The Stairs in the Woods

Chapter 4-Then

I didn't know how to feel about Alice at first.

After that moment in French class, she'd smile and wave whenever she saw me—walking through the halls, across the classroom, at the bus stop. Each time, I felt my stomach twist. In a good way, I think. And we had a few mutual friends, so it wasn't exactly uncommon that we'd find ourselves sitting at the same table during lunch.

It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it was an actual crush. Those months were a mess. It's not like I really had anything to compare it to. I didn't know what to compare it to, because I didn't feel much at all when I looked at boys, and I felt so much something when I looked at Alice. The words "gay" and "lesbian" hovered around my school in passing, but they were mostly used as the butt of a joke, and took awhile for them to finally stick in my head. So I was mostly just confused.

We gravitated to one another as if there was some kind of magnetic attraction yanking us into each other's circles. It was intoxicating. Alice started to show up more and more in my life. It seemed so impossible to me that our narratives could ever be entwined, so I did my best to convince myself that we were two very different people with two very different lives whose paths were never meant to cross, so goddamnit Julia, get over it.

But that became a bit difficult to keep up when I found myself in the seat next to her in a darkened movie theatre one night, fingers interlaced because Alice was freaked out by the jump-scares.

My friends had desperately wanted to go, and some of my friends just so happened to be Alice's friends. I just hadn't really managed to put together that Alice would also be joining us at the theatre that night.

She'd grabbed my hand maybe fifteen minutes into the movie, when the monster had first shown up, and I think I nearly ended up passing out.

I could feel her pulse through my hand. I kept sneaking little glances at her as she stared at the movie screen, face pale and eyes wider than I've ever seen them.

As the foolish yet stunning protagonist bustled around her house, a shadowy looming figure appeared in the background. Alice's grip tightened, close to hurting. I looked at her, and couldn't help it. I chuckled lightly under my breath.

"What's so funny?" Alice swivelled towards me. "It's scary."

"Sorry," I said to her, cracking a smile. "It's just your—" the boogeyman in the background left at the protagonist, and Alice let out a little shriek. I laughed. "That."

She rolled her eyes at me, but she was grinning. "You're not scared, then?"

It's odd—I have no shortage of fears, and I'm not a particularly brave person, necessarily. But horror movies never really scared me. Jump scares might startle me in the moment, a well-written psychological thriller could linger for a day or two, and gore made me cringe a bit. But none of it actually scared me the way it scared Alice.

"Not really," I replied with a shrug. "It's not real, so." I watched as the monster set itself upon the pretty girl. Alice had her eyes shut. I wished I could do more to comfort her than just hold her hand. "Doesn't spook me."

Alice cracked one eye open. "You're braver than me, then," she whispered.

If only that was true.

I blushed and thanked goodness for the dark lighting of the movie theatre, and ate my popcorn and trained as much of my attention as I could on the movie and tried not to focus on Alice as she held my hand tighter and tighter with every move the monster made. It hurt, but I didn't pull away. She could've squeezed all the blood out of me and I still would've let her hold on.

It was the little things. It was those little things that kept me wrapped around her finger. It was moments, snapshots, Polaroid pictures stored in my mind that made it impossible to just let her go. It wasn't quite love, not then. Not in the way most people define it.

But it was something close. It was the kind of romance we only really know when we're young—when it feels like now or never, life or death, and it seems to inflate and fill up everything until there's not much room left for anything else. It was the first whisper of young romance. The flutters. The sparks. The electricity.

It was a high school romance, but it didn't end the way most high school romances end. Because it just snapped off, dry and brittle and clean, and she was gone and there was no closure, and there wasn't even the usual kind of heartbreak because how do you move on from something like that?

After Alice went missing, once a few years had passed, there were other girls. There were countless first dates, my fair share of hookups, a fling or two. The kinds of people who you bring into your life knowing they're meant to leave. But I couldn't shake Alice. I can't shake Alice. I got stuck in that thrill of young love and had it ripped away before I learned how you're supposed to grow from it.

And she shouldn't have disappeared. That might be what shattered me, in the end. We were high schoolers. We were two kids watching movies together, taking classes together, going on picnics in the woods together. And then she was taken. She vanished. Alice was there, bright and vivid and alive as a spring flower. And then, in the span of a few moments, she was gone.

Some part of me was gone, too.

Alice. She was the missing part. She was everything, back then. And somehow, in a way so harsh it stings, she still is.