Roommates

Common Interests

Tris

Mid-September

The bark is rough against my palm. I climb one-handed, holding the camera to my chest with the other hand, so that it doesn't become damaged being knocked against a limb. It takes me a minute, some shifting and climbing from branch to branch, to find the right shot-- just the right angle, the light falling against the green apple in just the right way. I take several photos and when I am satisfied, I quickly climb down.

"Do you often do things like climb trees to take your photos?" Marlene asks, amused.

I shrug. "Sometimes. I go where inspiration leads me," I smile. "And," I add, "where the light is most interesting." I love the shadows tree leaves cast, the patches of light that shine through.

It's a Thursday afternoon, and I have the day off work. I'm spending the afternoon outside taking photos with Shauna and Marlene. We have been out taking photos around campus, eventually wandering to a nearby park, for a few hours now, as we all had only morning classes today. We invited Christina as well, but her classes are later in the day, and she said she had a study group to go to after her last class.

"I used to love climbing trees," Marlene sighs as I drop from the bottom branch. "I always wanted to have this amazing, huge treehouse."

"Do you remember the time we found those weird flat wood stakes or whatever they were in your parents garage?" Shauna grins.

"And we used ribbon, of all things, to tie them together trying to make a treehouse," Marlene giggles, and I can't help laughing.

"How do you make a treehouse out of stakes and ribbon?" I ask, confused.

Shauna snickers. "You don't. It was probably one of the dumbest ideas we ever had. We didn't have boards or access to nails and hammers so we tried to work with what we had."

"My brother and I built a treehouse when we were kids," I tell them, smiling at the memory. I really miss my brother sometimes. We got along pretty well as kids, but once he entered high school, Caleb seemed to completely lose interest in me. "It was more of a platform, really, but we took hammers and nails and boards... Caleb is older than me, but I had to keep correcting him, he was just terrible at it. He's more comfortable behind a microscope than hammering a nail." When Mom and Dad died nearly two years ago, Caleb was a year from completing his bachelor's degree, majoring in chemistry. He's probably in a doctoral program or something now. I wouldn't know. "But my favorite thing was to climb this tree that had a big sturdy branch that went over the middle of the stream near our house. I would climb up there and leap off of it into the deep part, in the middle of the stream."

"That sounds like fun!" Marlene says. "That's something I could see Uriah or Zeke doing. Maybe you can take us there sometime!"

I don't know if it would feel good to take my new friends to my hometown-- someone else lives in my old house now, but I could still go to the river-- or whether being there would be too painful for me to enjoy it. And I don't know if I can take them there without being bombarded with questions about my family, or whether I will be willing to talk to these people about what happened. A vague answer is probably best. "Maybe," I shrug.

"Are you still close with your brother?" Shauna asks.

"No," I answer. I know that in order to make friends, I need to open up, but I am just not ready to get into all that. Maybe someday. But this is exactly why Mar's suggestion that I take them all to my old home made me uneasy. I change the subject. "So... I've been wondering..." The girls look at me expectantly. "...what on earth is going on with our English lit professor's eye makeup?!"