Night Meeting

The edge of the window frame scrapes against my hip as I wriggle my body backwards, my toes searching for the slanted roof below. Shingles touch the bottom of my sneakers and I shift my weight to my feet, carefully ducking my head out through the window. Glancing to my left, I see that the light in my parents’ room is out. I exhale.

I crouch down, clinging to the brick wall as I clamber out to the edge of the roof. When I reach it, I lower myself onto my stomach and spin my body around, my feet now seeking the coiled iron pillar that connects the small rooftop with the house’s front steps below. From there it’s easy to get down. It might as well be a ladder.

I hit the ground and pad across the grass, staying low and moving as stealthily as I can. When I get to the corner of the yard, I glance back one last time. The window is still empty and dark. I disappear behind the hedge that lines the property.

Walking up the empty street, the quiet darkness of the night heightens my senses. The crickets are chirping, and it seems to get louder with every step I take. Summer is at its peak, and although the air has cooled since the sun set, I can still feel the heat radiating off the asphalt under my feet. A bead of sweat skitters down my spine.

Turning the corner, I stride along another sleepy street for a few more blocks before entering the neighbourhood park. Stepping into the park, I slow my pace as the sense of familiarity washes over me. I feel as at home here as I do in my own bedroom. As a kid, I played at this park almost every day, running up the slide, trading pokemon cards, eating sand…In middle school, my friends and I would bum around at the picnic tables, drinking slushies and listening to our mp3 players through shared wired headphones.

Now, I mostly come to the park late at night, when it’s empty and quiet. I’ll sit suspended on a swing, rocking gently and feeling an embarrassing nostalgia for the time when I’d thought that if I pumped my weight strongly enough I could fly off into outer space, or at least do a full loop.

Tonight, I made plans to meet up with my friend Rory. I make my way over to the swingset and sit down, waiting for her to arrive. Rory and I have been friends since the first day of grade one. Because our last names start with the same letter, I was always right behind her when our class lined up to navigate the school’s hallways. We would whisper to each other as we shuffled single-file with our peers, careful to follow the silver line on the terrazzo floors as instructed, making our way to assemblies, gym class, the cafeteria.

In the time since, we’d been through a lot together, from overnight camp for the first time together, to the time I got suspended from middle school for writing ‘Mrs.Thompson is a bitch’ in a bathroom stall, to Rory’s recent decision to stop visiting her dad in the country every other weekend. We were always there for each other. That meant something to me, but it sometimes seemed like it meant more to people who were older than us. Hang on to your long-term friendships, people would always tell me, it’s rare to have people in your life for so long. When you’re fifteen, you don’t appreciate how lucky you are to have had a friend as long. You don’t think about how lucky you will feel in the future. You don’t think about the future at all.

I lean my head against the cold metal chain of the swing, and a movement catches my eye in the distance. I look up and see a tall figure treading from the street into the park. I recognize that gait instantly—clumsy and graceful at once, like a fawn. As she gets closer, the yellow light of the park’s lone street lamp lights up Rory’s warm and winking smile.

“I brought weed,” she says conspiratorially.

We pass a joint back and forth, dragging our sneakers through the sand. Hours pass as we talk about our part-time jobs, whether Laguna Beach is better than The OC, teachers we hate and the ones that we love, who our real friends are and who is fake, the parties we had fun at and the ones we threw up at, who we have crushes on and whether there’s any overlap, and sharing the secrets we can only whisper aloud in a moment like this…

We pause and listen to the sounds of the insects rising up from the grass. We wonder aloud if we’ve already felt every feeling that we’ll ever feel in life, to some degree, or if there are new feelings we haven’t felt yet. We hope that neither of us will get our period this week, because we have to run the Beep Test in gym class. We make plans to go on a bike ride on Friday after school.

When the sky begins to brighten, it’s time to head home. I’ll climb back through my bedroom window, and Rory will slip through her sliding door. We get up from the swing set and move slowly towards the corner of the park. We look both ways before we cross the street. There’s no sidewalk on this street, but we’re used to walking along the edge of the road. It’s quiet and residential; even at rush hour, there’s hardly ever traffic coming through this area.

So it’s a bit odd now, in the stillness before dawn, to see a car’s headlights slowly turn to face us up ahead on the street. The car begins to creep towards us on the other side of the road, and we creep towards it on our side. We both glance up at it, but neither of us mentions it. Our chatter has died down, the reality setting in that we’ll both soon be lying in our beds, staring up at our ceilings, until, just as we drift off, we’re awoken with a jolt by the sound of our alarm clocks. The silence between us is comfortable and familiar, and we move rhythmically along the road, approaching the intersection where we’ll split off and go our separate ways.

The car moves lazily towards us, slowing but never fully braking as it passes through stop signs. It jostles over a speed bump, and its bright yellow headlights catch our bloodshot eyes. We squint. I glance over at Rory, who is staring down at her feet as she takes one step, then another. Time slows down, and for a long moment, a deeper silence settles over us—the crickets go quiet, and the air goes still. My ears buzz, muffling the sound of our sneakers scraping on the pavement beneath our feet. The crunch of the car’s wheels on the road warps like a record playing at half speed. One by one, the hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise. Rory’s head lifts in slow motion, twisting to face me, and she opens her mouth to say something.

Our eyes meet, but before she can speak, both of our faces are lit up as if by a spotlight. Our heads turn to face forwards, and we are blinded by a bright white light. It floods our vision, eliminating the road in front of us, the trees around us, and the periwinkle sky above. I hold up a hand to try to shield my eyes, but the light shines right through. We stare back at it, eyes like saucers, mouths agape. 

The loud roar of the car’s engine snaps things back into real-time, and the car lurches towards us as the tires screech, skidding on pavement. We shriek, frozen, our young lives flashing before us: Summer camp; the Beep Test; terrazzo floors; our bike ride next weekend; my 9th birthday party, when Rory got me the Lizzie McGuire Movie on DVD; the kitten that followed her home from the bus stop in grade four, that she named Avril, after Avril Lavigne; my first period, which came as a surprise when I was talking on the phone with Rory.

Our arms reach out frantically for each other, grabbing at fingers, wrist bones, elbows. We trip backwards, intertwined, and tumble onto someone’s front lawn, thudding onto the dewey grass. The car comes screeching to a halt, front wheels nearly touching the curb, the bumper just inches away from us. We breathe heavily, huffing and puffing as our chests heave and our bodies tremble. The headlights glare at us, lighting us up as we cling to each other, petrified and relieved at once.

As we begin to regain composure, the car clicks. Creaking, the wheels inch backwards. It reverses slowly, slithering back into its proper lane with a groan. It pauses there for a moment, and everything goes still—the car, the grass, the insects, the air, our hearts. Then, the car jolts abruptly forward, breaking the stillness as it speeds away down the street. A cackling laughter drifts from the open passenger window as it skitters around a corner and vanishes into the night.

Releasing each other limb by limb, Rory and I stare blankly into the emptiness in front of us. The space around us is hollow, the air pushed out from the force of our screams. We sit there quietly as our eyes adjust back to the muted light of dawn. The road, the trees, and the sky come back into view, orienting us. The wet grass beneath us tickles our legs. A bird begins to chirp in the distance.