This Way to the Hills

Louisa gave me a tattoo when we were eleven years old. I was teasing her one day about her liking me and she turned around with a pen in her fist and drove her weapon into my arm. I have never teased her since.

We didn’t talk to each other for a week after that even though our seats were right next to each other. Then one day, when my tiny wound was healed – with a spot of ink visible under a thin film of skin – she asked me if I had answers to today’s homework assignment.

“I never have answers,” I replied gloomily without looking at her. My attention was on my new tattoo, a reminder that I should be wary of her. I was also reminded of another thing. My head snapped up, I faced my right to where Mike sat and whispered, “Hey Mike, borrow homework.”

The next day, Louisa spoke to me again. “Mart. I have homework answers.”

She was holding out a piece of paper in my direction. Mike was below average when it came to Math and I knew Louisa was one of the top students, so tell me, how could I say no to that offer? That was the day Louisa and I became friends again. For good this time.

I never thought I would ever be thankful to Math about anything, but those daily homework assignments bonded us. For about two weeks, all I did was copy her answers. She was always offering a piece of paper with her answers scribbled on it the minute I sat down on my chair.

And then one day, she stopped. But I didn’t. I zipped open her bag to take her homework out and she just gave me a weird look as I went back to my seat. Halfway through copying, she said, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.”

“What?” I stopped to give her a weird look.

She continued, “Teach a boy some equations, and he won’t take stuff out of your bag.” Then she leaned over to my side, took the piece of paper I was copying from, and ran. I couldn’t process what happened but after a second, I ran after her. I wasn’t even done with half!

I caught up with her before she could run inside the girl’s bathroom. “What’s up with you?” I asked her.

She laughed. It was strange behavior, even stranger than stabbing me with a pen. At least for her it was. She only stopped when we both heard footsteps click-clack their way towards us.

“Those’re Miss Walo’s shoes,” she whispered. Miss Walo was our Math teacher, and I trusted Louisa because she was a girl, and girls know shoes. We ran as quietly as possible back to the classroom.

After school, I asked her, “So what the heck was that running around earlier about?”

We were outside the school gates as I waited for my ride. Louisa’s house was just two blocks away, but in the opposite direction from mine. She always waited for me to get in my dad’s car before turning to go home.

She didn’t laugh this time but spoke in a very serious voice. “I just wanted to see if you could do your own homework. You know, in case I’m gone, I wanted to know if you could function or not.”

“You mean like if you get the flu and can’t go to school or something?”

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Something like that.”

It’s funny how I remember that conversation only now, when I should have remembered it four years ago. We were seniors in college. It was the day after her twenty-first birthday.

It was the day she disappeared.