So I sit down against the Metaphor to wait with all the calc notes I didn’t take. I shove a few more rocks in my pockets and lean back, and slowly, the Metaphor starts to swallow me. I tilt my head back and smile at it. “I love you too,” I say.
And I do, truly, madly. We found the Metaphor when we were ten. It was early in the summer and we weren’t supposed to leave the neighborhood, and we didn’t really, if you think about it. The signs at the town limits say WELCOME, NEIGHBOR in a font that looks a little too close to Comic Sans, but if everyone is a neighbor that must mean that all of Waldo is just one neighborhood.
Micah was hesitant and sweet—ugh, so many feelings for ten-year-old Micah. He was floppy-haired and shy and freckly and awkward and newly bespectacled and he just wanted to stay in the backyard, and it was my duty as a citizen of the earth to show him how big it was. (And it still is. The earth is awfully big. I’m going to see all of it) We rode our bikes through evil old Ms. Capaldi’s lawn and down a few roads and took a few turns and then we were at the quarry like magic.
Everyone warns you about the quarry. So a few (dozen) people have died and disappeared here—why does that matter? It’s beautiful here. Sometimes it’s so still that you can feel the earth revolving.
I didn’t see that, at first, or feel it. The first thing I saw was the Metaphor, which wasn’t the Metaphor yet. (It would be in about a minute. Patience, grasshopper.)
It’s big enough to block the quarry, which is enormous. Let’s just willfully disregard that just about anything would have blocked out the quarry to my barely four-foot eye level. It really is huge. At least (or almost) two stories tall on good days, probably. It’s made up of all of the leftover rock scraps from when the quarry still had granite, so the rocks range from pebble to pet sized, and on that day when we were ten years old and the sun was everywhere and that moment was all that mattered, we stopped our bikes at the bottom and looked up and up and up.
“Janie? What are you—”
I was already climbing, or at least I was trying. The pebbles looked steady from the ground, but they started to crumble as soon as I started climbing, and I was back on the ground within a few seconds, probably, but they were worth it.
“Oh my god,” I said, my voice all hushed and awed because there was something holy about the pile of rocks but also because I was still breathless from the fall. “It’s like a metaphor for our lives, Micah. Wait—that’s perfect! The Metaphor for Our Lives. That’s what we’ll call it!”
“What?”
We had just learned about metaphors that day, and Micah clearly hadn’t been paying attention. I was obsessed. I wrote a whole page of them in my notebook and didn’t listen while the teacher explained why they were useful, because some things should just be beautiful and useless.
I ticked them off. “Metaphor one: it’s impossible to climb. Inevitably, you end up on the ground with your breath knocked out of you. Metaphor two: see these?” I picked up a rock and held it up to him, but when he reached for it, I retracted my hand. I didn’t actually want to let go of it. I put it in my pocket. (Later, I’d write a Virginia Woolf quote on it: Fear no more. In case you doubted that this was the beginning of everything.) “See how smooth they are? Smooth and all the same, like thoughts that people kick around until they’re smooth and all the same. Metaphor three—”
“They’re not all the same,” Micah argued, squatting and squinting at the base of the Metaphor. “You’re just not looking close enough. Most of them aren’t even the same size.”
“You’re ruining my moment,” I said, and we argued back and forth like we still do, and we never did get to the third Metaphor. But the point is that that was the first time I climbed and fell off the Metaphor, that was the first time I had a rock in my pocket, that was the first time we were really and truly free and alive and us. We were born that day.
I kick my calc stuff aside and get to my feet and start climbing again. I was going to wait for Micah, but I can’t stand it any longer. Climbing is always the first and last thing I do here. One of these days, I’ll get to the top. I will. But today I’m only a few feet up when I finally hear Micah pull up. His door slams, and I hop back onto even ground before the Metaphor can throw me.
“Late much?” I ask him as he comes toward me. He has a piece of paper crumpled in his fist. I frown. “What is that?”
“This? This is a goddamn speeding ticket,” he snaps. “You rushed ahead and almost killed a fourth grader and got the attention of every grandma in Waldo, and now I have to pay a fucking two hundred dollar fine for speeding.”
I shrug. “Wouldn’t be a problem if you drove faster.”
He throws his hands in the air. “That doesn’t even make sense! Janie, I’m serious, I have no idea how the fuck I’m going to pay for this and my dad is going to kill me—”
“Oh, don’t be a drama queen, Micah,” I say, waving the ticket away. “You still have money from Pizza Rancheroo.”