Pretend

Cora was beautiful. The light smattering of light brown freckles across her cheeks. Her slightly off-kilter nose, still crooked from the time she’d broken it after she’d run face-first in to a pole for a dare. Her smooth, pale skin, so prone to getting sunburned during the summer. Her long, luscious brown-blonde was unbrushed and damp from a recent shower, highlighted in the morning sun to a ruddy auburn. And her big, circular eyes, with their long, curled, thick lashes, –focused distantly on the smoky horizon- were the same gray-blue color of the choppy lake water beneath our rocky perch.

I wasn’t really listening to what she was saying. Instead, I traced her in the damp earth beside me. Occasionally she would grin, her shell-pink lips parting to reveal the chipped tooth she’d gotten from falling off the swing when we were kids. It had been her first grown-up tooth, too, I never forgot that. Rex’s eyes followed the movement of my finger with diligence. His jaw was clenched tightly around his ratty tennis ball; it was the only one he had left because the others had either disappeared down a hole in the yard or Aunt Sal had thrown them in the garbage during her weekly visit.

“Seb! You aren’t even listening!” Cora’s voice was exasperated. I smiled sheepishly, pulling off my beanie and running a hand through my sandy brown hair. “You could at least listen, considering you’re making me starve.”

“Not my fault you didn’t eat breakfast,” I replied reasonably, casually brushing out the silhouette I'd drawn and wiping my muddy finger on the side of my shoe.

“Well, you could’ve waited until I got to your house,” she implied, raising her brow at me.

“My house? All we have to eat is stale bread.” I smiled jokingly at her and she gave me her ‘you’re an idiot’ look. But I wasn’t kidding. The nutritional stuff had begun to smell funny, so I’d thrown it into the compost and heaved the bucket to the back of the garden.

I sighed and turned so I was facing the lighthouse. It had been shut down a couple years ago when an electrical fire had rendered the staircase useless, and the town was too cheap to rebuild it. Painted in classical red-and-white stripes, the lighthouse stood lonely on the top of Forest Hill, and usually people avoided the path up to it for reasons I didn’t understand. It was a bit dangerous, I guess, but so totally worth it.

I turned back to Cora and saw she was watching me with an amused expression on her soft features. She smiled and shook her head. Seeing humor in something no one else could was something I really appreciated about Cora. With her adventurous, friendly personality and charismatic ease, Cora had a lot of friends. The concept made my stomach twist unpleasantly. I knew I was one of Cora’s closest friends, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still be shunned and closeted. Sure, I was good at listening and advising. I was good when a steady hand was needed. But that’s all I was good for. I didn’t interact or socialize well with other people. My surety with interaction had been rubbed out with years of desolate disasters, one coming in after the other.

Cora and I had become friends during our last game of Tiny Tots Soccer. In an attempt to make us more sociable at the age of five, our parents had enrolled us into a program that encouraged teamwork, friendship, and cooperation. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I wasn’t good with soccer. I wasn’t good at any sport, period. Even now, I still hadn’t grown into my size ten feet. But Cora's lithe body was both graceful and flexible. She was fast and quick and logical, and just like now, she was everyone’s friend. Halfway through our last game, I was still sitting on the bleachers. That was fine with me, though, because I had been doodling on a hotdog napkin with my mother’s lipstick. Cora had been called off because she’d sprained her ankle, and while all the players on the field vied for her appraisal on their play, she came and seated herself next to me. She’d leaned in really close, placed her warm little hand on my arm, and whispered in my ear, “Soccer is a stupid sport, isn’t it?” From then on, we’d been nearly inseparable.

“Sebbie, if you don’t start paying attention, I’ll push you off the cliff.” I was startled out of my reverie to find that Cora was crouching in front of me, holding herself erect with my shoulders. I could smell her strawberry-scented perfume, feel the heat coming off her body, count the number of freckles dusted over the bridge of her nose. I swallowed loudly, trying to act like she didn’t affect me. But she did. She absolutely did. I didn’t know when I’d stopped liking Cora as a friend and started liking her as . . . something more. But one day I’d noticed the fact that she made my heart race whenever she laughed, made me blush whenever she talked about kissing. Of course, we’d had our first kiss together. But it was only so we could both get it over with. At the time, it hadn’t meant anything except evolving into a man - in my case, anyway. Now, when I was trying to keep calm, I remembered the whole embarrassing sequence. I shook myself.

“You couldn’t push me off the cliff,” I scoffed, brushing off the erratic thundering in my chest and pushing words through my throat. “You’re too little.”

“Please,” Cora laughed. “I beat you at arm wrestling twice on Tuesday.”

I shrugged. “I let you win.”

Cora smiled that dazzling, affectionate smile she saved just for me: her best friend. The guy she divulged her secrets to. The guy she came to for support. She laughed again. "Of course you did."