Patrick simply moved away. He didn’t take up a hermitic residence in the surrounding woods; he didn’t drown in any of the murky storm ponds squatting around the neighborhood. There was no biking accident that injured him for life. Nor, I think, was he particularly unhappy with his environs. Perhaps he just needed a change, or, more likely, it might have been his family who required the move. Such a decision wouldn’t have been surprising.

What surprised me was the abruptness with which he left. No last visit, no message left with the neighbor girl, no hastily scrawled note pinned to the oak tree by my house; and that scared me at first. Several weeks after he had left, I saw his phone number recorded on my answering machine. Absentmindedly, I failed to call back for a few days, and when I finally did, found a message explaining that the number was now out of service. He never again tried to get in touch. Neither did I.

We had been pretty good friends, and as such spent not a negligible amount of time with each other. Patrick lived on the other side of the neighborhood, producing a distance which, coupled with hills and uneven pavement, proved taxing but pleasurable to bike and a bit dull but relaxing to walk. Much of our time together was accordingly spent in a comfortable mix of both. We could often be found riding up over the roundabout with the ramped curb or the dirt mounds left behind from construction, and then sitting down to talk about it long after we should have returned home. Sometimes we invited the girl next door to his house to join us—she whom I always recall in a lime-green shirt revealing an awkward sliver of belly and a pair of jeans which looked remarkably uncomfortable. At the time I didn’t find her company singularly enjoyable, since she was never much into the outdoor scene and instead was content to try on her mother’s makeup. I would tease Patrick endlessly about his not so hidden attraction to her—a fine joke, by my standards. He, in turn, would kindly remind me of my ineptitude around all members of the opposite sex. We were good friends.

Yet when I think of our friendship, it’s not our bike rides or our prepubescent debates about the girl that come to mind. It’s rather one specific incident that occurred during one of our escapades through the woods; it’s this event that still makes me wonder sometimes if Patrick moved away at least in part because of it.

It was Patrick, in fact, who convinced me to jump the fence. Jumping the splintery wood and rusty iron was in itself not so much of a dare; the fence was scarcely my own height. It did, however, mark the end of where we as children were “allowed” to go and the beginning of a “prohibited zone.” So when Patrick grinned that day and beckoned impatiently to me, I knew refusing wasn’t an option.

We had often wandered off into the child-friendly woods of the neighborhood, sometimes with a plan, most of the time without. Those forays, however, had always begun in either of our backyards, and to embark on a journey from a forbidden area was forbidden fruit indeed. I remember the distinctive feel of the caked mud, hard at first, then immediately giving way beneath our sneakers, soaking them in squishy red clay. Taking our first few steps, we both turned to look back at road we had just left, our bikes lying stiltedly by the curb. Then we tromped off into the woods without a second thought, delighted at the opportunities ahead.

In familiar stretches of woods, Patrick and I had no problem finding our way around. Though this area was scarcely half a mile distant, the flora we initially ignored was surprisingly dissimilar. With no creek or body of water to guide us, within a couple hours or so we were happily lost. Of course, we still had a general sense of direction, but we had completely forgotten our original paths through the low-lying ferns and skeletal young trees. There came a point, however, when I brought to Patrick’s attention that returning the same way was quickly becoming impossible, and so we agreed to head to the larger highway outside the community which ran very nearly north-south.

Keeping towards the setting sun, we soon reached the end of the woods and found ourselves back on asphalt. Having secured our safe passage home, we began to stroll along the road back toward our houses. And so we didn’t really notice it until we quite literally almost stepped on it.

It was Patrick who first stopped dead, though I shortly followed suit. Lying on the shoulder of the road was a car-struck doe, its tongue hanging out a sickening scarlet, eyes bulging intensely in a random direction. Heaped between its stiff legs were some of its entrails, glistening and pinkish. It was still alive, sucking in irregular mouthfuls of blood-saturated air, its innards quivering slightly at each breath.

I promptly turned away and covered my mouth, having already seen too much. Attempting to control my own innards became ten-fold harder as the smell washed over me. After a moment or many of retching and catching myself, I turned back to Patrick. He was standing exactly as he had before I had turned away. Fascination or something like it gripped him as he stood over the body. As I continued to stare, he abruptly shook himself, went to the edge of the road, and picked up a jagged rock, the heaviest he could find.

I’ll never forget the next part: he approached the deer’s head with the most confused eyes I’d ever seen, muttering incoherently. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the doe’s eyes were no longer staring. Patrick panted as he held the rock, which now dribbled the smallest amount of red and yellow. A moment; then he looked down at what he held in his hands and dropped it like he had no idea what was staining it. It fell like wet clay but scarcely made a sound when it hit the ground beside the doe’s head.

It was an age before Patrick began walking without any specific impulse. I followed wordlessly, and when we reached my house, he said he was going to keep walking to go get our bikes lying a good distance away, though both of us knew we were late for supper, and that we’d have time the next day to retrieve them.

It’s not like I think of that incident, or even Patrick, every day. But whenever I happen to glance at a picture of him and me in an album or on the mantle, I can’t help but wonder if he sometimes thinks about that day, if he is ever haunted by the memory of that deer.