“So, your name is actually Webster?”533Please respect copyright.PENANAe01eydnKVl
“My last name, correct.”
“As in--”
“Merriam Webster, yes. Except that Merriam Webster isn’t actually an existing individual, at least as far as I’m aware. I’m named after Noah Webster. Merriam, as in the dictionary, comes from George Merriam, who purchased the rights to Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1843.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.” I said, unsure of what else to say.
“No one does,” Webster sighed. His driving seemed to have improved quite a bit now that we weren’t on our way to prevent a murder (probably). Caroline had her elbow propped up against the door where the metal met the glass, chin in her hand, and just stared out at the passing buildings without saying anything. I guess I couldn’t blame her, seeing as her boyfriend--ex?--had just been caught cheating, and in the worst way possible. Webster glanced her way a few times but didn’t say anything, so I supposed we weren’t going to talk about it. Not with me present, anyway. We hung a right off of Main Street and Webster eased the car into a space between two huge trucks right in front of the 50’s style diner Marcy had pointed out the day before. “C’mon, Caroline. We’re gonna go get some waffles.”
I was surprised at his sudden lack of advanced vocabulary, but decided now probably wasn’t the best time to make a comment. Caroline groaned and slumped against the door. “Not now, Webs. I’ve got sorrow to wallow in.”
“Nick is idiot of proportions only the waffles at Miller’s Diner could ever possibly counter,” Webster said confidently. I thought for a moment that Caroline was going to object, that she was going to defend her clearly unfaithful boyfriend--ex, or whatever-- but she made no attempt.
“Not today, Webs. Just take me down to the bridge.”
“You sure?” Webster glanced back at me and I realized that whatever or wherever “the bridge” was, it must have just been between them. It felt wrong to intrude upon their secret, especially after having clumsily stumbled upon such an ugly scene for Caroline. I was about to suggest that they just drop me off somewhere in town, but Caroline spoke first.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I need to wash the old Gorham filth off my brain.”
Webster nodded and hung a rather unceremonious right onto the same street I had come down that morning. He passed the diner, the library, and eventually John and Marcy’s house, where I imagined my cigarettes lying hidden beneath a pile of clothes. A little ways up the road the pavement gave way to dirt and we passed a ramshackle mobile home painted violently periwinkle, before curving to the left and drawing nearer to the trees that flanked the creek on its never ending march through the dusty annals of nowhere. The road ended rather abruptly and Webster killed the engine on a flattened patch of grass. “You up for a hike, Adam Ellis?”
“I guess.”
We extracted ourselves from the vehicle, me taking extra caution not to tangle myself in the front seat belt. It is, however, impossible to gracefully remove oneself from the backseat of a Geo Metro, especially when one is built like a stork, so I ended up flat on my ass anyway. The corners of Caroline’s mouth twitched upward just a touch, and I felt my face flush, unsure of whether to be embarrassed or happy that my incurable clumsiness could be of some amusement to her. I tried to smoothly brush dried grass and dust off my jeans and shirt as Webster led the way down what I could now see was a hidden but well-worn little dirt trail that wound straight in the direction of the water.
As the land began sloping violently downward the track disappeared between the trees. Webster paid no mind and pushed through the brush, Caroline and I close behind. I fought off stiff leafy branches from all around me, eyes fixated on the back of Caroline’s bright blue tank top, trying not to lose myself in the suffocating press of the trees and the sour smell of stagnant water. Finally we burst through to the other side, where I was somewhat surprised to discover that there was no bridge in sight, just a swampy patch of half-submerged mud and grass punctuated by several busted up plastic lawn chairs and a few cigarette butts, which Caroline immediately set about collecting.
“This is where the stoners--like, all four of them--hang out,” Webster said, reading my expression. “Our spot is a little further down.” He gestured further down the bank, where the grass receded into a gravel bar that wound itself around a corner. He perched himself on the edge of one of the lawn chairs and began unlacing his shoes. It took me a moment to realize what we were about to do. I sighed and began untying the laces to my own grey tennis shoes, too curious to protest getting my feet yet. Caroline pocketed all the cigarette butts she had collected and wandered over to the water's edge, dunking one flip-flopped foot in to test the water before hopping in with enough of a splash to make Webster complain as he stuffed his tube socks in the pockets of his cargo shorts and followed her in.
With my shoes and socks tucked under my arm, I made my way over to them and stuck my foot into the water, only to yank it back out with a gasp. In the muggy soup of air that seemed to fill my lungs like hot sludge, the water remained ice cold. I couldn’t decide if the feeling was better or worse, but I had no time to make up my mind because I didn’t want to get left behind. I rolled my jeans up to mid-shin and hopped in with both feet, ignoring the goosebumps that shot up my spine nearly instantly.
The sweat on my legs and back felt strangely out of place as I carefully waded my way after Caroline and Webster, who disappeared around the corner with much more sure footing than I had myself. By the time I rounded the bend, I had already managed to step right into a hole between two large rocks and soak my pants leg up all the way yo my thigh. The two of them were nowhere to be seen, so I waded around the next bend as well, unsure of what to expect.
The bridge was impossible to miss, not just because it spanned the water as the creek widened and deepened ahead, but because of its strange presence on an otherwise unmarked scene of natural beauty, a grey-green scar on an otherwise unbroken wash of vibrant yellows and deep greens. Other than seeming horribly misplaced (there was no road or path on either side, just dense bushes and trees) there wasn’t much that was remarkable about it other than a sloped roof that sat squat atop the structure like an ugly, greedy vulture. Vines and branches seemed to stretch out across the roof and bind the rotting shingles to the surrounding landscape, claiming it as nature’s own. I absently rubbed the watch tan on my left wrist and rolled up my jeans a little more before wading forward and carefully hauling myself up onto the weathered planks next to where Caroline and Webster were dangling their feet above the water.
It’s just a bridge, I told myself as I deposited my shoes and socks and leaned back against a thick vertical beam. Who cares about a bridge?
“What a crappy start to a crappy summer,” Caroline was saying as she dropped pebbles idly down into the water. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“You say that every five minutes,” Webster said with a somewhat annoyed look on his face. “We’ve still got a whole year left, anyway.”
“According to whom?” She cocked an eyebrow at him and the corner of her mouth twitched up, as if accepting a challenge.
“Ah, c’mon, you’re not just going to up and leave when you have one year of high school left!” Webster said, but his voice faltered as if that were exactly the kind of thing Caroline Wilder would do. I watched them, fascinated, feeling like I were invisible and watching something I might not have supposed to have been. “What about school, huh? What about college? What about--”
“Don’t say it!” Caroline warned, mouth tightening.
“--Your sister?” He finished, looking sheepish.
Caroline groaned and flopped back on the deck. Webster gave me an “oh, shit” face and we lapsed into silence. I had no idea what the deal was with her sister, but I had a creeping feeling the subject was one that was generally avoided. Back home, Dan Peterson’s five year-old brother had Autism, which sometimes meant spending time at his house was tense and awkward because their mom was stressed out all the time. It was kind of horrible of us, but sometimes the rest of us would pretend to be busy if he invited us over, or we would immediately suggest doing something else. It wasn’t the kid’s fault, it just made it hard to goof off with something like that looming over you. I wondered if it was something like that.
“What about Nick?” Webster said softly; it sort of seemed like he was an expert at picking the wrong thing to say. “Someone’s gotta kick his ass for being an insufferable douche, and you hit way harder than me.”
“I guess,” Caroline said, giving him a cursory smile. “I can’t believe that he… ugh! I can’t believe I didn’t know about it until now. Three weeks, Webs! Can you believe it? He’s been messing around with Slutface over there for almost a whole freaking month!”
“I’m sorry,” Webster said with genuine sadness, tossing a stick down into the water. We all watched it float away. “You’re too good for him anyway.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Caroline mumbled, and we drifted into that kind of silence that I knew so well from Grandpa’s hospital room, the kind where everyone knows there’s something horrible in the middle of the room but no one knows what to say about it. Or maybe someone does know what to say, but nothing could really make it better anyway, so everyone just shuts up and suffers through it. We stayed like that for several minutes, until Carilne shifted suddenly and said my name. “Adam Ellis.”
I blinked, startled out of my thoughts by Caroline’s voice just inches from my face. She had parked herself on the right above mine, perched over me with the lithe gracefulness of a cat, peering down at me with a curious expression. I felt my heart jump a little and I instinctively leaned back, feeling a little bit like prey.
“What?”
“You’re from a big city, aren’t you?” She asked. She didn’t take her eyes off me, and I couldn’t seem to look away.
“Columbus,” I answered blandly. “It’s not exactly Los Angeles.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” She said with a touch of malace. Webster laughed as if L.A. was something of an inside joke to them. “You know where I want to go, if I couldever get the hell out of this dump?”
I wasn’t sure if she actually wanted me to say anything or not, but her pause seemed to be taking forever, so I asked “Where?”
“New York City,” she said, a wide grin spreading across her face. “I’ve been thinking about it since you said something about it last night. Sounds like exactly the sort of place a girl like me should go.”
“There’s about eight-and-a-half million people living in New York City,” Webster said, which I assumed was true because he didn’t seem to be the type to make up facts. “It would be easy to get lost in a place like that.”
“Perfect,” Caroline chirped, rolling onto her back as if she spent plenty of her time perched on that beam on this bridge, which I’m sure she had. “It seems like the perfect place to knock off some of my bucket list.”
“What, like sky-diving and bungee jumping and stuff?” I asked automatically. With a pang of sadness hard enough to make my stomach twist, I remembered that my grandpa had something of a bucket list. He loved fishing, but he only ever took a fish home if it were a catfish, which Grandma would begrudgingly fry up for him southern style like he had grown up with in eastern Texas. He told story after story of hauling out huge cats deep in the summer night, monster channels and blues. He always talked about taking me on a summer fishing trip to Florida where we could fish for the only catfish he hadn’t yet caught, the white bullhead. Talk of catching a white catfish decreased to almost nothing after Grandma died, though, and he never made it down to Florida before the cancer become too severe to ignore. I stared down into the water and tried not to think about it, but I wondered if there were any catfish in this muddy old creek.
“Oh, my bucket list is far less exciting than that,” she said evenly, picking a few splinters off of the bottom of her beam with unpainted fingernails and tossing them down into the water. I watched her slender fingers with fascination, wondering if she played piano or anything. “It’s not a list of things to do, it’s a list of words.”
“Sounds like something Webster could help you with,” I said casually, eyes following the little bits of wood as they spun down past me.
“Someone,” Caroline put a lot of emphasis on the word, “doesn’t want to help me with my little personal project.”
“Come on,” Webster groaned. “I have a crap-ton of work to get done this summer, my Princeton essay isn’t going to write itself and Stanford wants all this community service BS that I have no time for, since the restaurant doesn’t count.”
“Restaurant?” I asked
“Webs’ parents own the only Chinese food place in town,” Caroline answered before he had a chance. “That’s kind of understating the fact that it’s the only actual sit-down restaurant in Gorham.”
“Alright, just get the stereotypical Asian-nerd-works-at-his-parents’-store comments out of the way now,” he grumbled, looking rather sour about it.
“No, I actually think that’s pretty cool, to be honest,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “Is the food good?”
Webster gestured up to Caroline. “She’d have to tell you. I’m completely burnt out on Chinese food.”
“It’s, ahem, uh, it’s interesting,” Caroline said, shifting in her seat. “The normal stuff is good, sesame chicken and fried rice and stuff. The, um, other part of the menu is--”
“--Horrible, I know,” Webster cut in with a short laugh. “I’ve been telling my dad for years that making a fried-duck and watercress burger doesn’t make your food American, it just makes it weird. He won’t listen to me though, imagine that.”
“Speaking of which, how’d you manage to get the day off?” Caroline asked cocking her head at him.
“I have you to thank for that, actually,” he laughed. “When I told my mom I was going to the library she assumed it was to write that stupid essay, so she made my dad give me the day off. I should actually probably get back home soon, or they’ll start wondering about me. It sucks having them breathe down my neck all the time, it would be nice to find a freakin’ break from them.”
“Everybody is looking for something they can’t have, huh Webs?” Caroline said with a grin as she hopped down from her perch.
“That’s the truth,” I said mostly to myself, thoughts flashing back to the deli owner I had talked to in Birmingham.
“Is that right, Adam Ellis?” Caroline said with something of a mischievous smirk as she turned back to me. “What oh-so-unattainable thing might you be looking for?”
“A decent pack of cigarettes,” I said without thinking about it. My answer was met with laughs from both of them as Webster gathered his shoes and socks and we dropped back down into the icy water so we could make our way back up to the car. Webster offered to drop us off back at the library, to which Caroline declined and asked him to let us out on the road near John and Marcy’s house. I remembered how she had materialized from the darkness behind their home the night before and realized that she must have lived close by, or as close by as you can get in the middle of nowhere. She and I stood somewhat awkwardly side by side as we watched Webster’s little red Metro speed off toward town.
“He’s a great kid,” Caroline said with a shake of her head, “ but he just doesn’t get it sometimes.”
“Get what?” I asked, tugging at the neck of my t-shirt self-consciously and wishing the human body weren’t so susceptible to sweating all over the place, especially when one was in the presence of a girl.
“A lot of things, if I’m going to be perfectly honest,” she said, glancing at me and making a face. It was the first time we were close enough for me to really see those big hazel eyes I remembered so well, even though it had been dark when I head first seen them. They came down a little at the corners, making them look sad like they might have seen terrible things. That was the thing, I realized, about looking at someone in the eyes; you couldn’t really tell what someone had gone through just by looking at them, but you could always see sadness in someone’s eyes. I wondered if my eyes looked sad. Maybe I was crazy and you couldn’t see anything in someone else’s eyes except for maybe a little bit of your reflection. “You know, Adam Ellis, that’s why I picked you.”
“Picked me?” I repeated, taken aback. “What are you talking about?”
“I want you to help me finish my bucket list,” she said, as if it weren’t an option. “Webs is too worried about stuff--you know, all those those reasons he said I can’t leave--to help me. Which is fine, really, ‘casue I don’t want to hold him back. I think I’m always holding him back a little... he deserves better, really.” She gave me a sad smile and I realized I might be hearing everything Caroline Wilder wanted to say but couldn’t, not to Webster at least.
“Why me?” Was all I asked, a question I had found myself asking more and more over the last three months.
“Because you already helped me with one of my items--or words, I guess--last night,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What word is that?” I asked, feeling a little uncomfortable with being on the spot like this.
Caroline smiled, eyes turning up at the corners and driving the sadness back for just a split second. “Sonder.”
“Sonder?” I racked my brain but I couldn’t remember seeing it on a vocabulary sheet anywhere. “What does that mean?”
“Sonder, Adam Ellis, is the sobering realization that everyone around us is living their own lives as the main character, so to speak.” She said leaning back on an old wooden fencepost and tossing her hair over her shoulder. “It’s when you remember that you’re not the only one with hopes, dreams, fears, wishes, troubles, and all that stuff that makes us all human, you know? It’s quite a strange feeling, realizing that you’re only the protagonist of your own story, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” I said with a frown, kind of getting what she meant but mostly not. It was far too hot for my brain to be wrapping itself around the questions of existentialism, even if it was with the attractive girl with the bright green toenails. “How on earth did I help you with that?” I wondered out loud.
“You just... told me, I guess.” She said with a shrug. “Anyone wandering around in the dark chain smoking shitty cigarettes with a book of poems under their arm has got to be at least as interesting as me, right?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said, kicking a little grey rock into the grass with the tip of my shoe.
“Good,” She said, pushing herself off from the fence post and beginning to walk backwards, up the road we had just taken out of town. “I like surprises.”
The way I saw it, I had no choice in the matter. Caroline Wilder was that element of rogue abandon that seemed so painfully absent back home in Ohio, where we played the same video games, drank the same soda, and complained about the same old crap day in and day out. Caroline was interesting, to say the absolute least, and she pricked a curiosity in me that I hadn’t really known I had. Life at home was so… ordinary, and those hazel eyes seemed to be teasing me with the promise of something fantastic if I was willing to take the risk. I had never helped someone fulfil a bucket list before; I had never even known a kid who had a bucket list, actually
“Wait,” I called out, taking a couple steps toward her. She just kept walking backward. “Aren’t you supposed to start a bucket list when you know you’re dying, or something?”
“We’re all dying, Adam Ellis,” she called back with a wan grin, stopping in her tracks. “In some capacity or another.”
“Fine,” I said, after deciding in that moment that, fuck it all, I would at least spend this summer doing something interesting for once. “I’ll help you with your list, I guess, but you can’t get me in too much trouble.”
“I can’t promise that!” she replied with a wide smile.533Please respect copyright.PENANA2bjJoqZUAv
“I’m serious,” I said somberly. “John and Marcy are really nice, and my parents would absolutely dismember me if they had to pick me up at the police station.”
Oh, alright!” She said, rolling her eyes and cocking a hand on her hip. “I’ll try not to get us arrested. You should know, Adam Ellis, that trouble and I go hand in hand!”
“I had a feeling,” I said, more to myself than to her. She just laughed.
“Hey, I’ve got another word I need to knock out tonight. Come meet me at that tree down by the river after dark!”
“Okay,” I called, a little unsure. I remembered suddenly why I was supposed to be meeting her on this day in the first place. “Hold on, what about Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“Sure, you can bring him too, if you want!” She laughed as she turned and took off up the road a a steady jog, leaving me wondering how one is supposed to use a dead poet to help a girl you barely know figure through a list of words before she dies, in one capacity or another.533Please respect copyright.PENANAn8pRlJtITF