Watchers

Things in the Woods

Through the woods we marched, the sounds of plants being crushed under our feet harsh against the sunny quiet. I could also hear the jangling of a ball-chain Adam had hanging from one of his pockets. He never stopped trying to find new chains to wear. You'd have thought he was an escaped convict with some of the stupid metal necklaces and chains he draped from his pants or around his head. Right then, he just had the one attached to his pocket and then a silver chain-link choker hanging loose around his skinny neck. Sometimes I wondered how he held himself up with all the weight on him. It was lucky he'd never been on a plane anywhere; he'd hold up metal detectors for days.

"I don't want to go look at some lame tree house," I said, being a real grouch.

Adam didn't make any sort of response. I became kind of irritated, because the fact that he wasn't going to argue made me realize that he really must've seen something out-of-the-ordinary. I was mad at myself for not seeing it first, whatever it was. There was something funny in the way Adam was walking. He had a real determined path. It was like he knew where he was going, even though we'd never gone wandering far back in the beech woods.

"Come on, then. What was it you saw for real? If it was some little kids' tree house you wouldn't care so much about it."

"Maybe if you'd climbed the tree, you would've seen it," he said all sarcastic.

I rolled my eyes, but I didn't say anything back to him. If he was going to be an ass, I wasn't going to try and stop him. We both had our own ideas of how to be stubborn. We both hated when other people tried to make us do things we didn't feel like doing, or say things that we didn't want to say. But there were different reasons for our stubborn streaks. Mine was all-natural: both of my parents were like oxen. They couldn't be swayed on anything except what was for dinner. Believe me, trying to get money out of them was like trying to suck water from a rock. Adam hadn't come by his headstrong nature through blood, though. It was something that had been stuck inside him like someone tacks a poster onto a wall. I didn't know it then, but Adam had sort of been shaken out of order because of his situation. Things had been taken out of him that were originally supposed to be there. Or maybe they just never grew how they were supposed to. That happens to a lot of people for various reasons, but at the time, I hadn't any clue what Adam's problem was. I didn't even really know he had one.

The sun splashed in splotches across the ground. There were still dead leaves there, left over from a fall that had begun too late—a winter that hadn't been cold enough. I couldn't help but find something sickening about the lumps of soppy leaves lying across our path. Adam and I slogged through them without the least thought as to what the black mud was doing to our shoes.

I tried not to complain, but our walk was beginning to go on forever. I wondered whether Adam really knew where he was going or if he was just taking me in circles through the woods. Nothing came out of my mouth, though; we had all the time in the world, I kept telling myself. And we did, so it didn't matter if we became seriously lost in the deepest trenches of the woods for an entire five hours. We could fall off the planet for half a day and nobody would know. That's how it was.

"There! Up there!" remarked Adam all of a sudden. He pointed a skinny hand straight ahead, and I shifted my eyes to where his finger led. My gaze covered the ground, then shimmied up a thick, white-trunked tree, where I saw it. "It" was something I'd never expected to see in such a place.

First, let me describe what kind of area we were looking at.

Everywhere, all around, the copper beech trees bubbled out of the ground. And then they gave way to these massive, towering trunks with bark as white as a dead man's skin. Leaves were all over the place, like I said, and they were yellow and orange. A lot of them were still floating to cover the very few parts of ground that still happened to be showing. It was like we were in the middle of an autumnal wonderland, or something, and then, to top it all off, there was this thing Adam had seen from above—an actual tree house entirely circling up through the top of the biggest, whitest tree, right in the center of it all.