Forever True

Life at the Quileute reservation in La Push, Washington, had it’s share of excitement. I mean, sure, we were just a bunch of Native Americans living in mostly peace, existing only to breathe in the salty sea air and the scent of the pine trees located all around us. Cliff diving was a regular sport around here, and bored teenagers always seemed to find something risky to excel at.

“I don’t know why you even bother to come by here, Jacob Black! You’re completely different now, and I’m not enjoying the change!”

“Not enjoying the change? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Arguing was one of those risky things that I took part in frequently.

“You’re a total jerk since you started hanging out with Sam Uley and his… I don’t know, his… gang!”

“Gang? It’s not a gang, Leona! I don’t even enjoy it much, okay, so at least you know I’m miserable!”

“Then why do you even hang out with him?”

Surprisingly, it was silent for a moment. “Sometimes, people don’t have a choice.”

And he was walking down my steps, down the front walk to the sidewalk, hands stuffed in his pockets, long hair stuffed under the hood on his gray sweatshirt. What the hell did he mean by not having a choice?

As I closed the front door of my country-style home (why we had a country-style home in the middle of an Quileute reservation La Push, Washington was beyond me), I found worry gathering in the pit of my stomach.

But maybe, before I go on, I should explain a few things.

My name’s Leona, I’m sixteen and I go to QTS (Quileute Tribal School) as a junior. I’m full-blooded Quileute Indian, and it shows by my light russet skin and dark, near-black hair that flows, perfectly straight, to the middle of my back. I’m not very tall, 5’5, but the people around me make me look extremely short, especially the guys. I guess you could call me pretty, a lot of people do, but I’m as comfortable in my own skin as the next sixteen-year-old girl. A lot of people really like my eyes, since I’m the only blue-eyed girl on the reservation, so I guess that makes me pretty in their eyes.

Anyway, I’ve been friends with Jacob Black since birth. We live across the street from each other and always have. Our dads were friends before we were born, so automatically we were as well. We were at each other’s houses nearly every day, whether we wanted to be or not, but recently, Jacob got “sick,” as his father Billy put it.

Needless to say I was worried, so I cooked up some chicken soup and decided to take it over and just pop in to say hi. When I went over, Billy yelled at me to leave. Now, Billy wasn’t the type to yell, not even at Jacob. He expressed disapproval or anger in a calm, reasonable way. This time, calm and reasonable was most definitely not the method of choice.

The plastic container of soup fell from my hand, breaking open upon collision with the cement porch inside the paper sack I carried it in, and I never went back.

After Jacob “got better,” he came to see me. Why, I don’t know, because he had his pet, Bella, the girl he loved quite a lot, over all the time. I was just another Quileute girl, and Bella was something spectacular, apparently. I hadn’t met her, so I didn’t know. I’m sure she didn’t know I existed, so it was just an overall bad situation.

He was on edge the entire time when he came over that evening, squeezing his hands into tight, white-knuckled fists. He was tall. Very, very tall. He’d had an unnaturally fast growth spurt, and I wondered how it was even possible. Even though it was the middle of January (extremely cold and rainy in the Olympic Peninsula), he was only wearing khaki shorts and a white t-shirt, his feet bare. When he spoke, he sounded different, older, his voice deep and rough. The things he said were no longer funny, and he didn’t intend them to be. He didn’t smile once for his entire visit, and he turned down anything I offered him. He seemed incredibly tense. Soon, it was just the sound of the ticking grandfather clock and the crickets outside, the occasional chirp from my parakeet, Blueberry, in her cage in the corner.

Jacob’s deep, rough voice broke the quiet. “I can see that this isn’t going to go the way I planned. Bye, Leona.”

And he was out the front door before I could respond, which is when I chased after him and the previous argument took place. I probably shouldn’t have let it upset me the way I did, but I ran up to my room and cried for a good hour. I suppose it was stupid to react that way, but hell, Jacob was not the Jacob I knew him as. I knew he wasn’t just in some kind of a funk. This was a change, a change that wasn’t going to go away, and if it did, it wouldn’t be soon.

So I childishly avoided Jacob for a couple of weeks, darting quickly past when I saw him and hiding behind my locker door the rest of the time. Of course, any time he couldn’t look directly at me I found myself looking at him, and eventually someone would talk to me and I’d snap out of it.

On Monday of the third week, Jacob came to school with a haircut. He’d had long hair, a few inches past his shoulders, and now it was all gone, cropped short. Not to say he wasn’t still handsome, but it was just different. He’d always had long hair, even when we were little kids. The Jacob I knew wouldn’t have cut it. His hair was something he liked a lot, too much to just lop it all off so short.

No one knew what was up with him. Unfortunately, I didn’t know Quil or Embry too well, let alone Sam Uley, who seemed to be his new group of friends, along with a few other guys that I didn’t really recognize, so I couldn’t ask any of them. They’d changed him, and I didn’t like it.

And so began my pitiful downward spiral. Losing your best friend does that to you. I’d always written poetry, hopeful, happy poetry about love and other beautiful things. I stopped. I didn’t talk much in class, let alone outside of it. My bird was usually the only company I liked.

After that, I got to be like Jacob had been when he visited me- cold and hardened. The love I’d had was disintegrating slowly. I just did my school work and spent the rest of my time at the river, watching it and thinking about everything. My friends stopped calling after a while, stopped talking to me at school.
Then Jacob came over again.