to make you a splint? I can carry you on my back. He said, You know that if you go home the police will just bring you back to my grandma’s house again. You can’t go home until the police say you can. I said, Altemonte, I don’t care about that. I know how to get out of most police holds. I know how to battle like a ton of enemies. Altemonte said, I knew you would say that. That’s why you’re my best friend. Extreme joyfulness then took over my body and I said, It’s okay if you hurt your ankle don’t worry, I’ll make you a stretcher out of pine boughs, wait here while I find some pine boughs. But Altemonte said, This is a deciduous forest so there aren’t any pine boughs. I didn’t hurt my ankle. I’m not going with you.
Back a long time ago when I was still trying to be super-popular at school, the Mean Aunt said, Perley, if your friend jumped over a cliff would you jump over a cliff? and I was like, Definitely. I said, If my friend jumped over a cliff, one of two things would be the case. Either they would be proving to me that jumping over a cliff is super-toxically amazing, so of course I would join in, or else, if it was my true friend that jumped over the cliff, I would be so lonely that I couldn’t bear it and I would jump over, too. Maybe I would catch my true friend in midair and then I would grab a tree branch and I would save us. But even if we both fell together to our deaths it would be better than being alone without my true friend. The Mean Aunt got all sick at that. No, no, she said. That’s not what a true friend would want you to do, she said. I should hug you, she said, but I’m covered in beaver intestines so just act like I’m hugging you. All right, I said, hugging myself.
And now I actually had a true friend which was Altemonte and I’d thought that I’d finally discovered what my mission was and what my destiny was. I’d thought my mission and my destiny was to find Altemonte and to bring him home with me. But now I knew I’d been wrong. My mission was way harder than that. It turned out that my mission was to find Altemonte and once I’d found him to leave him again.
I knew it, but still I had to try to not know it.
So I was like, Altemonte, you’re just jealous because I live in my own toxic house and I get to run a chain saw by myself. But I knew it wouldn’t work. Altemonte didn’t get jealous, because it’s like he hadn’t heard of jealousy. If a kid tied a string to a horsefly, Altemonte would be the next one to do it only because it looked fascinating, not because he thought it would make him popular. He knew he was flanged, but he had more important things on his mind. Like he said, he was pretty busy.
He sat in my cave and pulled his knees up to his chin. He said, This cave has orcs and goblins probably fighting to the death down in its very bowels at this exact moment. He said, I won’t tell anyone where you went I’ll just say I woke up and you were gone. He said, I’ll hide your knitting.
I said, You can keep my comic books.
He said, I’ll give you my force field.
I said, But you need your force field.
He said, We can share it. And he cut off a big hunk of it for me, and I put the hunk of force field in my pocket for later. It was so honorable that you could almost forget I was going to see him at school and you could almost forget that maybe it was true what he said about the police and about who was in charge. Maybe it was true but we both knew there were more important things in life.
We crawled out of the cave. The sky of Middle-earth or of the World of Two Moons or of home was light and Altemonte and I shook hands as befitted our stations and then I kissed him on the lips. Make haste, he said. The last thing that I saw before I ran was Altemonte tying a knot of joe-pye, marking the tree next to our cave.
I pretty much was flying, past the hollow beech tree, past the duck-shit ditch, sharp turn downhill, no snapping turtle, trees of heaven, acorn-shaking tree below me, then oh. A shadow.
A shadow in the trees. A step. A step not my step. I slowed, but didn’t stop. I listened. I remembered what I knew. The wolf pack may be near, hunting. If you’re just a dog they will try to trick you into running with them, and then they’ll kill you. I had to be smart. I had to show the shadow that I was a wolf, too. A little wolf, like Choplicker. But who could be walking out here on the ridge, who but a wolf, an elf, an elfin chief? Who else would know the way? I passed through the peach orchard no peaches. I paused again, sniffing the air, tracking it. Here it came, bigger than me, down the logging road, skirting the side trail, swinging something gleaming white by its side. I ducked behind the hickory. My scar shone, smarted. From the silence, I knew the big wolf knew me.