The Wishlist

The Wishlist

By Bostonjay

Chapter 1:

Lincoln, Harry and Emily were three best friends. They had been for a long time. They went to the same small elementary school and had all graduated from the same small high school. College was next. This was where they would finally go their separate ways as Emily headed to England to pursue her singing career, Harry to Vermont and Lincoln to Washington. It was all very far away and although the 3 agreed to Skype, email and visit often, they knew it wouldn’t be the same as seeing each other everyday. Luckily, they knew they had one more summer to be with each other before they were pulled in their opposite directions in the fall.

Our story really starts with a small adventure. It was a calm, clear summers evening in Whitefield, Maine and Lincoln was lying in his back yard looking upwards. His hands were resting behind his head and he lay peacefully amongst the long grass, almost invisible from his back porch. He did this intentionally - Somewhat avoiding his two younger sisters and his mother. He needed to do some thinking and he felt that being invisible in the back yard was the best place to do it. Lincoln thought a lot - so his friends told him. His eyes would only to easily glaze over and he would slip into somewhere else. Not intentionally of coarse and he never really knew where he was going when (as cheesy as this seems) his imagination took over. However, this afternoon Lincoln's mind wasn't drifting somewhere imaginative like the battles of World War II or the streets of Venice. No. His mind was on the forest lying behind the long grass and cornfields that made his 20 acres of a backyard. He, Harry and Emily had spent many afternoons in their youth running and hiding in the forest back there. There were several tree houses and camp clearings where the three of them had played pretend and then later had campfires and just talked about their teachers and the latest high school issues. The forest trees were high and dense and it was an adventure in itself just finding your way through the bushes without getting completely lost was a true mission. The three of them knew that there was just miles and miles of land that just kept going and so much that they hadn't discovered yet. During the weeks that followed their high school graduation the three of them hadn't been back there. Emily had been busily preparing for England and the boys had been hitting the local baseball mound nearly everyday. It was their lack of journeys to the forest that Lincoln was thinking about. It seemed that without realizing it the forest had become a memory along with high school and elementary school. The forest was suddenly somewhere where children play and not what college students do. Because of this, Lincoln invited Harry and Emily over and they would start their last summer in their forest, camping by the small lake they had discovered when they were ten. 8 summers back.