When they reached the schoolyard, she tried to drag him back to the
logs, but he resisted, taking her instead to the marsh where he'd first
spied her. The ground had frozen over and the rushes and reeds were
stubble, poking out of the snow. He took her mittened hands in his and
waited for her to stop squirming.
Which she did, eventually. He'd rehearsed what he'd say to her all
morning: *Do you believe me? What am I? Am I like you? Do you still love
me? Are you still my friend? I don't understand it any better than you
do, but now, now there are two of us who know about it, and maybe we can
make sense of it together. God, it's such a relief to not be the only
one anymore.*
But now, standing there with Marci, in the distant catcalls of the
playground and the smell of the new snow and the soughing of the wind in
the trees, he couldn't bring himself to say it. She either knew these
things or she didn't, and if she didn't, he didn't know what he could do
to help it.
"What?" she said at last.
"Do you --" he began, then fell silent. He couldn't say the words.
She looked irritated, and the sounds and the smells swept over him as
the moment stretched. But then she softened. "I don't understand it,
Alan," she said. "Is it true? Is it really how you say it is? Did I see
what I saw?"
"It's true," he said, and it was as though the clouds had parted, the
world gone bright with the glare off the snow and the sounds from the
playground now joyous instead of cruel.
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