4.

The day after the watermelon disaster, John returned to Lucy’s house to play with her. He simply appeared at the open back door and grinned at Lucy through the screen. She waved and bolted the last bites of her breakfast and ran to join him outside. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “Wanna play?”

“Yeah. What do you want to do?”

“I dunno. What do you want to do?”

Lucy thought. “Wanna climb trees?”

“Yeah!”

Lucy later heard her mother refer to John as “Lucy’s imaginary friend,” which Lucy thought was one of her mother’s odder jokes. Every morning, there he was, grinning through the window while Lucy ate her cereal in the kitchen. There was nothing imaginary about him.

“Who are you waving to, Lucy?” asked her mother.

“John. He’s outside the window.”

“Ah. I see. Well, tell him I said hello.”

Often, Lucy ran outside and she and John rode their bicycles down the road to where a cheerful, pretty creek undercut the pavement. Leaving their bikes in the bushes, they descended into a mossy bowl where the creek made a turn and the chatty, bubbling water slowed and pooled. A patch of surrounding woods made it a damp, cool spot to build dams, catch crayfish, collect shiny rocks, herd skater bugs, and generally while the hot mid-Atlantic summer away. After a few weeks, they had accumulated so many blankets, books, and toys there that they installed an old green metal footlocker in a cluster of small trees to hold their comforts. It had come from Lucy’s attic and smelled of musty books and wool. Over time, it turned slowly rust-colored from the summer’s rain.

John and Lucy’s playground by the creek was private property. Its owner, a man named Ansel Parker, checked the creek periodically for trash. He found the footlocker and opened it, curious. He scanned the contents with surprise and carefully closed the lid again and left it. “Kids,” he said to himself. He noted the pristine creek and unspoiled shady hollow and grunted.

When he walked in his back door and saw his wife Jane, Ansel Parker opened his mouth to tell her about his discovery. Then he closed it. She looked at him, eyebrows raised. He asked her if there was any iced tea left in the fridge. Children’s treasures should be left alone, he thought. He went to the fridge and poured his iced tea. Children’s secrets should be kept.

Lucy had no idea that her creek was someone’s property. She would have avoided it if she had known, albeit with longing and regret. She understood what private property was. It was only many years later that she met Ansel Parker and learned how he had kept her secret.

Lucy lay near the shady water and listen to the clickety buzz of cicadas. The sun dappled her vision and the world smelled green and wet and earthy and the music of the briskly flowing water gave her an inchoate sense of rightness. She might have said on any given day that the creek was her favorite place in the world. She might also have said her favorite place was Hershey Park. The park had free Hershey bars at the end of the Chocolate World ride. Hershey Park, however, was nearly two hours’ drive away by car and required begging and reckless promises, whereas the creek was there every day, easily accessible by bike and offering multitudinous cool and splashy unsupervised joys.

“The cicadas will come out of the ground next year,” said John. He lay nearby, plucking blades of grass and braiding them. “It’s time.”

“How can they come out of the ground next year when I hear them now?”

“Different kind.”

“Mmm.” Lucy closed her eyes, imagining thousands of cicadas emerging from the spring earth like tiny terrors in a Japanese monster movie. “Why do you know about bugs?”

“I don’t know.” John poked white clover blossoms into his braid of grass. “They’re interesting.”

“What else is interesting?”

He laughed. “Everything.”

Lucy rolled over and propped her chin in her hand. “Where’s your house?” she asked.

“Oh. Not far from here.”

“How come we never go to your house?”

John shrugged. “I like coming here.”

Lucy looked around. “It is nice here.” She looked at the braid in his hands. “Hey, how did you make that so long?”

“Come here, I’ll show you.”

John smelled of apples and puppies and cut grass and toast. A healing scab roughened his dirty right knee. His white t-shirt bore a smear of mayonnaise and a drift of Oreo cookie crumbs. As Lucy leaned close to him, her skin tingled from his otherness, a crackling response that disappeared when her shoulder met his: rather than electric, she found that his body felt merely warm.

“See,” he said, fingers working, “you pick the long ones, and when you get close to the end, you put in another one. If you do it tight enough, they stay together.”

“How do you get the clover to stay?”

“I weave the stems in.” John demonstrated. “See?”

Lucy watched. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere.” John knotted the braided grass into a delicate crown. “Here.” He placed the crown on her head. She touched it. Smelled the herbal juiciness of it.

“You’re the queen of the creek,” he told her. “You’re the princess of summer.”

She laughed. “So who are you?”

He smiled. “I’m just John. I make the crowns.”

On rainy days, they read books in the basement or in Lucy’s room with only sporadic conversation. Lucy lay on her bed with her threadbare pink elephant Wubby under her head. John sprawled in the orange vinyl beanbag in the corner or sat in Lucy’s chair at her desk, his sneakers kicked into the corner and his mismatched socks baggy at the toes.

“You know you’re wearing one green striped gym sock and one blue striped gym sock, right?” Lucy said.

“They’re socks. They’re tubes for feet. Who cares?”

They argued over whether The Hobbit was better than The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and made bets in sticks of gum on whether it would rain. Lucy always lost.

It was a perfect summer.

They had kick fights on the old broken-down sofa in the basement. They watched Happy Days with an old crocheted afghan over their knees. Lucy pushed John in a fit of pique and made him trip over her Fisher Price schoolhouse and fall. She bent anxiously over him as he lay still on the floor and shrieked when he opened his eyes and yelled “Psych!” He hid James and the Giant Peach when she wouldn’t let him play with her Easy-Bake Oven. She sat on him until he confessed that he’d put it in the closet behind the vacuum cleaner.

On sunny days when Lucy felt too hot and lazy to go to the creek, she and John climbed into her tree house.

Lucy’s treehouse was a shining feat of dad engineering. Lucy’s father had built it for her at a height that made her mother only slightly nervous. It was flawlessly level, square, and smooth, with careful cutouts to accommodate the Norway maple’s great branches. The wooden supports and planks had been neatly joined. The planks had tiny, precise gaps between them to drain rainwater. It was unpainted and had no railings or roof. Lucy loved it.

A rope ladder hung from a lower branch. With every step, Lucy rose slowly into the tree’s dense canopy, her perspective changing from ground to treetop. Where the ladder ended, the tree showed the way. In Lucy’s tree house, she and John lay side by side on their backs with their books or sat face to face to stick winged maple seeds on their noses, the wide platform serving as ship or island or desert oasis or the throne room at Lothlórien. Overhead the broad green maple leaves shivered and whispered. Summer-washed blue flickered and flashed between them. Lucy lay supine and lifted her legs and looked at her shoes against the leaves and sky and imagined herself walking upside down on the dome of heaven.

“I wish I could fly,” she said, her eyes following the dappled movement of the maple leaves. “I’d fly right out of this tree.”

“Where would you go?” asked John. He lay beside her with his eyes closed.

“Australia,” she said. “I want to see kangaroos.”

Without opening his eyes, John said, “They have kangaroos at the zoo. That’s forty minutes away.”

“Stupid. I want to see them in Australia.”

“You could go on a plane,” said John.

“You’re a pain in the butt,” said Lucy.

“Yeah, but I’m hilarious.”

Lucy grunted. “Bleah,” she said, sticking out her tongue.

“You know I am.”

“Bleah.”

“Just saying.”

“Bleah.”

Lucy might also have said that the treehouse was her favorite place.

5.

John and Lucy fended for themselves every day for lunch. Her mother was generally around, but in the heat of summer, she simply ensured that the fridge was well-stocked and warned Lucy not to eat breakfast cereal for lunch.

Barred from eating Cap’n Crunch, Lucy made herself bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread. John said they were boring. “How can you eat the same sandwich every single day?” he demanded. “Don’t they make you want to puke?”

“I like them,” she said.

“Well, I’m not eating a bologna sandwich. I’d rather starve.”

“Go ahead and starve,” Lucy said. “My mother only buys bologna.” An experiment in cotto salami had gone badly.

“That doesn’t mean you have to eat bologna sandwiches,” John said. He went to the refrigerator and inspected its contents. “There’s way better stuff in here.”

“Like what?”

“Cream cheese! Olives! Bananas! Jell-O!”

“You can’t make a sandwich out of Jell-O,” Lucy scoffed.

“Lunch doesn’t have to be a sandwich,” John said, “but why not?”

“I dare you.”

John grinned and pulled a casserole dish from the fridge. It contained unfinished black cherry Jell-O from dinner the night before. He brandished a spoon.

“You wouldn’t,” said Lucy.

He put out his hand for a slice of bread from the loaf on the table. She handed it to him. He plopped a scoop of Jell-O onto the bread, regarded it for a second, then reached into the refrigerator for a bright plastic squeeze bottle of yellow mustard.

“No way,” said Lucy.

“Way,” replied John. He squirted the mustard onto the Jell-O, set the bottle firmly onto the counter, and carefully folded the bread. He studied it, then took a large bite.

Lucy made a face.

“Now that’s a sandwich,” John said.

“I’m making you eat one of those every day forever,” Lucy told him.

“That would be boring,” he said, chewing. “Hey, I think some olives would have been good with this.”

“You’re gross.”

He grinned at her. “I’m John.”

Lucy laughed. At her age, joy happened several times a day and passed unseen and unmarked, and later unremembered.

They sat at the table and rolled slices of Wonder bread into small dense white balls and pitched them into each other’s mouths with occasional success. Lucy laughed so hard her diaphragm ached and she fell out of her chair.

“Come on,” giggled John. “Finish your boring sandwich and let’s go down to the creek.”

They took their bikes. John rode no-hands, reaching for the sky and singing off-key about a bear he saw the other day out in the woods. Lucy pumped to get up the hill near the Jamisons’ house and flew on gravity all the way down the far side. As they approached the creek, they caught each other’s eyes and laughed their delight.

With a hard bump, Lucy’s wheels left the pavement and landed in the soft green near the water. In a minute she had hopped free, leaned the bike against a sycamore tree, and flopped down on the grass. John followed suit. Lucy lay still and breathed. John gave her squishy warm M&Ms from his pocket. She put them on her tongue and let the chocolate sweetness melt slowly down her throat before crunching into the shards of sugar coating with her teeth. The summer seconds turned into summer minutes and slipped away into a summer hour.

“How come you never talk about your parents?” asked Lucy.

John shrugged. “What should I say?”

“Do you like them?”

“I like my mother.”

“What about your dad?”

“I don’t have a dad,” John said.

Lucy frowned. “What happened to him?”

“I just don’t have one.”

“You must have had one once,” said Lucy. “You have to have one to be born.”

“Nope. Just my mom.”

Lucy sat up and stared at him. “So he was gone before you were born?”

“No. I just don’t have a dad.” John plucked a blade of grass and whistled through it.

“That’s dumb, you can’t be born without a dad.”

“I was.”

“You’re just making that up.”

“If you say so,” said John.

He seemed unconcerned. Lucy punched his arm. “Seriously. You don’t know anything about your dad?”

“I know I don’t have one,” he replied.

“Is that what your mom says?”

John said, “I don’t need my mom to tell me what I already know.”

Lucy frowned. “Okay, then. What about your mom? Why hasn’t she ever called to talk to my mom?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because moms do that.”

“What would they talk about?” asked John.

“I don’t know. Us. Mom stuff. Whatever moms talk about.”

“Maybe they don’t have anything to talk about,” John said. “Your mom never asks me about my mom.”

“Oh. Well.” Lucy knew that was true. Nevertheless, she returned to the bone she had been picking. “How come your mom never asks about me?”

John frowned. “What would she ask?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t she care who you play with?”

“She cares. She just doesn’t worry about it.”

Lucy struggled. She felt a thought skip through her consciousness. An odd, quirky, harmless thought with a funny hat and a handful of balloons. It turned a corner in her mind and winked over its shoulder and was gone.

“Hey,” said John. “I brought some new books the other day and put them in the trunk. Wanna see?”

6.

Occasionally, John did not appear, and Lucy spent the day by herself.

There was always a great deal to do. She had her ongoing cat engagement experiments, a new project involving large quantities of clay and kite string, and piles of unread books from the library. She was also writing and illustrating a comprehensive volume about dinner. The research was time-consuming.

She liked John. He was weird and funny and he liked all the same things she liked. He made her laugh. These were valuable traits. But when John was there, he was there, and Lucy had to pay attention to him.

Her mother tried to get Lucy to play with Sonja Herron or Cathy Jamison down the street. “John not coming today?” she asked.

“Guess not,” said Lucy, eyeing her mother from her bed full of library books.

“Mrs. Jamison says that Cathy is back from Girl Scout camp and is free most of the time,” Regina offered.

“That’s nice.”

Sonja and Cathy were fine. Lucy didn’t hate them. Cathy was more tolerable than Sonja, since Cathy had a dog and a dollhouse with tiny lamps that lit up with a switch on the side. Sonja had a little sister. Lucy didn’t like either Cathy or Sonja as much as she liked John, and she definitely didn’t like them as much as she liked being by herself when John wasn’t there. She also thought they liked each other more than they liked her, which was fine. When she mentioned this to her mother, Regina displayed a complicated expression on her face. Lucy couldn’t quite parse it and decided to ignore it.

John always came back. Lucy was always happy to see him.

John had become part of her life, and Lucy rarely saw a reason to question her life. Sometimes life handed her liver and onions for dinner. Sometimes life gave her a Spirograph. In neither case was Lucy the one in control, and in neither case would complaining or celebrating have made a difference. John was more Spirograph than liver and onions, but he was also outside of her control; he came and went as he wished, and sometimes he hid her rain boots or ate the last cookie. There was really no way to improve on this, in Lucy’s opinion. It was what it was.

Despite his claim on the day she met him that he was not a weirdo, however, John was a weirdo. Lucy was sure of that. Couldn’t fool her.

 7.

John had spied a crawfish in the creek and wanted to catch it.

“You can’t catch a crawfish,” Lucy said.

“Yes I can.”

“Well, what will you do with it?”

“Eat it?”

“Euw!” Lucy recoiled. “You can’t eat it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s gross. Plus you don’t know where it’s been.”

“It’s been in the creek,” said John.

“Somebody might have peed on it,” said Lucy.

“Who?” John demanded.

“Dogs!”

“You don’t know that.”

“You don’t know it didn’t happen,” she said.

“The water would have washed the pee away.”

“I can’t talk to you if you eat a dog pee fish.”

After several more minutes of bickering, John agreed to not eat the crawfish and to instead keep it as a pet.

“How will you catch it?” asked Lucy.

“I’ll bring a fish net from home.”

The next day, John appeared at her house with not only a green nylon aquarium fish net, but a clean peanut butter jar with the label torn off in which to display his intended pet. Lucy felt that his preparations were optimistic. They rode down to the creek, John’s fishing gear rattling in her wire bike basket.

John scrambled down to the creek with Lucy behind him and shed his shoes on the bank. Stepping carefully on boulders in the creek, he kept out of the water to avoid disturbing his aquatic prey. He soon spotted the crawfish and contemplated the motionless beastie in the water below, its body partly obscured by a cairn of smooth quartz pebbles. He stood above his target, bare feet planted on boulders, net in one hand and jar in the other. Minutes passed.

“Well?” asked Lucy. “Are you going to catch it or not?”

“Sshh.”

Lucy sighed as loudly as she could.

John squatted, his eyes fixed on his quarry. He lowered the peanut butter jar carefully into the creek downstream of the crawfish, filling it with cold clear creek water. Then he straightened slightly and went still. Lucy watched impatiently. Just as she was about to speak again, John suddenly thrust the net into the stream and flipped the startled crustacean into the air, catching it neatly with this other hand in the peanut butter jar. “Gotcha!” he cried, splashing into the creek and doing a victory dance.

Lucy screamed. “I can’t believe you did that!”

“I’m the best! I’m the king!” John cackled. He scrambled up the slope and plopped onto the grass to show Lucy his prize. “I’m going to name him Boudreau.”

“What kind of name is Boudreau?”

“It’s French.”

“Why are you giving him a French name?”

“Why not? Isn’t he cool?”

“He’s really cool.” Lucy watched the small stone-colored creature circling its glass prison. “He looks scared.”

John laid a finger on the glass. “It’s okay, Boudreau. You’ll be fine.”

Boudreau settled and turned toward John, feelers twitching.

“Wow.” Lucy peered through the side of the peanut butter jar. “I think he feels better. How are you going to feed him?”

“Oh, I’m going to put him back in the creek before we leave.”

“I thought you were going to keep him as a pet!”

“I am. Just for the afternoon.”

“You were going to eat him. Now you’re just going to let him go?”

“What’s weird about that?” asked John.

“I don’t know.” Lucy frowned. “It just seems weird. Like, is he a pet, or food, or what?”

“All three,” John said. He set the jar down between them.

“Well, I wouldn’t eat Fuffy,” Lucy said.

“Fuffy’s food smells terrible,” John said. “If that’s what he lives on, I don’t think he would taste good.”

“Would you eat him?”

“Fuffy? What for?”

“I mean, would you? You know. If it came up.”

“I guess so,” said John. “If I had a good reason.”

“Like if you were starving and there was no other food?”

“Yeah, but things would have to be pretty bad if the only thing left to eat was your cat.”

“What would you rather eat instead of Fuffy?”

“Jell-O. Duh.”

“No, I mean weird food. Like if all the regular food is gone.”

“Well,” said John, “I think I’d eat the Jamisons’ dog.” The Jamisons had a fat beagle named Bernie.

Lucy wrinkled her nose. “You’re weird.”

“No, I’m not.” John scratched his chin and lay back on the grass. “I mean, not any more weird than anybody else.”

“You’re more weird than I am.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Am not. Boudreau knows I’m not. Right, Boudreau?” John picked up the peanut butter jar. “See, he agrees with me.”

The crayfish appeared to nod. It waved a small claw. Lucy stared.

“See?” said John. “Are too.” He winked.

The summer passed quickly thus, with sandwiches and Jell-O and books and play and all the many and various things that filled one’s days at eight years old when the sun blazed and school was a distant, noisy memory of damp boots and cold tater tots. And as with summers both past and future, the seemingly endless stretch of days that beckoned in June became a dwindling treasure in August.

Lucy thought later: It was already too late.

Next Chapter: Part 1: Age 8 (further cont’d)