I really don’t remember much of anything anymore. And people always get frustrated when I say that, but if I asked you about something that happened when you were a kid, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell me every single detail either. People forget that memories are slippery. Slippery like you and your friend’s sweaty grips on your bikes’ handlebars on a hot day during summer break. But you wouldn’t remember that. I’m going to try to explain to help you remember because I want you to understand why we did it.
For starters, we were ten.
And a half. Noah’s birthday was in March and mine was in July. It seems like nothing now, but back then, those months could be the difference between a boy who struggles to reach the kitchen counter and one who gets picked first for basketball every time. Except, I’d known Noah since kindergarten. We had an unspoken rule that we’d always pick each other first if one of us was chosen as team captain.
Fifth grade was the first time we were seated next to one another… most of the time. Noah sometimes got chatty during class, so the teacher would move him away a lot. But he’d always find someone else to talk to wherever she put him. During art class in last period, we’d draw a hundred drafts of characters for the comic book we were going to write someday. And then I’d come over to his house after school so we could finish them.
We never finished any of them.
“Let’s pretend we’re witches!” Noah exclaimed one afternoon. He mounted his chest of toys. He catapulted off it onto the big blue carpet that always made me feel like I was sitting on the sky.
“I thought Mrs. Webber said only girls are witches.” We were learning about the Salem Witch Trials in our history class.
“Why should they have all the fun?” He plunged his hands into the desk drawer and started pulling out bags of pompoms, containers of glitter and cups of googly eyes. “Let’s make some spells.”
“With what?”
“Anything. Oh, I know.” He opened his chest of toys and took out a plastic bowl. “This will be our cauldron. I’m gonna go get some liquid stuff to mix up in it. You try to find some stuff too, Ash.”
I didn’t want to go snooping around Noah’s house without his mom’s permission. But I knew his bathroom pretty well, so I decided to start there. I opened up his medicine cabinet and took out the toothpaste and shampoo. Between the floss and mouthwash, there was a squat orange container. It had numbers and letters all over it that didn’t make sense.
I knew it was pills. My mom had a container of them too. She loved the taste of them. Stark pink candies the color of a bathroom floor tile. She’d eat them before dinner and then get so full she’d pass out for the rest of the night.
Was that what Noah did after I went home in the evening? No. That was ridiculous. He was too energetic all the time. And my mom was sleepy from sunup to sundown. So tired she could barely stand up. So tired she couldn’t drive my sister and I to school or make us breakfast.
Noah came back in. I held the pill bottle as if I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t want to bring up my mom; he’d think I came from a family of freaks. He’d think my mom was a hag compared to his perky mom who drove a minivan and woke up early to cook waffles.
“What’s this stuff?” I asked.
His arms were full of milk and soda and every other liquid he’d found in the fridge. He set them down on the carpet, “Oh, that’s my new medication. It’s supposed to help me sit still and be quiet in class.”
“Is Mrs. Webber making you take them?”
“Well, my mom says she gave her the idea to talk to my doctor about it. She said there’s a lot of other kids who take them too.”
“In our class?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I couldn’t think of anybody in school who looked like my mom did. Then again, my mom had been taking them for a while. I wondered what her teacher had given her the pills for when she was a kid. She didn’t seem very alert. I imagined her teacher telling her that her muscles were too big. She needed pills to make her muscles shrink until she was just skin stretched over bone. She needed pills that made her sweat even when she wasn’t moving. Pills that made her breaths heavy like anchors, so her kids had to check on her when she slept, just in case, according to my older sister, she turned blue.
I really hoped that pills didn’t make Noah like that. He wouldn’t be strong enough to play basketball. He’d be too tired to meet up after school and do stuff like pretend to be witches.
“You’re still going to be able to go skating this Sunday, aren’t you?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “My mom says I only have to take them on schooldays.”
I set the pill bottle back in the cabinet. I couldn’t shake the image from my mind of Noah bent crooked and pale in his desk chair, trying to stay awake. It would be like my mom sitting in class.
“Oh, we need wands!” Noah said.
“Do the Salem witches have wands?”
“I don’t know. But the ones in the Harry Potter movies do. That’s how they cast spells.”
“How are we going to find wands?”
“I think they’re just wood. Like off a tree.”
We went out into Noah’s backyard where the big oak grew. It was autumn and the leaves were falling, taking down as many twigs as they could on their way. I found a stick that was thick at the end and pointy at the top just like in the Harry Potter movies. Noah found a fat branch that he said doubled as a sword too. He never used it as a sword, though; all our fighting was long range, shooting invisible rays of light across the lawn from behind the barricades of Noah’s mom’s hedges. We soon discovered that we could ward off the blackbirds on the grass by running toward them with our wands, and we did that until the sun started to set.
I walked the three blocks home alone, my bookbag stuffed with a dinner of Cheetos and applesauce. I stuck my wand in the hedge before I left so I would know where it was when I came back.
***
Noah had to cancel our trip to the skate park on Sunday because he was exhausted. His mom said he couldn’t sleep the night before. She was supposed to drive us, so I stayed home too. I played some of the apps on my iPad and wondered if Noah’s mom was checking on him in his bedroom to make sure he didn’t turn blue.
On Monday, I was relieved to see Noah in class, wriggling all over his chair and desk like usual. Minutes after we sat down, we had to get up again and load onto the bus. It was field trip day. Noah and I hadn’t been listening when the teacher told us where we were going, which made it all the more mysterious and exciting.
The whole fifth grade student body sang the Phineas and Ferb theme song over and over again on the way there. I didn’t know all the lyrics, but I blurted it out loud and unashamed, trying to get Noah to join in. But his face was pressed up against the window. We pulled into a gravel parking lot next to an old rickety house with a placard outside it.
The inside was too small, so they had to take us in groups. The teachers let the rest of us have a field day outside as long as we didn’t go around the elm tree growing on the hillside. It was an ancient giant with branches reaching toward the ground like it was feeding the squirrels and a mosaic of leaves so massive at least half of them were still unfallen. Noah and I stood near it, longing to simply be in its presence, like priests at an altar. No. Like witches at their bonfire.
“Isn’t there one like this in Harry Potter?” I asked.
Noah looked at me like he was noticing me for the first time today, “What did you say, Ash?”
“Is everything okay? You look tired.”
“Yeah, sorry. I’m really dizzy. I didn’t take my meds over the weekend. Mom says it will be like this until my body gets used to them again.”
I could see the fog behind his eyes. In his mind, he was already asleep. He wasn’t like my mom. She was shorter with her sentences, like every word took effort to get out. But I could see him getting there. He looked a little paler today.
“Do you think I could throw a stick high enough to hit that branch up there?”
“Maybe.” He sat down on the grass and laid his head on his knee. “You should try.”
“You should do it with me.”
“I think I’ll just watch this time.”
“But you can throw it way higher than I can. Come on. I need you to show me how.”
“You don’t need me. It’s just like shooting a basketball.”
“Come on.” I turned in circles, scanning the ground. “Let’s look for more wands. We can have another witch battle.”
Noah didn’t respond. He stared up at the giant elm, like he’d already surrendered the battle.
I climbed up on one of the arms of the elm. It was wide enough for me to plant both feet on. I walked over to Noah, holding out my arms for balance. “We can fight on the tree and hide behind the branches. It’ll be just like-”
“Ashton!”
Mrs. Webber yelled from the front porch of the old house. She stomped over to me with her fists clenched. “I told everyone not to climb that tree.”
“But I was just trying to cheer Noah up-”
“What’s our rule? No excuses. I know you heard me say you aren’t allowed up there.”
Noah looked up at her from where he was sitting on the ground. But her eyes were trained on me. She didn’t even notice him. She didn’t see that something was clearly wrong.
“You need to listen to me on field trips. You’re making our whole class look bad in front of our tour guide.”
She was talking to me like she talked to Noah when he screwed up. Did she even realize it was me? Or was I just another student to her? For all her talk of caring about us, she didn’t even see when something was wrong. I was the only one in this whole school who was trying to protect Noah. And I couldn’t even do anything about the fact that I was losing my friend because I had to bend to this stupid woman who was put in charge for who knows what reason.
I glared at her.
“Don’t you give me that look,” she growled. “If you’re going to have that attitude, then you can go sit on the bus.”
I jumped off the tree with the same glare branded on my face.
It was just me, the driver, the special ed teacher and our one special ed student on the bus. I sat in the very back so no one could see me crying. I kept my head down in case the other kids caught sight of me through the window. Every time I dried my eyes, I thought about our cauldron or Noah’s sword-wand or the hedges we’d used as barricades, and I’d cry all over again. I would’ve kept my wand if I’d known we were never going to hang out again. Now it was stuck there forever in the hedge.
Eventually, I pulled myself together. I peeked through the window and spotted Noah walking out of the old history house with the rest of the kids in his group. His eyes drooped, but he was smiling, probably because of something funny he’d seen in the house. It made him look like his old self. I smiled too, as if to capture that look in a still frame in my head.
I stayed on the bus an hour. When lunchtime came, Mrs. Webber came to drag me out of solitude.
“I don’t know what got into you, Ashton. You’re usually such a nice boy.”
I turned away quickly so she didn’t see my glare this time. She still didn’t understand what was going on. The stupid woman who couldn’t see two feet in front of her. Or maybe she did understand, and she just didn’t care. After all, she’s the one who wanted Noah on pills in the first place.
***
“You’ve been such a good friend to Noah, Ashton.”
Noah’s mom made pigs-in-a-blanket for dinner. I forgot to smile as she dished them out. Noah had been back to his usual self by Tuesday. We were working on designing our own village of witches. An infamous kingdom full of powerful magicians with wands that had unique abilities. This one’s could turn into a chainsaw. This one’s could burst into flames. We were going to write a comic book about it as soon as we figured out a plot. But it was Monday again, and Noah couldn’t take his eyes off the floor. When his mom talked, she only talked to me.
“It’s hard for him to get used to his meds again on Mondays,” she said.
“Yeah.”
Noah only ate a pig and a half. That was another thing my mom did. I rarely saw her eat unless she was stumbling into the kitchen at four in the morning for a snack. I wondered if Noah did this while I was away. Surely, his mom noticed that. Maybe she just didn’t care, like Mrs. Webber. What was wrong with adults?
I ate fast so we could finish up our drawings. His room was messy. Toys and blankets and craft supplies were scattered all over the floor, obscuring the sky-blue carpet. It looked smaller this way. Noah immediately sat down on the bed when he came in.
“Do you want to draw?” I asked.
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”
We knelt on the sheath of junk on his floor. I remember him telling me once that his mom made him clean his room on Sundays before he did anything else. He usually just shoved everything under the bed or in nearby drawers. Noah told me last week that he didn’t finish a single thing he did on Sundays anymore. Or maybe he didn’t clean his room because he couldn’t sleep over the weekend. He probably just laid in bed most of the day like me. I knew how it felt to be filled up over the week, only to be emptied out again at the threshold of your own doorstep.
“If you two get hungry again, there’s snacks in the kitchen,” Noah’s mom said from the doorway.
I glared bullets through her.
She flinched, “What’s with that look? Is something wrong?”
I’d considered telling her about Noah before, but I was worried about what she might do. My older sister, who knew about these things more than me, said that if I ever told anyone about mom’s habits, then the cops would come and take us away from her. I was worried that Noah’s mom might take me away from him. And then there would be no one for either of us.
“Just a little dizzy,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t read too much into an answer like that.
After she was gone, I went into the bathroom to throw out the pills. I had just opened the child’s lock when I realized throwing them out was pointless. His mom could just get more. Or Mrs. Webber could. However the system worked.
Noah and I wore the black, green and red pencils down to stubs drawing witches. He was silent the whole time. I couldn’t focus on what I was doing because I was ripping through my mind for ideas of what to do to stop these adults. I was just a kid. I couldn’t get to school on my own without an adult driving me. There had always been a bus driver or a carpool. Everyone tells you when you’re that age to tell an adult when something’s wrong, but they never tell you what to do when the adults are the problem. We just needed to leave, I thought. To find someplace where there are no adults and live there instead.
I sat back on the game console that was on the floor beneath me – right between a short heap of Star Wars DVDs and a plastic glow-in-the-dark pumpkin leftover from Halloween. How could I ask Noah to leave all this?
I looked over at him. He had drawn a picture of a stumpy witch in a black tunic and pointy hat. He was running over it with a red pencil, shaping a sharp fire that closed around the woman. Her mouth was drawn in a line, angled downward. Nevertheless, she was taking the searing pain of the flames silently. They warped around her until over half the page was burning. The red pencil scratched over her until it was the only color left.
And I remember thinking it had to be tonight.
***
The forest near Noah’s house was as black as the moonless night sky. It made it feel like we were stars in our own cosmos. Two stars far away from this planet.
“We should follow the road to the park,” Noah said. “I’ve always wanted to see what it looks like at night.”
He was leaping over the bramble and jumping up to touch the high branches, but I could tell he was still dizzy because he was tripping over everything and he could barely jump past his own ankles. His heavy breath pulsing in the dark was the loudest thing in my ears. It was cold and our jackets were thin. The freezing air slid across my hot, dry throat and my feet stepped to the beat of Noah’s breath. I’d never been more right about anything in my life. I knew Noah felt the same way.
“I think the road’s up here,” Noah said. He sprinted ahead of me into the dark. I figured we’d meet back up at the road, so I let him go, enjoying the frost on my arid skin. I thought about all the places we could go. Maybe we could just stay here in the cool woods like a black blanket, and we could make friends with animals like Hagrid from Harry Potter.
I saw a flicker out of the corner of my eye. I stopped and jerked around, thinking it was a wildfire. But there was nothing.
Then, I saw it again. The beam of a flashlight slashing through the columns of trees. And a voice behind it saying: “Ashton, is that you?”
It was Noah’s mom’s voice. We weren’t too far from her house. She must’ve spotted us as we were going into the woods. She’d already seen me, so there was no use hiding. I turned and kept walking toward the road.
Maybe I thought she would eventually get tired of trying to get my attention and go home. I can’t remember what I’d been thinking. To this day, that moment is so slick in my grip. I would try to remember it the next morning when the police finally found Noah and I curled up under a bridge on the exit to the neighboring county. I thought about it as I was waiting in the police station for my mom to pick me up, which never happened. I thought about it as a police officer took me home and discovered my mom high on pills. I thought about it as I sat in my bedroom at my new foster home, which I shared with three toddlers who never stopped screaming. I thought about it on that last day of school – the last time I saw Noah before I was moved to a foster home in another county. I would think to myself each time: I should’ve just screamed at her to go away. Or maybe hid. Or fought her. Anything but what happened. Then, she might not have known what direction we were going. Or that I was with Noah.
The truth is that she would’ve tracked me down. She would’ve fought back. She would’ve called the police either way. But to me, when I imagined being back in those woods, I really believed I could’ve saved everything. And that’s because memories are slippery. Slippery like you and your friend riding your bikes on a hot summer day.
“Ashton, where’s Noah?” Noah’s mom yelled. “It’s not safe for you all to be out here by yourselves. Can you hear me? Ashton, stop.” I could hear the dead leaves breaking beneath her as she picked up her pace.
My body tensed. I started walking faster. She kept yelling things at me. I ignored her. Forest, do your thing, I thought. Shroud me. Make me disappear. I could feel her flashlight burning my backside. It was as bright as a headlight in the dark. I could hear her jogging toward me. I caught her in the corner of my eye and broke into a run.
She was screaming my name. She was angry now. I’d never seen Noah’s mom angry before. But it was the only thing she could do now; I was too fast for her. I’d always been the fastest player on the court. If I could outrun boys my age, then I could definitely outrun her. The light receded as I left her in the dust. I could see it flailing between the trees like a monster scorned.
I came to the edge of the road. There were no cars out tonight. Noah was standing across the street behind the guardrail. “What’s the matter?”
I didn’t answer. I vaulted over the guardrail and tackled him to the ground. The shallow ditch on the other side cracked with the shattering of a thousand dead leaves and blades of grass beneath us. Noah seemed to get the memo and stayed down. Years later, I would wonder if he even knew what I was running from. He just trusted me that much.
I could see the flashlight scorching the air above our heads. We sat there, holding ourselves stiff and silent. Just two witches laying there in the tall, dry grass.
Teagan Fowlkes is a Kentucky fiction writer and poet. She has been previously published in The Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, The White Squirrel, and Eunoia Review. She is currently studying for her Bachelor’s in Social Work at the University of Louisville.
Instagram: @teaganfowlkes