel a twinge of that pain that Sam had been feeling. ”Where did childhood go?” Sam asked. I took her hand in mine, as I swept her brown hair over her shoulder and closed my eyes and we kissed. Silence enveloped us. ”Growing up’s a scary thing,” Sam whispered, her voice cracking at certain points.
”Yeah,” I mumbled.
We held each other’s hands so tightly, I thought for sure, we would cut off each other’s circulation but for some reason, we just kept holding on tight. In a way, I felt I was holding her up and she was holding me up too.
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