Cynthia’s family moved to my street from a place called Alexandria.
“That’s in Ohio,” She had told me.
“Where in Ohio?”
She shrugged. “Ohio’s Ohio.”
She explained that Alexandria is a little town – “Unincorporated,” she said – where things rarely happened and when they did, you pretended like they didn’t.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. She just shrugged.
“Anyways, wanna go look for creatures in the woods?” Cynthia likes the woods. That’s why I don’t visit Cynthia anymore.
Mama told me that Cynthia and her family are “hicks”, but when I asked what that meant she just told me I wasn’t allowed to repeat it to anyone. She said she doesn’t think I should be friends with Cynthia, but that I’m to be polite whenever she or her family talk with me. So, when Cynthia invited me to play ghosts in the graveyard with her and her brothers, I said yes, and then Mama yelled at me ‘cause I should have politely told her no thanks, but that now I was obligated to play just for a little while at least.
“You ever played before?” Arthur, Cynthia’s oldest brother asked me. I shook my head.
“Well, it’s real easy,” he says, spinning me around to point at the deck attached to Cynthia’s house, “that’s homebase. After we pick a ghost, they go out there and hide.” He points over his shoulder to the woods behind the house.
“They go into the woods to hide?”
“Mhm. We used to play in a real graveyard, you know, back home. But there isn’t one
close enough to our house, now. The woods back there have the most hidin’ spaces.”
I thought about telling him that Mama wouldn’t like me playing in the woods at night, but I couldn’t decide if that was impolite before he continued explaining.
“Then, after we’ve given them some time to hide, the rest of us run around and try to find ’em. Whoever finds them yells out ‘ghost in the graveyard!’, and they’re safe. The rest of us gotta sprint back to base before the ghost catches us. If you’re caught,” He pauses, hardening his face into a crooked grin, “you’re dead.”
I didn’t like Arthur so much. It’s like he was always tryna catch you, or frighten you. But I couldn’t ever tell any of them that, they’d have just called me a baby and then they wouldn’t have let me hang out no more. And, I really did like Cynthia at first, even if she was a little strange.
“Got it?” Cynthia asked me. I nodded. “Alright, I think John wanted to go first.”
“Oh, God. Not John!” Arthur cried, “No one’s ever gonna die if we let John go first!”
John was Cynthia’s youngest brother. He was only seven, but he was just as rough as the others.
“I’m okay with John going first,” I chime in, “It’ll give me a chance to learn the game.”
“And,” Cynthia added, “If no one dies after two rounds, we’ll pick someone else. And, anyways, you know Pa will have at you if you make him cry again.”
Arthur rolled his eyes, but wandered away to join the other boys on the deck.
“Do we have enough kids?” I asked Cynthia.
“You don’t need many,” She says, “Although it is more fun with more ghosts. Do any of your brothers wanna play?”
“I haven’t got any brothers.”
“Really? Not even one?”
I shake my head.
“Well, how about sisters?”
“None of those either.”
Cynthia thought about it for a moment, her face screwed up tight like she’d shoved it up against glass.
“Isn’t that really borin’?”
“I don’t know, I guess not.”
“I suppose you could always find some.”
“Find some brothers? I don’t really think that’s how it works.”
“Nah, well, I found John in the creek back home. Well, not really. Kinda did. He got lost a few years back – me and Arthur were supposed to be watchin’ him – and, well anyways, the John we found weren’t the same John we lost. But don’t tell my Ma that, she’d kill us. But, anyways, I suppose you could just go out lookin’, and maybe you’d find somebody else’s lost brother, or at least one that’s just like ‘em.”
I remembered what Mama had said about being polite, but I couldn’t help my expression. Sometimes Cynthia said the strangest things, and I don’t know how anyone is supposed to be polite always, even when someone is being really odd.
“John’s goin’ first,” Arthur announced, his tone barely concealing his annoyance.
“Does he gotta?”
“Shut it, Henry. He’s goin’,” Arthur snapped. I thought about what Cynthia had asked, if having no brothers was boring, and I couldn’t honestly decide if I’d rather have no brothers, or brothers who were as mean to me as Cynthia’s brothers were to each other.
A few of the other neighbor boys had joined us, but I didn’t know most of them, since they were older. They seemed to be about Arthur’s age, though, fourteen or so. I recognized Walter Wilson – his Papa worked with mine – but I knew he wouldn’t say hi to me.
“Weren’t there any girls who wanted to play?” Cynthia asked, tying her hair up into the shortest ponytail I’d ever seen.
“We didn’t ask any of ‘em,” Walter said.
“And why not?”
“’Cause we didn’t even want to be playing with you.”
“Well, Willy, you’re in my yard, aint ya?” She spat back.
“Yeah, and I’ll bury you in it if you call me that again, you little shit.”
Cynthia was kind of a little shit, but Mama didn’t let me say things like that, and I knew it would be impolite, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Oh, shut it, Willy. I wanna play already,” Henry said. Henry could call Walter that, but I never did find out why, all I knew was that Cynthia and I weren’t allowed to.
“Yeah, shut it,” John chimes in, to which a chorus of “shut up, John” and “John, keep your mouth shut” erupted from the boys as they each took a turn swatting at him for some reason. I changed my mind about Cynthia’s question, I knew it was better to have no brothers than brothers like that. John wasn’t fazed, though. He was still jumping around all excited, looking like someone had poured crickets down his pants.
“Alright, John. Get goin’,” Arthur told him, and off John went. If there was nothing else to be said about the kid, he sure could run. Within a moment it seemed he had leaped from the deck and sprinted the thirty feet into the woods and was gone.
“How far is he going?” I asked. Henry shrugs.
“We’ll find out, won’t we?”
“You mean there’s no boundary? He could go as far as he wanted?” Anxiety pools like acid in my stomach. I hadn’t known John long, but I knew that he was wild, and running a mile into the woods was no task for him.
“You ain’t scared, are you?” Arthur asked, his grin strange and abnormally wide.
“Of course you ain’t scared,” Cynthia told me, shoving her brother away. He slapped the
back of her arm, right where she had earned herself a cement burn a few days ago.
“Damn you, Arthur,” She said, caressing the wound.
“How long we giving him?” Walter asked. Arthur checked his watch.
“Didn’t that watch stop workin’ days ago?” Henry asked.
“Shut it. I say that’s good enough.”
As I made my way off the deck, I tugged on the back of Cynthia’s shirt.
“I’m just gonna follow you, alright?”
“No, it’s not alright. You gotta search for yourself, or else if I find him, he’s gonna tag you right away, and if you find him, he’s gonna tag me right away. It’s not fair that way.”
“But, Cynthia-“
“Nuh, uh. I covered for you back there, but now you gotta prove me right,” she said, turning around to face me. “You ain’t scared.”
I stared at her, my eyes wide and my skin clammy. I did not want to go alone into the woods at night, and there wasn’t any changing that. Even if I wouldn’t admit it outright, I was terrified.
“And, if you are scared, just pretend like you ain’t. Eventually you might believe yourself.”
And with that she dashed off and was gone before I could think of any protest to offer.
Alone, I listened to the woods from the threshold between it and Cynthia’s yard. I should have asked Mama to ground me for something, so I’d have had an excuse to stay home, but she probably would told me off for lying, since lying is impolite. I should have drank the milk she dumped out, if I was sick they wouldn’t have blamed me for staying in. But I hadn’t done either of those things.
So, instead, I walked, barely inching forward, into the woods behind Cynthia’s house. My heart hurt, it was pumping so hard, and I wondered how old you had to be to have a heart attack. My ears tried to ring, but somehow I forced it away. I tried my best to hear every crack, chirp and crunch that happened around me, but the focus made me feel lightheaded.
“Cynthia?” I whispered. “John?”
The forest answered me instead, a late-night summer breeze ruffling my hair and causing goosebumps on my bare legs. In it, I swear I heard a whisper, but it was gone before I could figure out what it was trying to tell me. The woods creaked around me, the seemingly endlessly tall pines dancing in the moonlight. I turned around, checking to see if maybe someone else had come back to the deck yet, but I couldn’t see the house anymore. A new wave of panic swept through me: What if I couldn’t find my way back at the end?
I forced my way forward, walking as straight as I could so that whenever I needed to, I could just turn around and walk straight back. Hours passed – or so it seemed, I later found out I had been gone for twenty-seven minutes according to Arthur’s watch – and it seemed like I was never going to find anyone at all, let alone John who was trying his best not to be found, and I finally decided to turn around and give up. I knew everyone would give it to me if I came back before it was time, but I thought that it was a little better than dying in the woods behind Cynthia’s house.
“Hey!” A whisper sounded from behind me. In my mind I was saying all the words Papa says that Mama told me not to repeat and praying to God at the same time, which somewhere in my brain I knew wasn’t going to get God to listen to me, but I couldn’t think straight.
“It’s Cynthia, you dip! Let’s go!” I whipped around to see Cynthia crouching next to a tree. Relief floods me, even if only momentarily.
“Oh, thank you, God!” I cried quietly. In my head I promised him that I’d stop fighting Mama on Sunday mornings.
“You don’t gotta call me that,” She says, a strand of hair slipping into her mouth as she breathed in. “You’re lost, aren’t you?”
I nod.
“C’mon then, I’ll lead you back.”
I hurried over to her, “Your hair tie snap?”
She ran her finger through her messed up hair, “yeah, something like that. Anyways, I’ll walk you out, then I’m coming in again. I gotta bring John back.”
“I thought we were supposed to be running from John when he was found.”
“Yeah, we were, but I’m not playing.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t wanna.”
Thinking back I should have found this weird, but at the time I was so thrilled to simply not be alone anymore, that I chalked that gut feeling up to left over anxiety from my time alone in the woods.
Cynthia turned to the left and waved me along.
“I think I came from that way,” I told her, pointing the direction I came from, just to the side of where she was headed.
“Didn’t you just say you was lost?”
I paused. I suppose I was lost, but I didn’t think I was that lost.
“I’m pretty sure I came from there,” I insisted.
“No, you didn’t. Now, come on.”
I decided to stop arguing. After all, Cynthia probably knew these woods better than I did. She seemed to spend most of her time here since they arrived. I followed closely behind, my ears and eyes sharp. I tried to catch anything strange before it happened, not that I knew what was and wasn’t strange in the woods.
Cynthia weaved her way through the trees as I tripped on every twig, rock and lump of dirt in my path. I was jealous of her grace – something Mama always told me I was missing. Or maybe she had gotten some sort of night vision after all the playing she did out here, I could barely spot anything before it was nearly knocking me over.
“How do you know where you’re going?” I asked her.
“I spend a lot of time here, I know what to watch out for. You’d get better if you came out here, too.”
“I don’t think so. I think I’d just be all scraped up.”
“Maybe.”
I eyed Cynthia; from what I could tell, she seemed to have gotten by without a single scratch. A few feet ahead, I could hear something shuffling around in the weeds, and I closed the gap between me and Cynthia.
“Cynthia,” I whispered, “What do you think that is?”
“It’s just an animal,” She whispered back, but it did nothing to help my fear. What if it was the type of animal you don’t want to meet face to face?
A small gasp echoed in the direction of the noise, and Cynthia finally stopped.
“It might be John,” I whispered, “He’s the only one who would hide.”
“Unless it’s Arthur, trying to scare you,” she said. She could be right, but either way, I knew she would have to go look for herself, she couldn’t stand to let John go if it really was him.
Creeping forward, we could just barely see John’s pale face hidden in a bush. I waited for Cynthia to yell out that we had found the ghost, but the shout comes from further away.
“Ghost in the graveyard!”
I looked around, trying to spot who else had found him, but I didn’t see anyone. I heard the shuffling of feet echoing in the woods around me and remembered that I was supposed to be running away from John. I followed the sound as it led me towards Cynthia’s yard. Behind me, Cynthia and John struggled to keep up. I never thought I’d be faster than John, but I guess I also never tested it.
For the first time that night, I had felt real relief. In the distance, I could make out the lights of Cynthia’s house. When I got there, I decided I’d make up an excuse to leave. Church early tomorrow morning, or say that I had heard Mama calling for me. It didn’t matter. I was going home.
As I reached the yard, I slowed down. I didn’t care if John caught me, I was just relieved to be out. But he didn’t tag me. I turned around, walking backwards for a bit, trying to spot Cynthia and John as they came out of the forest, but it never happened.
“Hey, you made it back,” Arthur said. “I bet on you being lost in there forever.”
I turned around, slamming into someone in the process.
“Dead! You’re dead! I killed you!”
I stopped, an ice cold chill running down my body.
“John?”
“You’re dead!” He shouted in my face, laughing.
I looked up to the deck. Everyone was clustered at the top, with Cynthia sitting on the bottom step. I stared, not able to think of anything to say.
“You alright?” Cynthia asked, messing with her pony tail, “You look like you’ve really seen a ghost.”
“How did you get up there?”
“Whaddya mean? I ran back when I heard Henry shout.”
“You were behind me.”
“There ain’t no way I was behind you. You ain’t faster than me.”
“No, you were. So was john.”
“John chased me out of the woods,” Henry said, flexing his muscles, “But I’m too quick for the little bastard.”
Arthur smacked him on the back of the head, “Don’t talk like that. Ma’s gonna skin you alive, and then she’ll skin me for teaching ya.”
“I swear –“
“Nah, that’s just the forest,” Cynthia said, unbothered. “ain’t I already told you? That’s just part of the forest. Creatures.”
I didn’t argue with Cynthia. In fact, I didn’t say much of anything, instead I just walked home. I slammed the door as I came in, and Mama went to yell at me, but I suppose something about my face stopped her.
“I’m not seeing Cynthia anymore,” I told her.
“Did you two have a fight?” She asked. I could tell she was trying to hide the fact that she was happy about it.
“I just don’t want to go over there no more.”
I asked her to run me a bath, and she helped me like I was little again, and I let her, even if it should have been embarrassing at my age. That night, I asked Mama to leave the hallway light on, and I could tell she thought about asking me why, but then chose not to and left it on, and kept both our bedroom doors open.
When Papa came home, he shut the light off. Somewhere outside my window, I heard Cynthia call John’s name.