Passing Strange Read Online Free Page A

skunks were as plentiful as the squirrels, and there seemed to be great wisdom in this observation, even though we were both laughing.
    We’d been friends for so long—sort of like Adam and Phoebe, in a way—it was so natural to be together, whispering, laughing. And then hand in hand went to arm in arm, and then we were walking more slowly and you moved your arm around my waist. We were walking toward the lake—a different lake, a different state—and the sun had just begun to set, and the old cliché about a handful of coins being scattered across the surface of the water, glinting in the sun, came to mind. We’d stopped talking, but then we sort of laughed at our silence and sat down on a rock outcropping that overlooked the shore. We were serious but lighthearted, too. There was a sailboat tacking in the light wind that seemed determined to entwine our hair. Sitting beside you, I compared our late-summer tans—yours far deeper, the color of fresh honey—and you pressed your thigh against mine to prove it. School would begin in a few days, and I was scared. I didn’t want it to begin, but mostly I just didn’t want the summer to end.
    “Don’t worry,” you said. “We can do this. We’ll be fine.” And I believed you. You alone knew me. You were the only one who knew what I was like, about the blue fog of depression that could sometimes drop between me and the rest of the world. You couldn’t make the fog disappear—no one could—but you could always find me when I was lost within.
    We hadn’t looked at each other in some time, I realized. We’d looked at our dusty legs and our tans and bare feet, but not at each other. I turned toward you then, and you said my eyes were sapphires filled with sunlight, and then I knew. I could see it in your eyes. I could see it; it was more than just sunlight, and it was like I could see myself, reflected. I leaned forward, or maybe you did, and our lips brushed, and we pulled back, together, as though to make sure it was okay, and it was. And then I was pressing my lips to yours and our mouths opened, and I couldn’t imagine that what we had would ever go away.
    But it did. It went away as if it had never been there at all.
    We’d stayed at the lake until the sun had gone down, and I was terrified as we walked back through the forest in the darkness. We were only a mile or two in, and I clung to you the whole way, shrieking every time some unseen animal scampered through the underbrush. But we made it out to where our bicycles and our shoes lay, and we were unharmed, if not unchanged. We embraced once we were there, safe, and we kissed once again before we rode home.
    Somehow, the sunlight all drained away.
    We were together for almost the rest of the summer, but the closer we came to the start of school, the more scared I became. I wouldn’t let you come near me once school began, and when you called me at night I’d try to convince you that we’d made a mistake.
    I think—I know—that I was also trying to convince myself. Then one day at lunch I made it clear to you that you needed to give me space. And you were finally convinced.
    Before long, you were with someone new.
    And I know why. Now I know why, although then I was nothing but devastated, in the grip of a devastation so complete that I couldn’t think clearly. I was so stupid, a coward. We’d been friends for so long, and for things to change…What would people think? What would people say? I realize now that it must have been just as hard for you to go through what we did.
    Harder, maybe. You stayed alive.
    I blinked, and my blue eyes were gone. Maybe they’d never been there after all. But as I looked more closely at my reflection I noticed other changes that didn’t go away when I blinked or turned my head.
    My face wasn’t as lopsided as it had been—as though the bones that had been shattered had started to knit back together. The bullet hole looked like it had begun to close up, but when I