The Color of Darkness COMPLETE NOVEL

Puck

After my mom died, my dad started reading more.

Not that he hadn't read a fair amount in the first place, but started to actually enjoy his reading.

"Life is too serious," he told me once, "to ignore the joy of spending an afternoon in someone else's head."

Though I agreed with him, I simply couldn't imitate him. My mom had been the one who brought me stacks of used books from yard sales and library organization days. I couldn't help but feel like I was betraying her memory even more by enjoying reading other people's writing too much.

Classics, contemporaries, famous authors and unheard-of authors; my dad read them all. Out of all of the things he read, though, he loved Shakespeare the most. Something about the Bard's elevated layers of tragedies and comedies could fill the holes left by my mom's passing just a little bit better than the other books, though he loved them all. Sometimes, when I would sit and do homework at the table in the evenings, he would laugh out loud from his seat in his favorite armchair and read me a passage from a play or a sonnet, one that he found particularly exciting or insightful.

"The man knew," he would say as if Shakespeare had been a close friend of his. "The man knew where it was at."

Whatever "it" was, I definitely didn't know where it was, at least in my father's eyes. After the third trip to the Warden's office (the awfully fitting nickname given to the grumpy, bald-headed principal by some senior class of the past) my freshman year of high school, he sat me down for what he called "a serious reconsideration."

"What's wrong, Andy?" he asked, sitting across from me in the living room and peering at me from over his reading glasses. "Why can't you stay out of trouble?"

"I don't know," I offered sullenly. My dad sometimes read these single-father parenting books and I liked to play "unresponsive, moody teenager" when I saw that he was using tactics that he had read of in those cheesy volumes. This particular method was called "Measured Confrontation," where he would attempt to address my behavior head on while still staying open to my feelings, or whatever. I knew my dad was just trying to help, but sometimes the best help is not helping, you know? Besides, it was all pretty harmless fun: Rick and I had only skipped a couple classes, switched some numbers around in our math teacher's grade book, and stuffed a toad into Sammy Pine's locker.

"You just like making trouble for the fun of it, don't you?" he concluded grumpily after half an hour of getting nowhere. "You're just a regular Puck. I wish you'd get you head out of the clouds and buckle down for some serious education for once!"

Puck, of course, was the faerie of mischief in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had read only a half a dozen times by then. As soon as the nickname reached Nova's ears, though, "Andy" was as good as dead.

"Hey, Puck, let's go down to the creek," She said one day in April that year, after calling me while I was in the middle of my homework. "I've got something cool to show you."

"Fine," I said, both glad for the break and knowing that she wouldn't take "no" for an answer. I snapped my biology book closed and went out back, slipping through a broken bar in the wooden fence that separated Nova's yard from ours, where I found her waiting for me. She had a little grey backpack slung over her shoulder and an excited look in her eyes.

"Let's go."

As usual, Nova led the way down into the gully. Instead of stopping at the bend, though, she turned upstream and led me through the thick brush for almost fifteen minutes. Finally, when she seemed satisfied that we were lost enough, she stopped in a tiny clearing and dropped her backpack.

"Check this out!" she said, unzipping it. She reached in and removed a slender decorated box with a little clasp. With quick fingers, she undid the clasp and opened the lid, revealing a long silver revolver with a wooden handle. I felt my jaw drop.

"Wow! Where'd you get that?" I asked, awed. The danger of Nova, let alone any impulsive kids, with a firearm was lost on me. Dale was a blue collar town, and even my pacifist father had a long Remington shotgun he kept around "just in case."

This was my first "real" encounter with a gun, though, and it sent my heart racing.

"My aunt and uncle keep a little box with my mom's name on it in the basement," she said, taking the gun out of its foam packing and turning it over with a look of immense self-satisfaction on her face. "I think it's my dad's."

"Does it work?" It was the single most important question any boy could have asked when presented with a dangerous object.

"Of course it works, dummy!" Nova rolled those indescribably blue eyes of hers and looked at me with a half-smirk. I knew exactly what she wanted me to say next:

"Prove it!"

Nova smiled a sweet smile, pulled the hammer back as if she had spent her whole life handling revolvers, pointed it straight up in the air, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

I laughed, partly to relieve the tension and partly because, for the first time in my fourteen years, I had seen her be wrong. Nova frowned and let her arm drop. With a deafening report, the previously-unbothered cartridge exploded and sent the bullet spinning out of the barrel and straight through my foot.

"Shit! Oh, Shit! Ohshitohshitohshit!"

I looked at Nova, surprised; I had never heard her swear before. Many more swear words followed as a thin stream of blood began bubbling up out of the neat hole in my sneaker and pooling in my shoe from underneath. Miraculously, it didn't hurt yet, and I stood dumbstruck. Something about watching my own blood ruin my sneaker was fascinating.

Perplexing.

Disconcerting, to say the very least.

"Oh. My. GOD! Puck, I'm so sorry. Shit, what are we going to do? Are you hurt? Of course you're hurt. Shit! SHIT!"

Nova was freaking out so much you'd have thought it was her who had been shot. I tried to take a step but nearly fell over; a dull throb had started in my ankle and I was feeling very nauseous. She wrapped my arm over her shoulders and, placing my hand firmly on her hip, started helping me up out of the gully. One excruciatingly painful half-hour later, I was laying in my bathtub with my pant leg rolled up to my knee, watching my blood trickle down the drain and trying to keep Nova from breaking down. I was sure she was terrified of the trouble she would get in for playing with a handgun, so I did what I did best:

I lied.

I'll never forget the look on Nova's face when I called my dad and told him that I had stepped on a framing nail in the backyard and that Nova had pulled it out for me. The bullet had been a twenty-two caliber, just small enough to let the story be believable. My dad rushed home from work and took me to the tiny health clinic in the next town over where the doctor bandaged my foot and gave me a tetanus shot with hardly a question. He also sent me home with exactly ten Vicodin pills without a prescription. By the time Nova came over after dinner to check on me, I was higher than a kite and could hardly remember my own name.

"How you doin', Puck?" She asked, standing in the doorway for a moment and looking me up and down. She crossed over to me and sat down on the bed where I lay, her butt lightly touching my hip. As delirious as I was, I could still feel my heart pick up its pace a little.

"I's okay. My foot fell off," I managed, wiggling said foot to prove it. Nova just smiled at me, a sad smile you give your friend when you've just shot them in the foot on accident.

"I'm so sorry, Puck. I was stupid and I hope you'll forgive me." She half-whispered. A tear rolled out of the corner of her eye and dropped onto my blanket.

"I forgive you," I half-whispered back. "I still love you." It seemed like a good thing to say in my narcotic-induced haze. The thing about words is that once you say them out loud, you can never take them back. Some words that see the breath of air outside our lungs are destined to change our lives forever. Even in my foggy state, I knew these words would serve such a purpose.

Nova squeezed my hand and sat with me until I fell asleep.

I'm not sure if she ever said she loved me back.