They circumnavigate streetlamps, walking only in the narrow shadow along the middle of the street.
"Five past three," she mutters, two fingers tucked around the straps of her backpack to keep them from swinging at her sides and making the plastic buckles clack together. She glances at the scrawled memo on the back of her free hand. "I have a history test tomorrow morning."
He shakes his head. "We're going to forget about it. I've got a geometry test."
They walk in silence, past his neighbor's houses. The flats from the 50's tucked in the subtle corners of her modest neighborhood don't compare to the looming two-story houses down his streets with flawless lawns and walls with mortar that perfectly outlines each individual brick, each the same shade of pure Georgia clay. He takes his steps easily, swinging his guitar case back and forth while softly singing tracks one through five of Justin Beckler's Crowded Rooms album.
"I thought if we were going to do anything like this, we were going to go to Atlanta to hook up with Justin and tour," she says. She shivers in the night chill as he smiles.
"Eventually. Maybe when we get back. If we come back." He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper. "Turn on Atlas Street...right here." He sticks out one leg and rotates on the other in his signature quirky manner and continues down the street whistling.
She pulls her sweatshirt tighter around herself and check her watch again. He eyes her suspiciously. "I'm going to throw that thing away, you know," he grins. The wintry air lifts his auburn bangs off his face and she catches the familiar sparkle in his eyes. He takes her by the crook of her arm and directs her past the massive houses with red doors outlined in holly and fir clippings. Perfectly arranged twinkle lights trace the edges of the roofs and columns down the street, every strand white lights, she hasn't seen a colored arrangement yet.
He glances at the creased paper; "Between numbers 78 and 80." She's not paying attention and keeps going straight until his hand reaches for her shoulder blade and gently turns her in the correct direction. The woods behind the massive homes envelop them, their dark shadows and lofty trees welcoming them with open branches.
"Where are we--"
"Shhh," he cuts her off.
She's never heard such a silence. The dead leaves beneath their feet aren't rustling, the birds seem to have forgotten to sing, the crickets are observing a kind of reverence to the shadows that have melted into blue with the arrival of winter.
He's still scrutinizing the lined sheet, finds what he needs and wordlessly leads her to the base of an oak a few yards away. Her breath, visible in front of her, freezes for a few seconds in midair. Above them is an oak tree whose height is inestimable, whose pinnacle isn't visible. Its limbs sweep the ground like staircases gracing the entrances of mansions she's never actually seen, twisting down to meet the leaf-blanketed earth.
"Come on," he whispers. He reaches out his foot and settles it on a limb, hardly needing to throw out his arms for balance it's so wide, and begins climbing.
She drags the toe of her boots in the ground, and gingerly lets her soles meet the bark. She feels surprisingly secure, as though she's simply walking across a footbridge that doesn't sway. He reaches over his head to grab a limb and swing up to another branch.
A dead leaf still clinging to a branch tangles itself in her hair, begging to come along and she lets it hold on out of pity. Perhaps it has wanted to climb to a higher level of the tree for quite some time and has never gotten the chance from staying on its own stem; maybe it wants to see the view from the top of the tree as much as she does and then fall through branches to the ground, left to right, cradled by mere oxygen.
She occasionally glances down as they continue to walk up the tree, but for the first time in her life she's not scared of heights. They climb for five minutes in silence. Five minutes fades into ten, and then fourteen; she lifts her chin to observe her surroundings and gaze at the endless tiers of branches spiraling down from the sky. Pinpricks of light peer between branches, enlarging as she ascends.
The rustling above her has quieted; she looks up and see the soles of the Tevas that he wears in the dead of winter settled on a branch two higher than hers, pass the first then grab his hand that he extends to pull her above the final limb. He leans back and has a seat on the branch; she suddenly flashes back to freshman year when they'd sit together in the bleachers in the same stance at pep rallies before she transferred, and feel a twinge of the pain that comes with reminiscing about that which won't repeat itself.
She blinks twice to clear her senses and join him on the branch, seeing for the first time what he sees in front of them: sky. Not sky from her bedroom window--sky with a tree-line border--and not even sky from the top of the tallest building--sky through a fogged lens. This is mere sky. She nearly reaches out to touch a star but her logic holds her back. And they aren't white like they are from the middle of her driveway at night; they are lavender and sage lined with saffron with pink bleeding from the center.
Out of the corner of my eye she sees his gaze creep over to her and he smiles slightly at her tense concentration and fear of awkward silences that he's always known about. "Look," he says, pointing in the east. "Saturn." She peers over his hand at the amber planet with rings, distinctly visible in the distance. He indicates a red speck nearer them. "Mars, and that really big one's Jupiter."
He's pointing to a massive sphere with shades of green and blue undulating, giving the appearance of the liquid with paint floating on the surface, just swirled and ready to meet paper and create marbled paper. "That's my favorite," she says; it looks like the journal in which she wrote her first story.
He nods. "Yeah, I knew you'd like that one. Seeing it would give you something to write about, no doubt." He grins at her, silently assuming that verses to a poem about Jupiter are already arranging themselves in her mind and she blushes, knowing that he knows her better than anyone else.
He reaches behind him and picks up a wooden box nestled among loose twigs and opens the lid, holding it out for her to look into. She grasps the handles on the side, balance it between her knees and lean over to see the contents: delicate iridescent scales fallen from angel wings, grayish colored powder ("moon debris," he explains), a pocket-sized star and a wooden Buffalo nickel. Her cold fingers reach for the star; she prods it curiously and its warmth licks her fingers, ribbons of light spinning themselves around her outstretched index finger and unwinding. She scoops it up out of its box and holds it in her cupped hands, squeezes them shut and peers through the crack between her pointer and thumb; the light tickles her eyelashes. He stretches briefly. "You can have that if you want," he says nonchalantly. She turns and stares at him disbelievingly. Shrugging, he waves her concern away; "There's stuff in there I care more about anyway."
She doesn't ask him what he values most but pauses and tries to read his thoughts as he does hers, squeezing her eyes shut and letting her mind feel around for some plausible thought that might come from his mouth, but nothing comes to her.
He points to the nearby red planet again. "We could walk there if we wanted to. See?" He points to a cloud of stars stretching from the branches to his destination. He reaches into his bag and tosses a rock onto the cloud; it falls as if it's fallen on a gravel road, rolling a few times then settling. "It's stable." Standing up, he gathers his guitar case and across his eyes flashes a mischievous vivacity. She slips her backpack back onto her shoulders, grasping her star in her right hand. "Jai guru deva..." he sings, looking over his shoulder at her. The star glows from the cracks between her fingers. She rests her foot on the whirling chips of light below her and follow him over the footbridge.