It catches my eye because some of its roots are torn up, but the tree isn’t actually dead, and there’s not enough room to hide under it. It fell halfway over, got caught up in some other trees, and then kept on living. I follow the length of it, and there’s a nice place, high up off the ground, where the slanted tree hooks into two giant oaks. It might be like a little tree house up there, a place to hide and to sleep.
Walking the ramp of the slanted tree is harder than it looked from the ground. It’s a big, broad tree, but as impaired as I am, it feels like a balance beam. Once I’m ten feet off the ground, I get nervous and crawl on all fours. It takes a while, but in the end I make it to the hooked oaks. It’s not a big space by any means, but it’s one I can wedge myself into. Probably twenty feet up at this point, I’m scared of falling from the tree while I sleep, so I take my arms out of the jacket and tie the sleeves to a limb, making it into a blanket-slash-security harness.
There are enough autumn leaves up here to give me cover, and luckily they’re a dull brown that matches my camouflage coat. Even my long white athletic socks hide me, thanks to all the mud they soaked up as I chased Wolfman. My hat is good too. Keeps my red hair and white forehead from showing. I don’t feel safe, but I feel almost safe, and that’s the best feeling I’ve had in a long, long time.
As the sun rises over the ridgeline, I fall in and out of sleep, shifting slightly now and again, never comfortable but too tired to really feel discomfort. Every time my eyes open, the sun has -traveled another hour higher in the sky, and at a certain point I think about how I need to will myself into consciousness. It’s not enough to open my eyes for two seconds and shift around; it’s time to get back to the business of survival.
But then the deep, deep mud of sleep sucks me back into the bog. It pulls me all the way down into the soft silt of the bottom, the place where eyes don’t open anymore, where there is no awareness of time or place or life outside the quiet murk of unconsciousness.
I don’t know how long I’m resting in that bog bottom of sleep; I only know I go from black nothingness to a ballroom at the Westin Poinsett in Greenville. It’s homecoming. Which makes no sense, because our homecoming was lame and held in the school gym. Not that I know for sure that it was lame. I didn’t go. Caleb asked me to homecoming, but I said no, said I had a horse show to go to, one I couldn’t miss. The truth is I could have missed the show, but I didn’t want to go to a dance with Caleb. He said we’d go as friends, but he didn’t really mean that, and he probably knew I knew he didn’t really mean that.
Now that I’m here, I’m so glad that I must have changed my mind. The ballroom is beautiful. I’ve been here once before, for Caleb’s sister’s wedding. That wedding was magic for me, magic for Caleb, magic for Caleb’s whole family. The groom’s side paid for it, and I know Caleb’s mom and sisters felt like they were in some sort of glamorous southern Tinseltown. From start to finish, the whole night was lovely and fun and filled with joy. It was the kind of night that made me hope for the future, made me think that maybe one day there’d be a wonderful night for me. It was my first real wedding, my first time in a ballroom, the first time I saw Caleb in something other than jeans.
I look over, and Caleb’s wearing the same rented tux he wore at his sister’s wedding. He looks amazing, better than anyone else. He looks like he’d more than fit in with the Carver clan; he looks like he’d be the star of the show.
Everybody from our school is dressed to the nines, and all the girls wear striking, spangly, sophisticated gowns. I’m wearing the same simple white cotton dress from my wildflower meadow dream, but for some reason I don’t feel self-conscious. I’m just happy.
Caleb takes me by the hand and leads me over to the dance floor. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days, which is the way I like him best. It makes him look older; it makes him look like the tough, competent farmhand that he already is. We begin to dance, and I see he’s wearing cowboy boots. Normally, that’s the kind of thing that mortifies me about Caleb, but not tonight. Tonight I find it charming.
“Cowboy boots?”
“Hey, at least they’re new.” He twirls me away from him and then back again. “Count yourself lucky I didn’t wear my usual shit kickers.”
“Classy.”
He smiles in a way that is a little bit teasing and all kinds of confident. It’s the kind of smile that says he doesn’t really care all that much whether or not I disapprove, and I find myself laughing.
“Besides,” he adds, “they give me a couple inches.”
Caleb has always had an inferiority complex about his height, which I’ve never understood. He’s five nine, which is average enough. More importantly, I’m tiny, so I like it that he’s the size he is. I say to him, “I think you’re the perfect height.”
“Nah, I’m short.”
“But look,” I say, leaning my head against his chest, “we fit just right.” And we do. My temple rests in a perfect spot, and I can hear his heartbeat. Caleb doesn’t say anything, but holds me close.
It is perfect.
Then I feel him tense.
I lean back. “What’s wrong?”