Lisa Unger: Darkness My Old Friend

“Okay,” he said. He lifted his palms. “I get it. I put you on the spot. You were trying to save face.”

Somehow his knowing that just made her feel worse.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, barely keeping her voice from breaking. She wouldn’t cry in front him. He was punishing her, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that it hurt. She walked out the door of his office and started jogging, her backpack knocking clumsily against her.

“Look, Willow…” His voice carried down the hall. “Do you need a late pass for your next class?”

But the walls, the shame, the smell of cafeteria pizza were closing in on her. She couldn’t stand it, being there under the fluorescent lights, in a place where she was a freak, where she couldn’t make herself seen or understood. When she turned the corner, she slowed and walked toward her class. But just as she was about to go inside, she saw the exit door at the end of the hall. Light streamed in from the narrow rectangular windows. Without really thinking, she kept walking and pushed out into the cool air of late autumn. For a moment she stood looking behind her at the squat brick building, the olive green doors. Then she moved quickly down the back drive to the side road and kept on going.

She expected someone to come running after her, wanting to know where she was going. No one did. And she just kept heading up the quiet, two-lane road lined with whispering elm trees. She had the giddy, anxious sense of stolen freedom as she made her way along the shoulder. It was only a matter of time in a town this small before someone drove by, saw her, and made a call, a teenager walking away from the school alone in the middle of a school day. Then there’d be trouble. Her mother was going to be upset. But she didn’t care. She just wanted to be… away. It was a familiar feeling.

She didn’t have a plan, wished she’d kept her jacket with her. A stiff wind blew through the trees and brought down a spray of golden leaves that lofted and danced and finally fell to the ground, crushed beneath her thick, black shoes.

She was a year and a day and a hundred thousand miles from lifebefore . There were people she could call, her old friends. Some of them had forgiven her; some of them still called and sent e-mails, still commented on Willow’s Facebook page. But why bother? Every time she talked to them or saw their updates in her news feed, read their stupid tweets, she felt her exile. She knew that there was no road home again even though everyone, including Willow, pretended otherwise.

There was a book her mom used to read to her, about a boy who got angry with his parents and ran away from home to join the circus. He put his head in a lion’s mouth and walked the tightrope. He sailed above the crowds on the flying trapeze, and he danced with the clowns. But at the end of the day when the lights went down and the crowd went home, he found himself alone in a small, dark tent. He closed his eyes and cried for his mother, who, it turned out, wasn’t that bad after all-she’d just wanted him to eat his broccoli. When he opened his eyes, it was all a dream and he was safe in his bed, his mom leaning in to give him a kiss on his forehead.

“I ran away and joined the circus,” he told her. He told her about the lions and the clown and the flying trapeze. “Even after all that, I just wanted to come home.”

“You’re always home, because I’m always with you,” the storybook mom said. “You can go out in the world and be or do anything you want, but you can always come back to me.”

Willow remembered loving that book, always nuzzling in close to her mom at the end. Even now, when it seemed maudlin and contrived, she still liked the idea that you could find yourself at home in your bed, safe and loved and everything okay after all. She used to believe that things were like that, that the world was safe and that there was nothing her mom couldn’t fix.

She heard a car coming, so she stepped off the road and into the trees. Fingers of light shone down through the thinning tree cover, glancing off the damp ground. The earth beneath her feet was a soft cushion of fallen leaves and sticks. The air was thick with the aroma of decaying vegetation. She started making her way through the woods. Better to be off the street; she knew she could walk through the trees for a mile or so and come out onto the dirt road by her house. She’d done it before, even though she’d promised not to. Once she came back here and smoked a joint with Jolie Marsh, the only halfway-cool girl she’d met in The Hollows. But Jolie got suspended for cutting last week; now Willow’s mom didn’t want her to hang out with Jolie anymore.

There was one thing about The Hollows that Willow didn’t mind-the silence of the place. She never realized how loud the city was, how noise invaded every element of her consciousness. I can think here , her mother said of The Hollows. She’d get this annoyingly dreamy expression. I can breathe . Willow knew what she meant, though she wouldn’t admit it. She tended to sulk when her mother started going on and on about The Hollows, how pretty, how quaint, how close to nature she felt, how clean the air.

God, Mom. Give me a break. This place is a pit .

Try, Willow. Just try .

The sun drifted behind the clouds, and the golden fingers withdrew. She was left in a milky slate light. The leaves suddenly just looked brown. She felt the unfurling of regret… her stupid mouth in class, her lame apology, and her reckless flight from school. Now there were miles to walk through silence and only trouble waiting for her at the other end.

Then the wash of fear. If the school called her mother, she’d be worried, really worried. Her mom got so upset, her wild writer’s imagination spinning every awful scenario in vivid Technicolor flashes. And that’s the last thing her mom needed right now.

Willow dug her cell phone out of her backpack. But as she was about to dial, she saw that she had no signal. The Hollows was full of random dead zones, places where cell phones mysteriously didn’t work. Jolie had told her it was because there were miles of abandoned iron-mine tunnels beneath the ground. Willow didn’t see why that would be a reason. But what did she know? She strongly suspected that the town itself was trying to keep her isolated and alone, just to torture her, to ratchet up her misery. There wasn’t even a Starbucks.

She shoved the phone into her pocket, knowing that the signal might return at any time, and she picked up her pace. She looked up at the sky and saw three large birds circling overhead. She stopped to stare at them, watching them aloft in the air, wings barely moving. There were things she’d never seen before that she saw here all the time: deer on their expansive property, wild rabbits, blue jays, cardinals, crows. She liked that about The Hollows, too. Of course, these things-the peaceful silence, the wildlife-hardly made up for the rest of it.

While she was staring up, she started to notice something she’d been hearing in the distance for a while. A kind of rhythmic thumping, something so soft and steady it had taken a while to leak into her consciousness. Willow glanced around to determine the origin of the sound, but it seemed to come from the earth, the sky above. She knew there were some properties that backed up against the edge of the Hollows Wood, and sounds carried.

Jolie said that the old-timers called the acres and acres of trees the Black Forest, even though that wasn’t the real name. But the Germans who had settled the town had stories; it was the forest of every fairy tale ever told-filled with witches’ cottages and gingerbread houses and big bad wolves. Apparently the Hollows Wood reminded them of that place. And it was a nickname that stuck.