Janitor's Closet

                    The Janitor’s Closet


         “Have you ever wanted to escape from your classes to a beautiful field or a running stream?”
         “Sure Mr. Lyle. Why do you think I was staring out the window all day in class?” Johnny Benson is just like any other twelve year old that I teach. Spring fever drives them all to dream of kite flying or tree climbing. When spring arrives the shades have to be drawn to keep their eyes on the chalkboard. Unfortunately that trick doesn’t work with Johnny. He’ll stare through the cracks, just trying to make out the wing of a bird darting past or a cloud shape softly floating along. Even in detention I can’t keep his mind on his work.
         I sigh, “And do you know the fastest way to get into those open fields and muddy creeks?”
         Johnny snickers, “Drop out of school?”
         “No you little hooligan! You finish your class work in class so that you have all afternoon to play instead of keeping me stuck in school trying to force feed you this stuff.”
         “Sure, Mr. Lyle. Like you have anywhere that you’d rather be. Teachers live for this stuff.”
         “You’re only half right Johnny.”
         “What do you mean,” he asks, scrunching his forehead.
         “I don’t think I have anywhere that I’d rather be. But there is someWHEN that I’d rather be,” I reply sadly.
         Johnny stares at me wordlessly.
         “It’s not a place that I’d rather be, but a time,” I try again.
         “So you mean you wish that you were a kid again, in detention maybe,” he jeers.
         “Something like that Johnny. Let me explain.”


         There were four of us back then. We hung out in the halls, in the fields, and in the muddy creeks. We’d grown up together in this little one horse town and our parents had grown up in this little one horse town and so on and so forth. We knew the neighborhood as well as any group of fourteen-year-olds could. We played hide and seek in the neighbors’ backyards. Heck, we were all neighbors for as long as we could remember. That was Tommy, Alex, Susie, and I. Up until one stormy day right before the end of school our seventh grade year.
         It was so grey outside that it had looked like dusk while we stood at the bus stop. The wind blew us around, but the rain hadn’t showed itself yet. Our backpacks bulged with the raingear mothers had forced every one of us to bring. Even if the rain had showed, we would’ve kept our routine and it still wouldn’t have impacted the events that morning.
         “Six more weeks till summer,” I said.
         “And only four weeks until the end of the school year,” Tommy chimed in.
         Alex looked up at the sky and said, “Yeah, but how long until it rains?” I looked upward too.
         “Little before noon, maybe right after,” responded Susie. She was very much the girly-girl at school, but she was always one of the gang at home. She didn’t have a problem wearing jeans and running around the neighborhood getting dirty. She was right beside us running through backyards and riding our bikes up to the grocery store. She even hung out at the park with us while we played street hockey on the basketball courts. Like I said, there were four of us.
         “How can you be so accurate?” Alex snipped at her. He was something of a fire starter like that.
         “Let’s think. Who’s passing science and who’s not? Hmmm…”
         “Ooohhh,” Tommy and I said in unison.          Susie slapped high fives with Tommy while Alex just scrunched his face and turned to look for the bus.
         “Hey, who’s that?” he asked. The four of us stared down the street at a tall, but still obviously young, kid walking towards us. He was wearing tall black boots with metal buckles across the fronts, a pair of camouflage pants, a blue tank top, and a dark green hooded sweatshirt (you know the kind with the zipper down the front?) loosely tied around his waist.
         “Do you know him,” Tommy whispered to me.
         “No. Do you Susie?”
         Susie stared down the street as he got closer and closer to us. “No I don’t know her.”
         “Her?” We looked again, and to our surprise it was a female. She had a backpack on and was headed right towards us. Definitely right towards us.
         She came up, gave each of us the once over, and then just stood silently waiting for the bus with her hands on her backpack straps. She wasn’t any older than us, but stood at least six inches over Tommy, the tallest. I stood in awe at the green eyes that were so deep that you could get lost in them, and hair so dark that it appeared that the night had somehow manifested itself on the top of her head. Her hair framed her face, hanging just below her ears and sloping towards her chin, while being shaved up about halfway in the back. Her skin was practically flawless, and the freckles that dotted her nose were definitely not flaws.
         “Where’d you come from?” Leave it to Alex to break the enchantment.
         She looked down at him and said, and I’ll never forget this, she said, “My mother, where’d you come from?” Alex turned and looked at me and Tommy wide-mouthed.
         Before Alex could close his mouth, Susie piped up. “You moved into the old Henderson place didn’t you. The grey house on the corner.”
         She warmed better to Susie than she had to Alex. “Yeah, that’s the one.” We’d all seen the moving truck the week before, but none of us had seen any of the family that had moved in there. It was rare for anyone new to move into the town, much less onto our street. After first glance we’d left the moving van alone. The little bit of furniture that we had seen hadn’t had any sign of kids, but then again the new girl wasn’t like any kid that we’d ever seen before.
         “I’m Susie.”
         “I’m Alice,” she said extending her right hand. She had a ring on each finger; each one was silver and each one had a stranger symbol etched on it than the one before it. Susie shook her hand.
         “Hey, that’s my name!” Alex said.
         “You’re from wonderland too? How grand,” she laughed cruelly at him. We couldn’t help snickering too as he realized the mistake he’d made. He got frustrated and went to work at the bolt. We’d been trying since our first day of middle school to get that bolt out of the telephone pole. We tried like hell for a week before we lost interest. Every now and again we’d remember about it. And then a week later it was forgotten.
         Susie made the proper introductions for us. “That’s Alex. That’s Tommy and that’s God in the mirrored sunglasses.”
         “I see. Well hi Tommy.” She shook his hand. “God.” She nodded at me. I nodded right back. Alice looked over at Alex and saw him struggling with the bolt. She walked over to the telephone pole and stared over his shoulder. He felt her standing there.
         “You wanna give it a try? Nobody’s ever managed to pull it out. Not even all four of us,” Alex jeered.
         “Alex,” I cautioned, “don’t light fires you can’t put out.”
         “She is bigger than any one of us,” added Tommy. Alex shot him a mean glance. “But still...” he quickly added.
         “No boys, I got it. This is something that even a girl can handle.” And with that, Alice reached up and gave the bolt a couple test tugs.
         “She can’t do it. I told you so,” snickered Alex. “Just like a…” He stopped short as Alice tossed the bolt over to him. He caught it, and then tossed it over to Tommy. “Yeah, so what? We loosened it for you.”
         “Yeah, we did work on it for a long time. Maybe it just gave up,” Tommy said. He had a tendency to make quips backing up whoever was talking at the moment. No matter what they were talking about or what he thought. He was great to have when you were explaining why you were late to your parents, but useless when it came to arguments between the four of us.
         “Figures, you guys are all alike,” she complained. “So aren’t you gonna add in some smart crack?” She looked straight at me, belittling me with those powerful eyes. “Well, God,” her voice so full of scorn as she stressed my name. I stayed silent. “I didn’t think so. How do you hang out with these guys Susie?”          Alice turned away from us and stared at the street. Susie looked at us and shrugged. She walked over and stood over next to Alice and they got into their own conversation. We didn’t think anything of it. We always got the gossip from Susie every afternoon anyway.
          The bus came and carried us to school. Alice and Susie sat together. This was the first time that Susie hadn’t sat with us on the bus since we boys had slipped a lizard in her pants in third grade. She didn’t talk to us for three weeks after that.
          When we reached the school, the three of us agreed to stay after and walk home. Tommy would find Susie at lunch and let her know the plan. The rest of never saw each other during the school. Susie had had all of the smart classes since the standardized testing in fifth grade, while I had most of the borderline classes.
          Anyway, I made it into my first bell and grabbed a chair towards the back. I was unloading my backpack onto the desk when what to my wandering eyes should appear but…


         “Santa Claus?”
          I sigh, “You never say anything in class, but now you’re gonna interrupt my story?”
         “Well, umm, I…”
         “You’ll never get out of detention at this rate. You didn’t want to do your work in class or after school. This is your alternative. Can you sit and learn?” Johnny is quiet. “That’s better. As I was saying…”


         …When what to my wandering eyes should appear but the girl who arrived when the sky was not clear. Alice dropped her paperwork on Mr. Randolph’s desk and looked around the room. I watched her from beneath my sunglasses, but she only glared at me and took a seat across the room.
         “Welcome Ms. O’Dell. Isn’t it kind of late in the year for a transfer?” She just looked at him. “Ok, anyway, I don’t have any other books to issue you. We order them all at the beginning of the year to cut costs and if I were to order one it wouldn’t get here until the summer school sessions. You’ll just have to share with someone. As for homework, your paperwork says you live on Mr. Lyle’s street.”
         “Who?”
         The girl behind Alice leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “God,” and pointed my direction. She looked over at me and I waved, more for the teacher’s sake than hers.
         Mr. Randolph continued, “You can borrow his book, as I only assign homework twice a week and it’s all due on Fridays. Got all that?” She nodded. “Mr. Lyle, would you mind taking off the sunglasses? I’d suspect that you won’t be needing them today.” I silently looked outside at the grey-lit world. I made to take off my sunglasses, and as Mr. Randolph looked away I pushed them back up on my nose. “That’s better. Now let’s get started…”
         Tommy and I met up at the basketball court that afternoon. We were shooting baskets on the waterlogged court when Alex walked out the gym doorway.
         “So what’s up? Where’s Susie,” he asked as his backpack slid off his arm into the pile of ours.
         “At lunch she was saying that she was going to walk Alice home and show her around the town on the way,” Tommy explained as I bounced the ball over to Alex.
         “Go figure. She has one girl friend on our street and she leaves us just like that,” grumbled Alex. He shot and the ball sprayed water as it bounced off of the backboard and rim.
         “Yeah, just like a girl.”
         I let the ball roll past me into the wet grass. “Shut up Tommy,” I said. “We’ll get the scoop from Susie in the morning. She’ll tell us all about Alice. Anyway, you guys aren’t the ones who have to hang out with her.”
Alex questioned, “What do you mean?”
         “Alice was in my computers class as well as history and my gym class. Plus I have to share my history book with her for homework.”
         “Just like a girl.”
         “Shut up Tommy! I ain’t got nothin’ against girls. I mean we’re all cool with Susie since we was kids, right?” They were silent. “Right Alex,” I said again, almost as a challenge to the fire starter.
         Alex consented, “Right. You’re right God. It’s just Alice.”
         “I don’t know what to think about her and I’m not gonna think anything until I talk to Susie tonight.” I really hated to see fighting between people, especially my friends. I probably only ever spoke up about it at the last minute. Alex was generally the one who went too far in the first place so I had to nip this in bud at the source.
         Tommy broke in, “Well if we’re just walking home why don’t we stop in at the grocery store. We can scrounge up some loose change in the parking lot.”
         “Yeah, I still got my lunch money so I’ll spring for sodas.”
         “Thanks Alex,” Tommy said as he rushed over to his backpack. “We should go before it starts raining again.” Alex and I just looked at each other, and then headed over to our own backpacks. I tossed the school basketball to him and winked. He knew what to do; he was the only one who could do it. And then the basketball was next found in Mrs. Drake’s second floor math classroom. We heard her scream and we took off running through the puddles that covered the cracked sidewalk.
         Our walk home was free of rain or thunderstorms, but still as dark as it had been that morning. Unfortunately, it was also free of adventures. We hadn’t had a good adventure since October. Alex swore up and down the Mayor was in a conspiracy with aliens. So we dug paperwork out of the city building’s dumpster; Tommy and Susie had broken out their walkie-talkies, which hadn’t been used in years. We kept track of the Mayor for a week. We all skipped a day of school to watch him, and even though we all were caught and punished, but it was a blast.
         Not many other adventures had happened that year, and the summer before had been slow too. I knew it meant that we were growing up. Our imaginary play lands were becoming childish and outdated. It just wasn’t as much fun worrying about who’s dating whom and what classes we wanted to take in high school. I had often thought one last adventure would have been enough. Just one more totally innocent and carefree adventure would push the banality of real life off just a little bit further. It’s all I’d really wanted.
         Tommy and Susie lived next door to each since birth, which was only a week apart. I think that their mothers had been best friends in high school, so they had been playing with each other before Alex or I was allowed to even walk down the street. So when Tommy went inside, it wasn’t a surprise to see Susie coming out his front door with a bag of flour and a carton of eggs.
         “Hey Susie,” said Tommy as he held the door for her before going inside. Sometimes I thought he belonged in the slow class more than I did. I looked at Alex and rolled my eyes.
         “Tommy is so slow,” he said. “Susie, what’s the news?” Alex watched as Susie walked right past us and up onto her own porch.
         “Sorry guys, I can’t talk now, mom’s making a cake as a housewarming gift for Alice’s folks. I promise that I’ll see you first thing in the morning. Honest,” she said, pausing to kick on the bottom of the screen door. Her mother came to the door and waved.
         “Hi Mrs. Todd,” Alex and I chimed in unison.
         Mrs. Todd replied, “If you want to talk to Susie, it’ll have to wait till tomorrow. We’re having the O’Dells over for dinner and she’s helping me get ready.”
         “She told us, ma’am. Have a good night,” Alex said with a nod. The fire starter was quite cordial around adults. We all had to be. After all, everybody knew everybody in town. She nodded back to Alex and then followed Susie inside. Alex and I walked down the block while we continued talking.
         “…No way, man. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table don’t have a thing on the X-men. The X-Men have mutant powers. What does King Arthur have? A big sword perhaps,” Alex suggested.
         “Immortality,” I answered. “What more do you want? History will always have a place for King Arthur, but not for the X-Men.”
         “Yeah, whatever.” We stopped in front of his house. “Look, I’ll see you in the morning. I got a ton of math to do. And I gotta catch up on the stuff I didn’t do all year.”
         “Alright man, see ya later.” I watched the screen door bounce off of the woodwork before I headed home.
         At home I had a surprise waiting for me on the front steps. It was Alice.
         “Susie showed me where you lived,” she predicted. “I saw the look of confusion in your face.”
         “I thought you were eating over at Susie’s tonight?”
         Alice shook her head. “No, just my parents, I have to learn this history stuff if I want to pass the eighth grade.”
         “I got homework to do in that book tonight too, you know.”
         “I know. Your mom said that I could stay and use your book until nine.” I rolled my eyes and I guess she saw it. “Look, I’m not to happy with having to work with you either God, but I’m not gonna let your stubbornness get in my way.”
         “What? I’ve been sticking up for you all day and I get this,” I shouted.
         Alice paused for a moment, but only a moment. “Forget it. I don’t need anyone sticking up for me. I can stand up for myself. Let’s just get inside and do our homework.”
         “Yeah,” I mumbled, “Come on.” I led her inside, not bothering to make the introductions to my mom or dad because she’d obviously been there ahead of me. We walked upstairs to my room and I dumped my backpack out on my bed.
         “A little messy,” Alice said, moving the books and comic books off of my table into a pile on the floor. I pushed the homework papers and notebooks around on the bed.
         “Here,” I droned, dropping the history book onto the table. “When you’re done let me know.”
         “You’re leaving me alone in your room?”
         “Hell no!” I yelled. Slightly softer, I said, “I’m gonna use the computer and I always wear headphones.”
         “Then go do it.” Alice flopped open the book with a bang and started reading. I went over to the computer desk and tried to zone her out in a game of F-18 Fighter Squadron. Each plane that I shot down was a personal rebuke to the fact that I had been stuck sharing schoolbooks with the most loud and obnoxious girl that I’d ever met. I strangled the joystick as I jerked it left and right, flying around the digitized countryside. Now I couldn’t even manage to play my favorite game without her image burning in my mind. I couldn’t get past the uneasy feeling of knowing that she was sitting right behind me, in MY room.
         “Die Die Die! Come on, you commie drunks! Die,” I screamed just to here my voice over the roaring engines blasting in my ears. The plane dipped and rolled with my frustration. I pulled and jerked at the stick, growing angry that the plane didn’t change directions as quick as my mind. “Come on you stupid piece of…” A hand on my shoulder made me start and I dropped the joystick. I turned and just stared at Alice who was mouthing something. “What did you say,” I asked taking off the headphones.
         “Your mother said to keep it down, you’ll wake you little brother. Plus I can’t study with all the testosterone flowing around here. Calm down,” she repeated.
         “Calm down? Calm down?” I slammed the joystick down on the keyboard and the screen ran so many lines of code that it kept scrolling continuously. “I’ve got the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met studying in my room, I just broke my computer and you’re telling me to calm down? UGH!” I threw myself back into the computer chair and swiveled back to face the computer. “Just do the homework.” Just like a girl.
         I typed a few commands into the computer, but it didn’t evoke any response from the machine. I slapped the side of the monitor. Alice stood beside me and stared at the screen over my shoulder.
         “I thought I told you to use the history book,” I growled. She pushed both the chair and me over onto the floor. “What the hell?”
         “Shut up.” She hit five or six keys and the screen flickered back onto the flight simulator screen. “I’ll see you at the bus stop.” And then she walked out of my bedroom, leaving the door open enough so that I could see her walking down the stairs from the spot I had fallen. I heard her mutter some things to my mother in a much more polite manner than she had talked to me. Then the front door open and closed and I was still on the floor looking at where she had walked out.


         “So she kicked your butt, Mr. Lyle.”
         “Yes Johnny, she did.” Johnny smiles at me. “She kicked my butt because she was better at the computer than me. She had pulled out the bolt that none of us had been able to budge. Alice kicked my butt because she could do everything that I could not.”
         “So that’s why you were so rude to her.”
         “Pretty much.”


         I dreamt of the War of the Roses that night. When I woke I realized that I needed to cut back on the historical reading. I woke up later and set myself to putting everything back into my backpack. I had just pushed it all off onto the floor when I had gone to bed and now I had to look for it all. The math book and worksheets were beneath my tee shirt. My computer disks were over by the dresser. My gym shorts were in a heaped pile; under which were my novels and comic books that Alice had pushed onto the floor. ‘That girl,’ I thought as I stacked the books back together on top of the table.
         I grabbed my history book off of the table angrily and a piece of paper fluttered to the ground. I snatched it up. It said “Alice O’Dell World History First period” across the top, but it didn’t look like her homework. The rest of the paper was covered with “God”. It was written little, it was written big. It was scratched into the paper; it was carved into my mind. What had she been doing? Was she psychotic? Was she ready to kill me? Did she even know what the homework had been?
I stuffed the paper into my backpack. I’d ask her tomorrow, but I’d have to get her alone. I couldn’t let the guys see me talking to her. First period at the latest, I settled for myself as I climbed back into bed.
* * *
         Morning found me waiting at the bus stop ahead of everyone else. I thought that I was waiting for Susie, so that I could get all the gossip that we had missed out on the night before, but when I saw Alice walking down the street I remembered whom I really was waiting for. I stared down the street at the girl I couldn’t stand, but was dying to talk to. In the blue sky morning, I saw that her hair wasn’t as dark as it had looked in the previous grey morning or in my poorly lit bedroom. It was instead a red so incredibly deep that it shown black. Watching her, I fell into a trance that rivaled the one that had overcome me the day before.
         “She’s back again?”
         “Of course she is silly. She lives here now. You could stand to be a little bit kinder to her ya know. If you just stopped saying what everyone else thought and be yourself every once in a while, you’d know that.” I turned around and Susie was talking to Tommy. Both of them appeared to have been there for a few minutes, and yet I hadn’t heard either of them approach. “And that goes for you too.”
“Hi Susie,” Alice greeted. The moment alone with Alice had eluded me for the morning.
“Mornin’ Alice, did you get any of that cake that my mom sent home last night?”
“Yes, it wasn’t too terrible,” she replied with a smile. “What history do you have?” I knew where that conversation was headed. I walked down the street to meet Alex who was already coming towards the corner.
“How was your night, Alex? Hopefully better than mine.”
Alex shrugged his shoulders. “Ehh, I guess so. I just watched X-Files the Movie again. What was so bad about your night?” I told him, leaving out the part about the homework paper, and he just looked over at Alice with the same contempt that he had the day before when she pulled the bolt out of the telephone pole and made him look bad. “Just like a girl.”
“I guess so. Anyway, what are we going to do this afternoon? I mean look at them.” Alice and Susie were so engrossed in conversation they never even turned their heads to acknowledge the fact that Alex had shown up or that I had returned to the bus stop. Tommy stood opposite of them and tried to jump in the conversation whenever he could get a chance. “Even Tommy is getting along with Alice now.”
“Just like a girl.”
I didn’t get to talk to Alice before class so I resolved to just let the homicidal homework paper retire to the trashcan without any more fuss.
That afternoon I walked home alone. There was no one waiting for me at the basketball court or the bus loading dock. There was no one waiting for me when I spent my Friday allowance on Fun Dip. I stuffed the sugar packs into my backpack and walked home sucking on the dipping stick.
“Hey God.” I looked up from the sidewalk. I’d reached my street without even noticing.
“Hi Susie,” I said heading towards her porch. She was sitting in an old wicker rocking chair. “You talking to me now?”
“Maybe.”
I stopped at the stairs. “What do you mean maybe?”
“I mean maybe if you stop being so rude to Alice then I might start talking to you again.”
“What? I stuck up for her yesterday when Alex was dogging her after school. I stuck up for her when Tommy agreed with whatever Alex said. I even let her use my history book without even complaining too much,” I said, exasperated.
“Oh come off it God! You’ve been an ass! She told me about the way you treated her. Come on, would you have just thrown your history book at me and told me to keep it down?”
“No, but your different Susie,” I said, sitting down on the top step of the porch. “Besides, I didn’t…”
“You’re talking to me, not some stranger. I know how you are. Can’t you be just a little bit nicer to her,” she asked.
“You mean like Tommy? He’s a moron. He follows whoever’s closest to him at the time,” I argued.
“You know why there wasn’t anyone to walk home with you this afternoon?”
“Why?”
“Because of the way you’ve treated Alice.”
“What about Alex?”
She explained the rest of the days events to me, which sum up to this: Alex and Alice had the same lunch period and they got into a hot and heavy yelling match, pushing each others buttons, fire starter versus unruly one, and they reached an understanding of each other. “They’re more like each other than either one wanted to admit. Reaction seekers my mother calls them. Anyway, will you work on being just a little bit nicer to her?”
I tugged at the straps of my backpack and nodded.
“Good.” Susie got up from the chair and came over and sat down next to me on the steps. “You know how we used to have imaginary adventures all the time?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“We haven’t had a good one in a long time.”
I smiled, “I was thinking the same thing just the other day.”
“You know the reason we haven’t had a new adventure the same as I know it. We’re growing up. The imaginary adventures of childhood are gone God.”
“They don’t have to be.”
She sighed, “Yes, I’m afraid they do. It’s the only way. I’ve seen it coming for a while. Well, we could always think of Alice as someone who’ll bring us the next adventure.” Susie put her hand on my shoulder as she rose up. “Let’s just try not to think of it as fading memories. It’s sad. I’ll see you tomorrow morning anyway, right?”
“Yeah, will do.” She went into the house and I watched her go upstairs from my vantage point on the steps.
* * * * *
On Sunday morning it was clouded over again and Alice’s hair looked as black as it had been that first morning. We all met up in front of Tommy and Susie’s houses and headed off towards the park. ‘Good mornings’ were bid all around, but Alice and I merely nodded at each other. We all walked to the school park, carrying on about three different nonsense conversations. We passed right by the playground into the forest beyond. Alex was the first of us to reach the old oak tree.
“Guys, it ain’t a pretty sight,” he yelled from the window of our old clubhouse. Tommy and I were just entering the clearing when we heard the gasp of the girls ahead of us. The clubhouse was in shambles. The wood was warped on all sides, the shingles littered the ground, and the steps had sunk into the tree. The brown of the clubhouse did, however, set itself off nicely from the rest of the greenery. None of us could even remember the last time that any of us had thought about the clubhouse, so we should have assumed that the clubhouse would be in that kind of condition. Why we decided to go there and why we even thought about it that morning still eludes me.
“Well, what’d we expect by coming out here anyway,” I mumbled. I kicked at a couple of the boards that had rotted and fallen to the ground.
Susie sighed. “Well, I’d planned to show Alice where we used to have all those cool adventures in the woods and stuff.”
“Hey that sounds cool, would you show me too,” Tommy asked. I reached over and walloped Tommy across the back of the head.
“Thanks God.”
“Yeah thanks,” grumbled Tommy, rubbing the back of his head. “Hey, lets run down to the creek!”
“Race you,” screamed Alex as he swung down out of the tree house. The two of them crashed through the underbrush.
“Wait for me!” And then Susie thundered off after them, leaving Alice and me alone.
I climbed up the rope ladder and looked around the inside of the clubhouse, trying to ignore Alice. It wasn’t in much better shape on the inside than it had been on the out. I was digging around in some of the ‘treasures’ that had been left up there when Alice poked her head in.
“So this is the clubhouse huh?” She squeezed herself through the square hole in the wooden floor. “You guys must have been really little when you built this,” she said, crouching just to keep off the warped and splintered floor.
I looked back over my shoulder and laughed. “No, you’re just really big.” I was thumbing through a cardboard cigar box full of waterlogged papers.
“Can I see?” I handed her the box and kept digging around through the leaves in the corners of the tree house. Alice put down the box. “What’s with the sunglasses, God?”
“I wear my sunglasses at night…”
“So I can, so I can keep track of visions in my eyes…”
I fought the astonished smile that was growing on my face. “You know that song?”
“What do you mean ‘do I know that song’? I’m the grandmaster of bad 80’s music!” Alice made a couple headbanger gestures and smiled back at me.
“Everyone else thinks my taste in music sucks.”
“Well if you weren’t such an ass, you might realize that we could be friends,” she quipped.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one plotting to kill you!”
She opened her mouth to shout something obscene at me but instead looked very stunned. “What are you talking about?”
“Your history paper had my name scribbled all over it. I’ve seen those mass murderers do stuff like that too. I didn’t say nothing before, but just as I’m starting to warm to you, you decide to call me an ass,” I spit out coldly. She fell backwards from her crouching position onto her butt, where she stayed as I moved to leave the disorderly tree house.
“I didn’t know that you saw that.”
“Yeah, well I did, and I don’t appreciate it.” I was halfway down the rope ladder.
“God, wait.” I stopped with my head just inside the clubhouse. Her mouth moved to form words, but nothing came out so I climbed the rest of the way down. “Dammit, wait a second,” she repeated as she tried to work her way out of the small opening. I turned around and waited for her to get out of the tree house before I started walking again. She ran up behind me and pushed me down onto the forest floor. “Ass!”
I rolled over and looked up as bewildered as I hade been the first time she pushed me. “Do you have to go about pushing me down all the time? Do you want God to ‘humble before you’, or something?”
“Yes! Stop acting like you know everything! I’m not a mass murderer and I’m not trying to take your friends away from you, you stupid jerk!” She kicked dirt at me. “Guys are so stupid. They never notice anything.”
“What are you talking about,” I asked as I stood up and brushed off the dirt.
“Take off your sunglasses,” she asked. Her voice came across so soft I was compelled to obey. “I’ve never seen your eyes before. You should keep the shades off.”
“But it’s part of my image.”
“I just told you that your image was bunk. Listen God, I wanna make a truce.”
I held out my hand. “Ok truce. But I don’t see what that has to do with my sunglasses.”
She shook her head as she shook my hand. “That’s not how they make peace where I come from. We have to trade something personal to seal it.” She worked the silver ring off of her thumb. “Friendships made this way are harder to make, but harder to break.” She held out the ring and asked again, “truce?”
I looked down at the ring in her hand. Celtic knot work swirled around the band formed a perfect circle around the mirrored socket where a stone would normally be set. Then I looked at the mirrored sunglasses that I held in my hand. Next to my computer they were the absolute coolest things that I had. They had supported my image and privacy by hiding my eyes for years. I extended them to her. “Just like a girl.” She growled as I winked at her. “Truce.”


“Ok Mr. Lyle. I get it. You wish you were my age with your first girlfriend. I should use my childhood wisely and avoid detention more. I get it. See you tomorrow huh?”
I reach out and force Johnny back into the desk across from me. “That’s not quite it. Besides, the detention buses don’t come for another half hour. Sit down and stop interrupting or you’ll be back tomorrow to listen to my story on toenail hunters.” He sits with a visible shudder. The toenail story doesn’t exist, but has become my trademark fear tactic. “Plus, she was not my girlfriend. She couldn’t belong to anybody. That wasn’t her style. And even though she stole mine, I couldn’t even think of touching her heart.”


I had been asleep for about three and a half hours when I heard something bounce off of my window. I looked out the window sleepily and saw the light from the streetlamp dancing merrily about in my sunglasses that were pushed up in Alice’s hair. Alex waved me down and I held up a finger letting them know that I’d be down in a minute. It was bad enough when I had Alex dragging me out of bed on some crazy late night run, but now he’d enlisted help.
I ducked back into the clothes from earlier that day, which were still a little dusty from my tussle with Alice on the path next to the tree house. I grabbed my digital watch off of the dresser as well as the Celtic ring that Alice had traded to me. I slipped it onto my right thumb, as that’s where she’d worn it. I snuck downstairs, looked around for my parents and then slipped out the front door.
Outside I thought I was in the clear. I walked towards the streetlamp that Alice was leaning against. Alex was walking away from it, coming to meet me halfway. As I began to ask him why he’d dragged me out of bed at two thirty on a school morning, he said “Now!” in a loud whisper.
Suddenly Tommy and Susie rushed up from either side and grabbed hold of my arms and then he and Alice whipped out squirt guns and proceeded to spray me. I sputtered as the water ran down my face. They were all chuckling heartily at my expense.
“Forgive me if I go back to bed now,” I said, pulling free from the laughing pair that had held me still.
“You shoulda seen your face,” giggled Susie. “You looked like someone had just pulled a real gun on you!”
“I’m tired.”
Alex grabbed me by the arm. “Hey, you didn’t go swimming with us earlier so we had to get you caught up.”
“Yeah, we caught you up alright,” laughed Tommy. “Right up the nose! Did you see that shot? HA!”
Alice tossed me her water gun. “Here. Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“Remember how you were talking about not having a lot of adventures anymore? Even pretend ones?” asked Susie. I nodded. “Well, I mentioned it to Alice on the way home this afternoon. You guys were busy talking about the Spiderman reruns,” she explained.
“And?”
“So we’re going to foster an adventure. A good old game of cops and robbers! What do you think?” She was smiling wide.
“But it’s Monday. We have school in…” I looked down at my watch. “…three hours and fifteen minutes.”
Alex jumped in. “Oh that’s ok. We’ll already be at school.”
“Huh?”
“You really are daft. We are going to play in the school,” Alice sounded out very slowly.
“OK,” I said, mocking her annunciation. Everyone had a good laugh and then we were off and running for the school.
Running through the empty streets of night, we ducked in and out of streetlights. Between the buildings and alleys of our small town, we saw it as a personal playground. No one was out at that hour, so the echo of our feet rung out across the empty parking lots. No one thought of the hour or where we’d be when the school janitors and staff would show up. Of course, that wouldn’t matter soon anyway.
At the side door of the building we stopped, waiting for our breath to come around that last corner. Laughing and running never seem to go hand in hand.
“Whew, that was the farthest that I think we’ve ever run,” said Susie between gasps.
Tommy wheezed, “At night anyway.”
Alex had already recovered and was working on the lock to the door of the school with a credit card. Alice, Susie, and I walked over to the external water faucets and began to fill the water guns. Tommy was wandering between Alex and us, looking altogether anxious.
“Would you stop that,” demanded Alex as he wriggled the plastic card around in the door crack.
“Would you hurry up,” he retorted as the door slipped open.
“You were saying,” jeered Alex. He held the door as we ran inside, then letting it lock behind us.
Susie laid they guns out on the floor. “Who’s on what team?”
“I wanna be a robber,” said Alex.
Tommy jumped in, “Me too!”
“All right, that makes God and Alice cops,” Susie affirmed as she handed the other two their water weapons.
“Wait a gosh darn minute thar’ missy,” I said in my best John Wayne. “What makes you think that you’re gonna join those cattle rustlin’ varmints?”
“Cause I said so. Run!” Susie, Tommy, and Alex took off into the dark halls.
“Well, I reckon that we’d better get after those theivin’ scoundrels,” Alice chided as she handed me one of the two remaining squirt guns.
“You making fun of my accent?”
“No no, it’s just that… Well, yeah, I guess so!” I raised my gun and squirted her repeatedly until she ducked out of range.
“Look at you. You made me use all my water!”
“Well just cover me as if you had water in it. I’m soaked and we haven’t even found the others yet. Sheesh…” Alice laughed.
We turned down the first hall, but it was empty. As I crawled around the next corner, I caught a glimpse of Tommy running at the end of that hall.
“There he goes!” Alice and I ran the distance of the hall and paused before turning the corner. We whipped around it, but the hall was as empty as the first.
“He’s around here somewhere,” Alice said. We stood quietly, listening for any sound. Our eyes met as we spied the janitor’s closet.
I looked to Alice from the side of the door and nodded, holding my gun the same way that I’d seen on cop shows a thousand times. She nodded right back at me and smiled. Holding her water pistol in her left hand, she slowly turned the doorknob and then quickly jerked the door wide opened.
What happened next was incredible. The first ray of the rising sunlight caught the edge of Alice’s ring, which was on my upturned thumb. From there it beamed off of the lens of my sunglasses, which were still pushed up in Alice’s hair. The light ricocheted around in the janitor’s closet and a blue electric circle grew in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“What the…”
Alice lowered her squirt gun, as did I. I simply stared at the growing ring as she moved towards it. Each step that she took towards it, the circle seemed to move out of the mirror and grow until it was large enough to fit a person inside. I was so afraid that it might pull Alice inside; I reactively grabbed her arm and pulled her back. As she stepped back, the circle returned to a smaller size.
“What’s the big idea?”
“I didn’t want you to get pulled in,” I explained.
“But I want to. Come on; let’s see where it goes. This is a hell of a lot better than just hanging around shooting squirt guns.” She turned back to the door, staring longingly. Just then, our ‘robbers’ jumped out of the vacant lockers behind us, squirt guns at the ready.
“Gotcha!” they screamed in unison.
“Whoa, what the hell is going on here?” Alex walked up toward mirror and the electric circle grew to his size as he did.
“Yeah, what the hell,” echoed Tommy, who maintained his distance.
Alice pulled free from my hand. “Let’s see what this thing is.”
“But what if it shocks us,” I cautioned.
“Here, let’s see.” Susie tossed her squirt gun into the circle and it landed clean through on the other side.
“See, nothing,” said Alex as he went to get the gun back. As he stepped into the circle, it shrunk down to its original size behind him and he vanished from the janitor’s closet. The plastic squirt gun lay still on the floor on the other side.
“Alex!” Tommy screamed. He ran to the closet, but before any of us could reach him, he had gone through the portal too.
“Now you better go Susie. You don’t want to let those two running around like chickens with their heads cut off. You’re the voice of reason,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
Susie smiled. “Come on God, it’s the adventure of a lifetime.”
“I’m right behind you girl,” I said with a wink. Susie walked to the circle as it expanded. She stuck her hand in the circle as if to test the waters, and was sucked inside of the blue waves.
“This is incredible. I can’t believe this is really happening,” I said as my third childhood friend vanished before my eyes.
Alice came over and nudged me. “Hey God it’s your turn.”
“Alright…” I walked up to the mirror and the blue electric circle, but instead of growing to fit me, the whole mirror glowed green. I looked startled at it, took a step back and then another towards it. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why, but it won’t let me through. I’ve wanted this adventure for a long time now, why won’t it let me pass through?”
“Maybe when you realized how much you wanted the adventure, you grew past it,” Alice suggested. “Maybe you want something more now.”
“Yeah… and I know I’ll never have it,” I said, smiling sheepishly at Alice.
“It’s ok,” she said. Her hand found mine as she spoke. The faint grip of her hand said a lot in the simple action, but when I felt my soul get lost those deep green eyes for one last time, that took the cake.
“Now you’d better get going. You’re the most world wise one, they’ll need you in there.” And she stepped into the portal.


“So you see Johnny, my some when is in a time that I couldn’t even begin to tell you, because I don’t really know,” I finish as Johnny and I stand in the hallway.
“You’re not too shabby of a storyteller Mr. Lyle. I liked that one. I might get detention next week just to hear the famous toenail story,” Johnny says as he grabbed his backpack. “But I wasted enough of my free time that I’ll have to do class work in order to make up the hours of cops and robbers that I’m missing.”
“Well that’s good. Now don’t miss your bus.”
“Bye! And good story!”
“I wish it were just a story,” I say to myself as Johnny thunders down the hall.
I twist the old Celtic ring on my thumb and wander back towards the teacher’s lounge. The empty hallways of this school always echo with laughter and I’m sure that there is someone running with a squirt gun in corner of my eye.
‘I should stop telling that story,’ I think as I close my eyes and shake my head trying to clear the ghosts from my mind. I open my eyes and find myself once again at the door to the janitor’s closet.
‘I’ve been here a thousand times since,’ I tell myself. ‘Nothing has ever happened before. Nothing will happen today.’ With trembling hands, I turn the doorknob. The closet is dark, except what little light reflects in the mirror. I reach for the light switch and knock over a mop in the process. As the florescent light flickers alive, I bend down to pick up the broom. Harry would have a field day if he caught me in here again.
Standing the mop back up, I glance at the mirror and see my reflection. I watch myself for a moment, but then stare past myself. Approaching from the distance behind me in the mirror is Alice. I think to close my eyes again, but I cannot. With every step that she takes in the mirror, my reflection grows younger.
“God,” her voice whispers in my mind. She’s standing right behind my reflection now, who is about the age I was when she disappeared. “God,” she whispers again.
‘Please make these dreams stop,’ I plead in my head.
“This isn’t a dream. We’ve figured out how to come back,” Alice says in my ear. I turn around and there is a woman I’ve never seen before, with dark hair and deep green eyes. She smiles.
“You’re all grown up,” I stammer.
“Only while I’m here.”
“You’re not staying?”
She smiles, “No, you were right. They do need me, but we need you too.”
“I can’t go. Remember?” My voice falters as I remember.
“We’ve figured that out too.” Alice steps up to the mirror and taps on the glass until the electric circle starts to grow again inside. Young Alice does the same thing in the reflection. “Now take these.” She hands me my sunglasses.
“You still have them,” I say putting the old familiar shades on.
“Your image might’ve been bunk, but it was your image. I guess you lost sight of the adventure when you lost part of yourself,” Alice said.
There is movement in the corner of my eye again. In the mirror Tommy, Susie, Alex, and even young Alice are all calling mutely to me. I stare in wonder at everything that was happening. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted, including that which I’d wanted so many years before.
“Are you ready?”
“Will I still be old?”
Alice shrugs, “I don’t know. I do know you can be an ungrateful cur and stay here, or you can follow me and find out.” My eyes stare off as I think about my life, but she interrupts. “No more thinking, are you staying or going?”
“I’m going.”
“Then walk through the portal already.”
And I did.