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Jeb whispered to me, “Can we hurry? I really gotta pee.”
I snorted. “So? Go take a piss.” I wiggled my eyebrows at him. “You want me to hold it for you?”
“Shut up.” He eyed my mom. “What about her?”
“She’s not allowed to hold it for you.”
He blew out a big sigh. “You’re hopeless, man. Someone should lock you up.”
“Go over there.” I pointed to a copse of maple and pine trees. “Mom’s not going to give a frig if you take a leak out here. What? You think she’d torture you? Make you wait until we drove home? For what? Good manners?”
He trudged away. Trees and shadows swallowed him up. Watching him vanish into the darkness gave me a little chill, despite the warm night air. I shivered.
As we packed up the cooler and picnic basket, Mom said, “I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“For the things I said yesterday about Jeb. It wasn’t fair. It was beneath him and it was beneath me. He’s a nice boy and you’re lucky to have him as your friend.”
“Thanks, Mom.” I eyed the darkness he’d vanished into. I leaned close to her and, without letting my little ineffectual and annoying inner censor interfere, I blurted the truth out. “He’s more than a friend.” I laughed. “I love him.”
She touched my face for a moment. “Oh, honey, I could seethat. But I needed you to say it first. So thank you for sharing that with me. It’s all good, my sweetie.”
“He wouldn’t want you to know, so, for now, could we keep this just between us? Please.”
She made the universal sign for zipping her lips shut. “Not a word. You let me know when you’re ready. I wouldn’t dream of saying anything, especially if Jeb isn’t in a good place to come to grips with the truth.” She glanced toward the woods. I turned my head, expected to see him emerge, but there was only the dark and the wind.
I peered closer, worried Jeb would have overheard us. It was paranoid, I know. But I wasn’t sure how he’d react. He wouldn’t be happy, that’s for sure. And believe me, making him happy was top on my agenda for tonight. I could just about see him, in his faded cut-offs and Cleveland Browns T-shirt, coming back while zipping his fly.
But the image was a figment of my imagination.
All of a sudden, it got quiet—even the wind stilled. Vanilla slumbered on the folded up blanket, paws outstretched. The sound of car and boat horns was completely gone. After the moment of silence, the leaves rustled in the trees, sounding sand-papery and ghostly.
How long has it been? Why’s it taking him so long?
Mom glanced toward the woodsy area where Jeb had gone to take a leak. “I’d ask if he fell in, but that doesn’t apply.” She let out a half-hearted chuckle. Despite the snort of laughter, her expression revealed a smidge of worry. It had been too long. But what explanation could there be?
He’d been gone now, I was sure, for fifteen minutes or so. A nagging sense of worry crept up, tickling the base of my spine.What’s taking him so long?
Mom tapped me on the shoulder. She was now standing. “Go check on him, okay? I have to get home and get to bed. Tomorrow’s a workday, you know. I don’t get to sleep in until noon like some people.”
“Sure.” I wandered toward the woods and noticed for the first time how eerie it was. Once under the canopy of trees, it was very still—and utterly dark—pitch black. Like you-can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark.
“Jeb?”
Only the wind answered, and then the hoot of an owl. My skin crawled. I took a few more steps into the darkness. “Jeb? C’mon, man, this isn’t funny. My ma wants to get home.”
There was nowhere for him to go. This place, really, was nothing more than a cliff at the top of a hillside. The woods around me bordered the valley, but didn’t lead to anywhere significant—certainly no place like a road. The only way out was the way we’d come up.
Or that’s what I believed, anyway.
Of course, there was another way out, through the horror-movie-scary woods running in the opposite direction, but I didn’t find this out until much later.
The alternative was to think that Jeb finally got cold feet about me, about our budding relationship. In a fit of shame or remorse, maybe he used having to pee as an excuse to slip away. I suppose he could have braved the darkness and descended the hillside without using the main in-out route. It made some sense because what lay ahead would be our first night together. The image of his worried face popped into memory when I told him we’d have to share my full-size bed, with what was probably a leer.
Yet I couldn’t believe he’d be so cruel as to just leave me here, worrying not only me, but my mom. Jeb was a lot of things, but one of them wasnota prankster. Nor was he the kind of person to just ditch other people without an explanation. No, he was kind to a fault and hiding like this, scaring us, wouldn’t occur to him. I knew that much for sure. It wasn’t in the makeup of the boy I thought I knew so well.
After too many minutes of standing helpless in the pitch darkness and after too long listening to the wind and hoping for a voice or a footfall, I gave up.
