120 pounds that have come to pass since I’ve last been on it. But Mallory doesn’t wait; she pumps her arms and legs, sweeping back and forth in front of me. I jump on my swing and try to catch up.
The wind mutes her laughter, the shriek of objection when she realizes I’m going higher than she does. She tries to change physics, but the extra work she’s doing only slows her down. Soon we’re moving together. Our feet almost touch heaven, and then we come back, falling just as quickly as we rose. Over and over again we rise and fall, making eye contact each time our backs are at the sky. On the next push forward, at the height of the swing, Mallory lets go.
When she lands, I’m sure she’s broken something. The notebook, which has been in her pocket, ends up a few feet away. Her body convulses on the ground, and I leap off my swing after her. But once I kneel down next to her, I realize she’s laughing.
“Did you see that? I never got this far as a kid.”
“You almost hit the monkey bars.”
“Exactly. Third graders ain’t got nothing on me.” She struggles to catch her breath before saying, “Life was better when we were kids, wasn’t it? Do you remember how long it took for Christmas? For our birthdays? A year took forever. You had to figure out all kinds of things to do while you waited. Now it’s just like”— she makes a zipper noise and swipes a finger through the air—“zoom. Done. You make a decision, and it happens. You barely have to wait for anything.”
“I don’t know. Look at Sinclair. He’s going to be waiting for NASCAR for a long time.”
I realize too late that when she laughs this time, it’s different. It turns to tears, which quickly turn to all-out sobbing. She grabs my neck and holds tight. I can feel her tears on my shirt.
“It’s stupid,” she says. “I was so stupid.”
“It’s going to be okay. You can call him. Right now, if you want.”
This makes her cry harder, and when she shakes her head, I’m confused. Before, I would’ve thought it was your typical graduation breakup. Or maybe it was just a fight that got out of hand. But Steve was so adamant, such an asshole . . . it doesn’t make sense.
A phone vibrates, and Mallory touches her pockets until we both realize it’s mine. She lets go of me and wipes her eyes, as I look at the screen: Mom. I silence the phone, and it’s not dark two seconds before it lights up again, buzzing angrily in my hands.
“You should answer it,” she says.
“They just want me to come home,” I say.
She’s quiet for a second. “Maybe we should. You’ve got so much going on. You don’t need all of this.”
The truth of her statement feels true, a blanket securely wrapped around me. But she still looks so lost, enough that I have no idea how I could even begin to help her—even if we stayed out all night and a hundred more after that. Whenever I got this way, her answers seemed effortless. Her plans, perfect. And now that it’s finally my turn, I’m coming up short.
“Well, we need to go bury the can before we go home,” I say.
It’s all I’ve got. Every card, on the table.
She sniffs, nods. “And the sign, too. That way it’s always there. Our little secret.”
I want to take her by the hand, put my arm around her, something. But when she stands up and wipes her legs off, it feels like an ending, a natural stopping point. Something neither of us can deny. As we walk to my truck in silence, that same hollowness that’s filled my stomach for months returns. All that’s left is to go home, take my lumps, and then wake up in the morning and finally leave.
CHAPTER NINE
When we get to the bridge, I park the truck in the same place as before. Mallory opens her door, carrying the coffee can and sign with equal reverence. We bury the can in its original hole first and then wrap the sign in an old T-shirt and start digging a bigger, wider hole together.
Mallory is quiet, but the work unearths something inside me, kinks in my memories of these sorts of moments. They always had an old-movie nostalgia to them, a fuzzy warmth. But more often than not, when we found ourselves here at