Eight

He’s gone.  They were just in class together.  She was just feeling guilty for not spending more time with him, for not letting him stay a few minutes longer before her parents came home from work, for only being his friend in private.

She stared at the barely visible, red-bricked peak of his roof.  She cried.

He told her that he was moving—moving far.  She wouldn’t look at him.  She made some cavalier comment about how it wasn’t fair to move a year and a half before graduation.  He wasn’t impressed with her response. 

“Shut up,” he thought to himself.  She heard him anyway. 

He wrapped himself around her as he always did.  It wasn’t difficult.  She fit well inside his arms.  Their minds went numb.  He could have kissed her.  He didn’t.  She could have kissed him.  She didn’t.

Neither of them knows how long they stood there on her back porch or how he walked away.

She retraced the path from her house to his in her mind.  The once worn-down trail past the pine trees, along side of the tall wooden fence, traversing up the hill--long overgrown with tangled weeds and new growth.