Dreamcatching

Chapter 16

Kaden waited outside Nora's math class with little patience. He was pacing back and forth muttering to himself. He'd felt terrible about how his and Nora's reunion had been going. This wasn't how he'd wanted things to turn out.

Fortunately, today was bell schedule B, which meant him and Nora had early lunch together. Their school rotated the schedules so that each student had lunch at different times during the week depending on the bell schedule. Student council had fought with administration about it because too many people hated having first and eighth period lunch. Today, Nora and Kaden had fifth period lunch together.

Kaden'd figured that with everything going on the least he could do was buy her lunch. As a bonus, Slate'd promised to run interference between him and Donovan. He grinned as he waited for Nora, remembering another time in which his friend Slate had run interference for them.

In every family there were secrets. Neither Kaden's nor Nora's was any different. For reasons they hadn't fully understood at the time, their parents were leery of their growing relationship. After the day they'd met in the woods, it became more and more common for Kaden to disappear into the forest to find his new friend.

She was always doing something surprising. One day, he found her hiding in a tree branch, gathering honey from a beehive. Unlike most people he'd met, Nora wasn't afraid of being stung. The bees were happy to share their bounty with her, which should've seemed strange to Kaden, though it hadn't at the time, even if not one bee stung her that day.

On another occasion, Kaden found Nora out gathering strawberries. Her wicker basket was draped across her arm, and Nora had been singing to herself, or so he thought, as she plucked the ripened fruit from their vines. As he drew closer, however, he realized she was singing to another god.

He smiled. She was always singing her gratitude to someone.

On the one particular day he needed Slate's help to get away from his village unnoticed, Kaden found Nora sitting in poppy field with a crochet needle and some thread in her hands. Dragonflies were buzzing in the air from the nearby pond, and butterflies were fluttering from one flower to the next as Nora sat alone singing under the rays of the sun shining above.

As he crept closer Kaden grew curious. Was she making-

"Hello, my friend," Nora called out cutting his thought off. "I have something for you."

"Is that a dreamcatcher, Nora?" Kaden asked with surprise. "How do you know-"

"It is," she replied cutting him off again. "I read about them."

"You did?" Kaden asked. "But why?"

"Well," Nora began. She was twisting some thread in a loop with her needle and it was a tight knot to make. Nora stuck out her tongue and squinted. "Yes!" she whispered to herself when she got it through. "I wanted to know more about you, silly. So, I went to the library and I looked up information about Native American traditions."

A fuzzy bumble bee bounced on the anthers of a nearby poppy and Kaden looked at Nora thoughtfully. He was touched that she had gone to such lengths to learn more about his culture. Most people couldn't be bothered. They made assumptions about his family that usually painted them in a less than generous light. The idea that Nora sought out the truth about him in books endeared him to her.

"Now," Nora continued as she strung some thread across a tiny, circular ring. "According to the reference material I found, (see below reference notes), Dreamcatchers are a Native American tradition that the Ojibway (Chippewa) tribe began."

Twisting some strings to trap an amethyst bead into the netting, Nora suddenly looked up and frowned at Kaden. "I hope its ok that I'm making something outside the origins of your Lenape tribe, Kaden. Is it?" She asked and then continued.