shirt. He could see his own hand, slicing at the flesh on Shane’s face as he grabbed hold of the lip of skin and started to peel…
“Come on guys,” Scott said, interrupting his thoughts.
“You standing up for Liberace here,” Shane said, preparing to step even further forward to bump Matt in the chest with his own. “Just because you…”
He stopped mid-sentence as Jeremy grabbed him by the arm. Shane whirled and fired him a look, and with a slight nod, turned back to Matt with a smirk.
“You know,” Shane said, taking a step back and throwing his arms out to his sides. “This has gotten a little out of hand. We all used to be friends here. Maybe we should, you know…”
“Let bygones be bygones,” Jeremy added, stamping the yellowed butt of his smoke beneath his heel. “I’d say it’s been long enough.”
“What are you talking about?” Brian interrupted. “Dude’s a pillow bit—”
Shane shot him an icy glare, and his words dropped. He just stared down at his snow-covered hightops.
“Jeremy’s right,” Shane said, a forced, toothy grin crossing his face beneath his lowered brow. “It’s been long enough.”
“Can I talk to you guys?” Scott asked quietly. He stared suspiciously at them, a puzzled look etched into his face.
“Don’t sweat it, Scott,” Shane said, his attempt at a pleasant, reassuring glance looking more like the wild-eyed stare of the deranged.
“What we need,” Jeremy said, stepping up, “is someplace private, where we can all just sit down and talk this through. I think enough time has passed that we should all just be able to put this behind us and move on.”
He gave Shane a quick glance, and the two smiled in unison.
“Really?” Scott said, carefully studying them, attempting to verify their intent.
“Oh, yeah,” Shane said, nodding. “After all, we’re going to graduate soon and then all go our separate ways. Why not make the last six months as easy on all of us as possible, and why not try to have some fun in the process?”
“Sounds good,” Matt said, his eyes thinned to slivers, his grin unflinching. “Let’s meet today, get this thing settled once and for all.”
Immensely pleased with themselves, Shane and Jeremy beamed. Tim and Brian looked at each other, definitely out of the loop on this one, but they were willing to go along with whatever, so they just leaned back against the wall and lit up another smoke.
The first bell rang painfully above their heads, echoing around them in the small cement cove. Tim and Brian turned and walked around the corner, heading around the buildings on their way to class so that they could finish their smokes along the way.
“How about we meet at Solstice around eight,” Matt said, staring through Shane and Jeremy, one at a time.
“That old abandoned house out by the convent? Sounds like a great place to meet,” Shane said, turning to Jeremy. “Sound good to you?”
“Perfect,” Jeremy said, his grin widening. He nodded slowly. “Perfect.”
“Eight o’clock then,” Matt said, whirling and opening the door.
He could see Scott’s reflection in the window in the middle of the door, staring quizzically at the other two.
Walking back down the hall, Matt shouldered through the clusters of students lazily lingering outside of their classrooms trying to take advantage of the last three minutes remaining before the start of the school day. Matt just walked by, refusing to acknowledge their presence with a single glance as he turned and ascended the staircase, bursting through the door into the courtyard. He walked straight through the thinning herds of students. There were only a couple of long-haired hoods in the smoking circle, finishing off the last of their butt as they lamented the start of yet another punitive school day.
Yanking open the door at the end of the yard, he walked straight to his locker and opened it, producing his backpack from within. Slinging it over his shoulder, he strutted straight toward the front doors of the building, tugging the zipper on his black leather jacket down. He turned backward into the door, pressing the bar with his rear end to open it.
“Where do you think you’re going, Mr. Parker?” the principal said, rounding the corner and staring at Matt, his hand on his hip.
Matt shook his head and popped the door open with a thrust of his hips. He placed three fingers above his right brow and saluted as he ducked out the front door and into the blowing snow, the wind threatening to rip his cap straight off of his head.
“Matthew Parker,” the principal snapped, following him out the door, his graying hair blowing straight up in the wind, the snow sticking to his thick gray mustache. “You get back here right now!”
Matt kept on walking, straight through the small, half-circle parking lot in front of the school reserved for the administration’s parking. He stepped up onto the snow-covered sidewalk and strode directly toward the long wall of evergreens close to a hundred yards dead ahead.
“I’m going to have to call your parents!” the principal raged after him into the storm.
Matt smiled and shook his head before bounding off the sidewalk and into the thick, uneven buffalo grass buried beneath six inches of snow, which covered his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans. Finding a small break in the line of foliage, he slipped past the sharp needles and onto a thin path that wound through the foothills, rising and falling as it made its way through Woodmen Valley.
He was getting to know this path like the back of his hand. Whenever things started to get really tough at school, to the point where he could no longer bear the thought of another second within those pale white walls, he just wrote a letter of excuse from his mother and split. He had learned to duplicate her handwriting faultlessly, and those letters had gotten him out of many days, especially recently. And as he had no car and was in the middle of the Air Force Academy, he had been forced to learn his own route home.
The woods were thick, pines and other evergreens pressing against one another, darkening the floor beneath, save for the small gaps of light that filtered through the canopy where the skeletal aspens broke the thick green of the walls of needles. The Rocky Mountains loomed over the tips of the trees directly to the right, the winding path heading straight up a steep, muddy slope.
He recognized this spot. His first time walking this route he had tripped and fallen straight down the hill, the books in his backpack jamming into his ribs from behind as he landed in a twisted pile of humanity at the bottom. Learning from the experience, he had figured out a pattern to the tree trunks, allowing him to brace his feet on one to leap to the other.
Reaching the crest of the hill, he stared down into the small valley below. There was a stream in the very bottom; the surface all but frozen solid, hiding the thin line of water trickling beneath. He was halfway there now; just one more large hill to surpass and he would be there, in the next valley beyond. It was this spot where the Air Force property met with the private landowners beyond. Cadets used this path to slip off of the Academy at night when they couldn’t secure passes, showing up at high school parties and hitting on everything in a skirt. At first it was more than annoying, these older guys showing up from out of nowhere and stealing their dates and what not. But he could understand the allure. An older, college aged, brawny-type guy had to be awfully appealing to a sixteen or seventeen year old girl whose other options consisted of a bunch of scrawny high school kids who drank Keystone straight from the tap, smoking pot from a crumpled tin can. But he hated them. Half of the girls in his school were wearing engagement rings their senior year, most of them destined for heartbreak after they graduated and found out that their rings were nothing more than a tool used by horny Cadets to get what they wanted.
Standing atop the jagged formation of rocks on the summit of the hill, Matt stared down into Woodmen Valley. The wind hummed from the mountains above, the snow blowing straight to his left as it raced down the slope. A white, sparkling layer of snow covered the pastures below, the road invisible in the middle. Off to his left, a small cluster of houses sat in the middle of the woods atop the hill, enormous piles of dirt every quarter mile or so as developers dug holes for foundations. Before long, the whole valley would be full of houses.
At the bottom of the hill, cradled beneath a cluster of trees, an abandoned white house beckoned to him.
