Winger

Anyway, I thought maybe she’d notice that I’d been lifting weights over the summer, that I was taller, that I really wasn’t a little boy.

Yeah, right.

Just before the summit, the trees gave way to nothing but scrub brush and grasses, and the trail wound around the point of the mountain. I was almost to the top when Annie rounded the corner in front of me on her way down. And I could tell I startled her, too; that she wasn’t expecting to run into anyone up here. She tensed and froze up when she saw me, but I could see her shoulders relax when she realized it was just me.

I put my head down and kept running, only stopping when I came up right next to her.

“I thought you couldn’t run today,” she said.

“I finished early. I had some energy. I didn’t think you’d come up here.” It wasn’t really a lie, but then I added, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh. No big deal,” she said. Then she started running, going downhill again. Without me.

“See ya, West.”

“Hey, wait!”

She stopped about twenty feet down the trail.

“Did you go to the top?”

She gave me a “duh” look, hands on her hips.

“Well, could you see the ocean?”

“Yeah. It’s really clear today.”

“You want to go back up?” I asked.

“No,” she said, so matter-of-factly, like she was singing a song in grade school, like nothing at all mattered to her. The way she always sounded. “I’m going back.”

I quickly calculated my alternatives. If I just stopped there, turned around, and followed along with her, that would make me look pathetic and wimpy. And, after all, she was the one who told me just this morning that I was going to have to get tough this year. I said the same thing to myself, even if I had serious doubts about my ability to pull off the transition from little boy to something else, something less insignificant—if “less insignificant” is actually a combination of descriptors that doesn’t cause some kind of literary black hole. Plan B meant sprinting like hell to the top, taking a quick three-sixty just so I could say I saw the ocean too, then running like hell again back down the trail to catch up to her before she got to Stonehenge. That would work, but I’d have to burn it, because Annie was a damn fast runner, and I had this feeling that she was going to try to not let me catch up to her.

So I took off for Buzzard’s Roost as fast as I could. My legs burned, but I had to get even with her somehow, to try and salvage the last day of summer, and the last wimpy shreds of my little-boy ego.

There.

I made it to the top. I was dizzy and dripping with sweat. My hair lay plastered, flat and dark against my scalp, and when I rubbed it, a misty spray of soothing droplets rained down on me. I lifted my arms to let the faint breeze blow a cooling breath under my arms and across my aching ribs. I looked down at the school, the narrow black strip of lake that cut a gash through the dark green points of the trees, and turned around to see where the sky faded down to a grainy fog-gray over the distant line of the Pacific.

Did it. I took off back down the trail after Annie as fast as I could.

I almost fell three times sprinting down that trail when my feet shot out in front of me, rolling over loose rocks. But after I came around the corner of the final switchback, before the trail flattened out through the forest, I saw Annie ahead of me.

And part of me wanted to just stay back and watch her, seeing her legs and arms move so smoothly while her black hair swung from shoulder to shoulder like a pendulum. She was one of those girls who never seemed to sweat. Everything about Annie Altman was perfection.

The shade beneath the pines was cool and fresh, and the air smelled like summer and freedom, the smell of never having to go home.

“Hey!” I called out.

She turned back, looking over her tan shoulder as her hair brushed across the line of her jaw. I couldn’t tell if she smiled, but she did slow down to a jog so I could catch up to her.

“You’re hard to catch,” I said between gasps.

“Did you go to the top?”

“Yeah. It was awesome.” We slowed our pace even more. “Look, Annie, I’m sorry about not running with you. I was mad, I guess.”

“I know,” she said. “You think I couldn’t tell?”

“It’s nothing.” And then I told a major lie. “I’m just mad about being in O-Hall. Away from my friends.”

Our eyes met. She had that same look she had in her picture, like she knew the truth.

“You know what we’re going to do this year?” Annie said, and my heart just about stopped cold, because I was really scared she was going to say something, well . . . scary. “I’m going to find you a girlfriend.”

I stopped running, and Annie took about three more strides and stopped too, but she kept on talking. “What freshman girl wouldn’t just die to go out with you? I mean, it’s the best of both worlds: You’re the same age, plus you’re an upperclassman and a varsity rugby player. Don’t worry, West, I’ll find you the best one.”

“What if I don’t want a girlfriend?” I said.

Then she got this smirky look and said, “You want a boyfriend?”

And I know she was just teasing me, but I turned away and walked off the path and into the trees.

I heard her following. “Come on, West. Don’t get all I-can’t-take-a-joke on me. I’m just looking out for you.”

“Don’t do me any favors, Annie.”

I stopped, knee deep in ferns, sweating, at the edge of the circle of stones.

“Hey, it’s still here,” she said.

“I looked for it on the way up.”

I wouldn’t look at her. I was still mad. But I felt her heat; she was standing so close to me.

Stonehenge wasn’t much like Stonehenge. The rocks were small enough to position with just the four of us working on it. Sure, some of the outer rocks were fairly heavy—they were the ones stacked in threes, a ring of doorways like the monument on Salisbury Plain—but it wasn’t, like, an amazing feat of engineering to get them there. It was more a feat of boredom last spring as we all got ready to go off in separate directions for a break from school.

In the middle of the circle was a spiral path; two lines of evenly spaced smaller stones that wound around and around, coiling in on themselves until the path ended right in the center of the ring. That was the part of our Stonehenge that took the longest time to create. We started in the center and worked our way out, and when we finished, I think the path might have been a quarter-mile long if you could stretch it out straight.

Annie proclaimed it a wishing circle and told us if you walked it all the way in and then all the way out without saying anything, you’d get your wish. Of course I knew she had just made that up, because I’d only ever wished for one thing whenever I walked in and out on that path, and that one thing never came true.

“I don’t want you to do it, Annie,” I said. “I don’t want you to look for a girlfriend for me.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, shrugging. “I was just trying to help.”

“Like you said, things are going to be different this year. But I’m going to do it for myself.”

“Okay.”

We stood at the opening to the spiral path.

“You want to do it?” she said.

You know, there have been times when I would have just about cut a finger off to hear Annie, or any girl for that matter, but especially Annie, ask me that question. Do you want to do it? Of course I