hall and the row of cabins that lined the pathway behind it. Everything looked so ordinary … so quiet … so safe, but then the sound of someone speaking over the police radio on the boat snapped his attention back to what was happening on the beach. Pressing the side of his face against the pine tree, he watched the men as they approached the water’s edge with their burden. One of the policemen in the boat got out and walked down the dock toward them.
Without making a conscious decision, Jeff pushed off from the tree and, moving mechanically, like a robot, started walking toward them. The muscles in his legs were trembling violently as he headed in a straight line that would intersect the men before the reached the dock. Everyone on the scene was focused on what they were doing, so they didn’t notice Jeff until he was less than twenty feet away from the men carrying the stretcher.
“Hey! Kid! You ain’t supposed to be here,” one of the men shouted.
Jeff looked at him with a blank stare. The town cop was moving toward him, so he broke into a run.
“He was my friend,” Jeff said in a high, strangled voice. Tears streamed from his eyes, blurring his vision and turning the late afternoon light him into a smear of shadows and darkness, pierced by the blue flashing light.
Another man who was closer to Jeff reached out and snagged him by the arm, but Jeff twisted out of his grasp and kept running without breaking stride.
“He was my friend,” he said again before his voice climbed into a wild, ragged scream. Once he was close to the stretcher, he lunged forward. Before any of the men could react, he grabbed the sheet and tore it away.
What he saw staggered him.
He let out a loud, barking bray that echoed from the nearby forest.
Jimmy was lying on his back with his eyes wide open. Unblinking. The glassy surface reflected the flashing police light with an unnatural brilliance. His head was turned to one side, probably from the men trying to move away from Jeff as he ran toward them. Jimmy’s thin, dark hair was wet and plastered to his skull in tiny curlicues. Except for the dark bruises under his eyes, his skin was as white as the sheet that covered him. It looked like someone had smudged his face with soot from a campfire. His arms and legs looked like sun-bleached sticks with tiny blue lines under the skin, but it was his throat that caught and held Jeff’s attention.
That night and years later Jeff tried hard to convince himself it had just been a shadow cast by the police lights … or maybe some water weeds still clung to his skin because it was obvious Jimmy had been pulled from the lake.
Whatever the cause, there was a dark slash that angled across Jimmy’s throat just below his jaw line.
“Come on, kid,” one of the volunteer firemen said. “Get the hell outta here.”
The man didn’t sound all that angry, and when Jeff looked at him, there was an expression of sadness in his eyes.
“He …” Jeff started to say, but he had to stop and take a watery breath. “He was one of my friends.”
There was no way he could absorb what he was seeing, but one of the men quickly covered up Jimmy’s body again, and they stepped up onto the dock.
Taking Jeff gently by the arm, the volunteer fireman led him up from the beach. The feeling of abandoning his friend overwhelmed Jeff. All he could think was, he couldn’t let them do this. He had to stop them from taking Jimmy away. They shouldn’t be putting him on that ambulance boat and leaving. He and Jimmy were best friends.
They were B.F.F.
He should stay with him so Jimmy—who always got scared when Mark told them a scary story at night—wouldn’t be alone.
“There’s nothing more you can do, son,” the man said, his voice low and comforting.
Jeff knew he was right, but he couldn’t stop stammering, “But he’s my best … he’s my best—” until—finally—his voice choked off.
A heavy wave of darkness spread across his sight as he looked up at the sky. High overhead, the first few stars glittered. A crescent moon shined down on the beach, its reflection rippling like white ribbons in the dark water. The pine trees were all leaning inward. The dark slashes of branches looked like widening cracks in the sky. Jeff