30 Days - Companion

[felicitygs]

 He’s twelve when they first meet.

 

“Why is her hair like that? Can hair be purple?”

 

“She dyes it,” he explains.

 

She frowns and studies Susie.

 

“Like cloth.”

 

“Yes,” Mark says. “Like cloth and… indigo, right?”

 

She smiles wide, pleased he remembered, and he can’t help smiling back.

 

Some afternoons, he meets her at the old apple tree on the hill, and he brings things with him. He isn’t sure how he feels about girls, but he likes her smile, likes the way it makes him feel, and she loves to see new things.

 

She especially likes books. He never read books much before they met, but now he reads lots. They sit together, not quite touching, and he’ll read aloud to her. Sometimes, she reads aloud to him as he turns the pages, and they’ll stop to examine pictures when there are pictures.

 

When he’s thirteen, he dreams of her, and what her arms would feel like wrapped around him. He wakes hot, pajamas sticking to his skin. He avoids going to see her for days after that. When he does go, she doesn’t seem surprised at all.

 

“Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t know how to explain what he’s sorry about. It seems wrong to think about her that way, and all it does is make his heart ache. He can’t imagine a time she won’t be there, can’t imagine a time he’ll not want to see her.

 

She looks up at him from under the shade of the tree, and for the first time he realizes how very sad her eyes are.

 

“It’s okay,” she says and she smiles the way dark dark chocolate tastes–bitter and sweet.

 

When he’s fifteen, her laughter sounds like wind in the trees.

 

“I love you,” Mark tells her, sincere and fierce, and he thinks the sound he hears is his heart breaking.

 

She doesn’t say anything, his Adella.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says. Then, “I love you, too, Mark.”

 

He nods, and then they sit underneath the tree, just like they always have. He pulls out a book from his book bag, and he starts to read first, the words rough at the edges because his throat is a bit tight, that’s all. Nothing else.

 

Adella sits by him, and if he doesn’t look, he can pretend the sunlight that plays through her is nothing more than the way her skin glows.