He sidles up after English one afternoon. “Wanna go somewhere?”
“For what?”
He peers all around—I don’t know if he’s nervous or just pretending to be nervous—and drops his voice. “I might have found something.”
“Tell me!” My first instinct is to hug him.
“Not here.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere we can talk.”
“I can’t leave. I have tutoring.”
“Why do you get tutoring?”
It’s interesting, now that I think about it, that no one has pressed River into Track A tutoring servitude. He’s not doing football or an after-school job. So it turns out there’s this additional dispensation—you don’t have to tutor if the tutees might try to kill you.
“I am the tutor.”
“Oh. Who are you tutoring?”
“Kyle M. and Kyle R.”
“My favorites.” He rolls his eyes. “Does it help them?”
I laugh, not because it’s funny but because it’s true, and I never thought of it before. Years of tutoring to make up, I guess, for getting more than my fair share, and does anyone even think it’s helping? I shrug. “It’s the least I can do.”
His eyebrows snag. “Can you skip?” he says.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I open my mouth to answer him, but suddenly I can’t think of a single reason.
* * *
Somewhere to be alone.
Somewhere to be alone together, which is not alone, which is the opposite of alone.
That’s how we find ourselves at Bluebell Park. It’s pretty there, with the lake and the path that loops around it, picnic tables and gnarled trees blazed orange and yellow and red now it’s firmly fall. Leaves cover the ground and the walking trails and a multitude of sins because the grass and flowering plants never really came back here, so in spring and summer, when it should be green and bright, Bluebell Park is brown and dead-looking, sparse scrub and bleached-out ground where nothing grows. But the trees are older, more established, hardier. Autumn here looks like autumn on a greeting card.
We follow the path around the far side of the lake until we come to the dam. River follows me as I climb out onto its concrete ridge, a spine along the top of a body of rough wood beams and rocks and cement. Like everything else in Bourne, it’s a little the worse for wear, and you can see trickles of water leaking brown tendrils down from cracks along the wall. The lake is pretty, but when we reach the middle of the dam and sit, we have to have our backs to it because it’s rained a lot and the water is high.
Instead, looking out from up here, we can see the plant. That’s why, even though this is the prettiest spot in town, I knew it would be empty. The plant is ugly. It is also mammoth. I forget that. It’s loomed over my hometown all my life—it’s loomed over my life all my life—so I don’t really see it anymore. River won’t look directly at it. I don’t know if that’s guilt or shame or because it’s loomed over his life all his life too, even from hundreds of miles away, but he averts his eyes.
It’s a hard thing though to ignore. (Petra would say “elide.”) Except for those giant rusted letters on top, it’s aggressively gray, not a spot of color on its whole enormous hull, like it’s sucking up the light and life all around and trapping it away. There are hardly any windows, so the walls soar on and on, all the way up, all the way over, sprawling, smothering. This massiveness must be purposeful. It could be to make you feel walled off, enclosed within, protected from what’s outside, like a fortress whose members-only club you’re desperate to join. Or it could be to make you feel despairing, like you’ve joined already, and now it’s too late and there’s no escape. It works either way. It takes up the whole sky, like the clouds you see when you look up must be part of the plant too. Or maybe the clouds are just the half of it because the plant has the feel of taking up the whole world, earth and sky and everything else, and in many ways, it did, it does. It looks exactly like it always has except the ground’s been all torn up, muddy, tiretracked. There are a couple dump trucks and a dirt-caked bulldozer out front. No one’s there, but someone has been. And it’s clear someone’s coming back.
Beside me, River nods over his shoulder with his chin. “Can you swim here? In the summer I mean.”
“You’re allowed.” It’s such a Boston question. There’s no rule you can’t swim in Bluebell Lake, but there doesn’t have to be. No one in this town would ever think to swim in its water.
“I bungee jumped off a dam once.” He’s bouncing the backs of his heels off the wall of ours, his right then his left, his right then his left, so it sounds like when Mirabel taps Monday’s name. “In Switzerland. You ever done that?”
I don’t know if he means have I ever bungeed? Or have I ever jumped off a dam? Or have I ever been to Switzerland? I shake my head no.
“They strap this elastic cord to your feet and you just dive into thin air, headfirst, arms wide. It’s like flying. That’s what they say, anyway.”
“What?”
“That falling is the same as flying.”
“Falling seems like the opposite of flying.”
“No, you know like things in orbit. Satellites or whatever. How it seems like they’re flying in space but really they’re just falling and falling around the earth.”
“How big is this dam?” I ask.
“It’s like seven hundred feet high.”
“Oh.” I start to see how what I’m picturing is different than what he’s talking about. I start to see where our perspectives diverge. “So if it’s high enough, falling is like flying?”
“Well, it’s not like you’re going to crash into the bottom. You’ve got the wind in your face and the view all spread before you and nothing keeping you on the earth.”
“Except the cord.”
“Right, except the cord. But not while you’re falling. It doesn’t kick in until the end when it yanks you back up.”
I’d have said that the difference between falling and flying is everything. Like the difference between a home and a library. Like the difference between broken and whole. Like the difference between a seven-hundred-foot dam you can fly off and this one. His legs are longer, but from where we’re sitting on the top, even mine dangle nearly a quarter of the way down, the silver tassels on Pooh’s mules glinting in the sun. It’s not seven hundred feet high. More like ten maybe. You could jump down without a bungee cord or anything else and you’d be fine, but it would be nothing like flying.
“Sorry I made you skip tutoring.” He’s got a magic coin in his hand which looks solid but flips open to reveal a secret hollow inside. He’s practicing clicking this open and closed with one hand, open and closed, clear blue sky above, fall trees getting naked all around us.
“You didn’t make me.” I want him to tell me what he has to tell me, but I don’t want to seem overly eager or overly selfish or overly anything.
“It’s nice of you to do that. Tutor.”
I snort.