Time Lifts the Light

It didn't take long for my embarrassment to turn into horror. I'd essentially done more damage by running away than I would have if I'd just stuck it out. I could have said something, tried to make a joke out of it. It was an honest mistake, really. Why couldn't I have just laughed it off?

I groaned and curled up in my bed, pressing my forehead into my knees. I groaned louder: oh God, I'd forgotten to shave. The prickly hairs scratched at my skin and I wondered if I'd ever get to sleep. I also wondered (with a hint of idle cruelty) if I'd had something in my nose or teeth as well.

I pictured how strange I probably looked as I bolted away from D.B.'s car. He must be so confused right now. I thought about calling him maybe twenty times, just to explain what had happened, but decided that would probably be much weirder. Maybe he wasn't confused. Maybe he had forgotten all about it by now and my calling him would just make me seem overly sensitive and neurotic and okay, I'm dwelling on this too much.

I eventually drifted off to sleep and, thankfully, suffered through no dreams. By the time I woke up exactly eleven minutes late, pulled on my uniform (still slightly damp from the washing machine), and choked down my breakfast, the whole "running away like a scared rat" thing had been driven from my mind entirely.

I burst through the front door in my sock feet (no time to deal with tedious laces!), murmuring a quiet prayer to the Greek god of Really Slow Bus Drivers.

"Go, go, go, hurry, hurry - "
"Indy?"
"Oh my God!" I shrieked, dropping my shoes into the dew-covered grass. "Daniel, don't do that!"
"Sorry! I'm sorry." He paused, his hands clasped behind his back. "Um. Hello."
"Hello," I replied sarcastically. "Look, I'm late for - "
"No, you're early," he protested. "I normally pick you up around eight and it's..." He checked his gold pocket watch. "Half-past seven."
"I... I was..."
"Sneaking off to take the bus?" he finished for me, managing to look sly and amused and worried all at once.
"Ugh," I sighed, picking up my shoes and turning to face D.B. "Daniel, I'm so sorry for running out on you..."
"No! No, don't say that!"
"...yesterday. I don't know what's wrong with me, I just decided to be stupid for some reason."

D.B. looked at me with a strange glint in his eye. It was as if he were about to laugh, although I couldn't see anything funny about the situation. He reached into his pocket and pulled out three butterscotch candies, a small pink bouncy ball, and the end stub of a yellow crayon.

"Need to clean out these pockets," he muttered to himself as he popped one of the candies in his mouth. "Let's walk."
"What?"
He jerked his head toward the bus stop at the corner. "I'll walk you, or whatever."
"But - "
"You wanna ride the bus, we'll ride the bus!" He took my left shoe and dangled it in front of my face, slowly walking backwards toward the street. "Follow the shhhooe!"
"I actually need that, freak."
"Then let's go!" he cried, laughing in exasperation.
"What about your car?"
"I'll leave it here."
"But how - "
"I'll ride the bus home with you and get it." He adopted a nasal voice, biting his lower lip as if he had buck teeth. "I wouldn't want to ruin my perfect attendance!"
"But Kim and Mikey - "
"Will find their own rides!" He was already half-way down the street, calling back to me. "You gonna stand there, or you gonna come get your shoe?"
"Daniel!"
"Hark, are those the wheels of a yellow prison I hear?"
"Daniel!"

I bent down to shove on my right shoe and then began running after D.B., limping awkwardly with one bare foot. By the time I caught up with him, he had abandoned my shoe on the ground and was scribbling something onto a folded piece of notebook paper. The wind disturbed his hair, but he shook it out of his eyes with a flick of his head.

As I stooped to pick up my other shoe, I tried to sneak a peek at the paper he was writing on. He saw me and turned away, chuckling quietly.

"Writing in your diary?" I teased.
"No."
"What is it?"
"Secrets."
I was silent for a moment. "You... You're writing your secrets on a piece of paper." It was more of a dry statement than a question.
"Yes."
"That is the most un-D.B. thing ever."
"Yeah, well..." he sighed, shrugging.
"Why?"
He scuffed the toe of his converse into the ground. I could see the elastic part of a pink sock peeking out from the top of his shoe and almost laughed at the ridiculousness. "It's a present," he said, attempting casualty. "For, uh... for you."

There was a moment where I was only able to stare at him, my eyes in hard slits. I could hear the bus chugging somewhere down the street, but neither of us acknowledged it.

"I don't understand," I said slowly.
"To make up for yesterday."
"Uh, are we talking about the same yesterday? Because the yesterday I'm thinking of ended in me running away from you."
"Yeah, but I'm the one who wanted to put more trust in you and then sort of failed immediately."
"So... You're going to tell me secrets?"
He swallowed, looking ill. "Yes. Maybe. No, I will. Yes. I will."
"Nervous?"
"Yeeh... No."
"No?"
"No. Not nervous. No nervousness. None."

The bus pulled up by the corner, releasing a grey gasoline-smelling cloud. D.B. snatched his book bag from the ground and scrambled toward the bus, glancing back over his shoulder to check that I was behind him. We moved toward the back, which was empty save for a moldy milk carton and a greasy-haired boy listening to metal on his iPod. We sat down and Daniel began to trace the graffiti on the vinyl seat in front of us with his first finger. (Things like the world is ending! scribbled next to a graphic picture of a busty mermaid.)

He cleared his throat, finally rolling his eyes and digging out the paper. I tried to act normal, looking out the window and absently picking at my nails, but I couldn't resist a glance.

The paper was titled secrets to tell Indy why the hell am I doing this and I could tell that it had been erased and rewritten many times. D.B. caught me looking and whipped it from view, clutching it to his chest.

"No peeking!" he scolded and got up to relocate to the next seat down, leaning over the back of it and opening the paper again. "Ahem!"

I could have said that I wasn't interested in D.B.'s secrets. I could have said that his idea was dumb and that it really wasn't necessary or wanted or sane... But I would have been lying. I couldn't deny that having D.B. tell me details about his life was a bit of a guilty pleasure. It made me feel closer to him.

"Secret number one," he said in an official voice, pausing to check that nobody in the immediate vicinity was listening. "This is what I was going to tell you yesterday." He set his jaw, steeling himself and reciting directly from the paper, as if trying to distance himself from the actual words. "The scar in my eyebrow is from a sword fight in London in 1632."
"A s-sword fight?"
"Yes."
"I take it you lost?"
"No, I ran away." He attempted his patented cheeky grin, but failed miserably and gave up instead, returning to the paper. "Which, in turn, brings us to secret number two. I got the scar on my back from turning away from my opponent in a sword fight in 1632 and running like my life depended on it because, in fact, it did."
"Why was this guy so hell bent on fighting you?"
"Oh, it wasn't a guy."
"A medieval wench, then?"
"A wench-let, if you will. She was seven."
I tried valiantly to hold in my snort of laughter. "Seven?"
"She saw me appear. The warp, the portal, all the lights and stuff. She thought I was a witch."
"You ran away from a seven-year-old girl."
"With a sword!"
"Some witch you are."
"What a mouth you have!" he scolded, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. His eyes scanned the paper and I could see the light in his eyes extinguish. "Secret number three. One day my grandfather went traveling and never came back."

It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over me. The greasy-haired kid was still bobbing his head to the beat of his thrashing music, which was so loud that I could distinctly hear the singer yelling something that sounded like kill your idols, kill your heros over and over again. I suddenly had no desire to know these plastic secrets, these private looks into D.B.'s life that he was tossing to me like a reward for good behavior.

"D.B., don't tell me any more secrets."
"What?"
"I don't want to hear any more."
"Oh, good. The rest are pretty dumb. I don't like peas, sometimes I forget what year I'm in, oh! I just wrote this one down this morning: I secretly don't really mind when you call me Daniel. Honestly, I don't mind anything other than Danny. I don't even like it when my parents - "
"Why would you tell me that?"
"What? That I like it when you call me Daniel? I guess I was - "
"No. About your grandfather."

He gave me a withered look. I'd never noticed it before, but he had three freckles on his jaw, just below his ear. I found that I couldn't look him in the eyes.

"Because I trust you."
"But... But that's really personal. You didn't have to - "
"Yes, I did. I had to because that's what trust is."
"No! No, it's not! Trust isn't just randomly telling people things and making yourself sick over it! Trust is natural, it just happens!"
"But don't you want me to... you know, tell you stuff?"
I sighed. "Yes. Yes, I'll admit I'm curious about you... About traveling and different periods of time and your secrets. But that's just because you're my friend and I'm interested in... things. Never mind. It's stupid. Just forget all of this."

The bus pulled up in front of our school, a ridiculously large building made out of yellow-ish stones. Too large, I thought angrily. What idiot felt like a couple of kids needed this much space? We filed off awkwardly, bumping into each other on the way through the narrow isle between the seats. D.B. kept checking over his shoulder, as if he were afraid that I'd rather jump out of one of the emergency exit windows than be stuck behind him.

As we entered the school, D.B. allowed me to lead the way to my locker. I tried to ignore him, but he was acting quite strange. His locker was in a different wing than mine was and yet he was following quite close. I dialed my combination quickly, not sure if he was peeking over my shoulder and placed my backpack inside. Just as I was about to pluck my books from the wire rack I'd set up inside my locker, D.B. bumped me out of the way.

"Hey!" I cried, my voice echoing off the walls of the nearly deserted hall.

D.B. ignored me, shoved his bag into my locker, and slammed it shut.

"What do you think you're - "
"Shhh!" he interrupted, smiling devilishly and taking my hand.
"Daniel, where - "
"Shhh!"

He tugged me down the hall and into the first door we came to.

"No, Daniel! No, no, no!"

Unfortunately, it was the boys' bathroom.

"Out," D.B. barked at the guy leaning over the sink to examine his zits in the mirror. He snatched his books and scrambled through the door.
"Class starts in less than a minute!"
"Well, then we're skipping."
"No! Daniel, please let go of me!"
"I can't."
"What? Why not?" I started struggling, edging closer to the door.
"Because then you can't come with me."
"But where... Oh."

The next thing I remember was a strange, dragging sensation; like walking through water.