Of Raevins and Croews

2

"Hiya Merick." Her smile was so wide it almost closed her eyes.

"Hey Dahlia." I was running too fast and needed to dig my heels in. Skidding to a stop was my best bet. Rockets burning on excitement as Dahlia's dad would say. My arms pinwheeled in a vain attempt to keep balance. You can't keep what you never had, so I spilled onto the dirt.

If I had hit the sidewalk, that would have been an early end to my day. Scraped, bruised, and bloody, to be confined to my room to force recovery and punish clumsiness. There was a time I thought everything would have been different if that had happened. Time passed, now I'm not so sure. I think things would have happened exactly as they had, no matter what I did.

Even considering, I wouldn't change anything.

"Reeeal smooooth." She said and held out her hand. I took it. As always, I was fascinated by how smooth her skin was. Still a few years before girls did more than skitter through my mind, but Dahlia always brought roses to my cheeks.

"What do you want to do today?" She asked. A gust plucked at the black strands of her hair and tossed them in her face. Her nose wrinkled. I was in love with her before I even knew what it meant.

(I'm getting jealous)

(Hush now, let me get through this)

(Sorry, love)

"Earth to dumbo." The look on her face scrunched into a child's understanding of malicious. She tapped my head with her knuckles. Her tone was harsher than the action. The look evaporated. She was too kind to fake such disharmony she didn't feel.

"There are new neighbors."

"That's right." She said it with confidence. As if she had plucked the answer from my mind before bothering to ask. "And what are we?"

"Kids," I said, trying to match her tone. It was a far cry from where it needed going.

She giggled and hugged me. "No Taunton." That made my blushing cheeks deepen to a feverish maroon. I hated my first name back then, except when it was carried by her voice. "We're the Welcome Brigade."

"Ooh."

One of the neighbor's dogs barked. I jumped.

"Don't be worried. We got this. Everybody loves you."

That confidence again. Even if it wasn't exactly true. Nobody was loved by everybody, not even her. Mostly it was adults that didn't like her. Distrusted her would be a better word to describe it. They said she was too smart for her own good. I didn't see how that would be a bad thing so, like most kids confronted with the strange musings of adults, I ignored it. Dropped it in a well and walked away.

With her hand gripping my wrist tight, she skipped away. I stumbled trying to keep up. "We're going the wrong way."

"No such thing."

"What?"

Dahlia turned mid-eye roll. On her, it didn't seem half as childish as it did on my father. "Everywhere leads to the same place."

"Where's that?"

She shrugged. "Go long enough and you'll come around the world right back to where you started. My dad always says sometimes, we can't pick where we're going, we can only pick how we get there."

Dahlia's dad always said things like that. He talked in ways that made more sense to children than adults. Not complete sense, but more. Understanding him required a certain leap of faith in both the simple and philosophically complicated at the same time.

"Now close your eyes." She said, grin so wide it nearly split her head.

I did. The sidewalk stretched ahead of us but we turned off and grass pricked on my feet. My sense of direction was good, but I quickly lost track with all the twists and turns and random circles. The sounds of the neighborhood faded to nothing behind us. The smell of fresh cut grass and grilling was usurped from within by the richer smell of wet earth.

"Do you know where we are?"

"Hob's River." I said

"Good. Open your eyes."

We were indeed at that shallow running track of water. It was hardly a river, barely even a creek. But the water flowed consistently and carried with it thin patches of green grime. I drank from it once and got very sick for an entire day. Dahlia hadn't been there to stop me. I didn't see her make many mistakes.

"Why are we here?"

She shrugged. "Wanted to get away from the bustle of the city."

If you strained, you could still hear the cars on the highway. "We aren't far enough."

Her smile closed, shuttering her teeth, but the shape remained. It looked sad. "I know."

I hated when her smile went away, even more, when I thought it was because of something I did. "What do you want to do here?"

She shrugged. Her mood was slipping. A precarious thing. Though always a pleasure to be around, sometimes she had a more morose veil than others. More precarious was the ensuing panic of anyone observant enough to see it coming. Like I was right then.

"Want to look for toads?"

A wildcard. Shot in the dark. She was the rough and tumble type, didn't shy away from touching the squirmy things and getting dirty. But I was the only one who actually liked toads. It was all I could think of.

"Sure." She smiled. It was dim, barely peeking from behind the clouds.

We caught toads, running north along the stream to the waterfall. It was little more than a runoff. A four foot drop off where the ground dipped. The current picked up speed from there. Water churned over jagged rocks, bubbling and chattering, forming what we called The Rapids.

Past that, the land was damp from the previous day's heavy rain. More of a swamp. Wet earth sucked at our shoes, soaking through. We turned and followed the snaking path back, heading south upriver. It was the only reason I knew the entire part of the forest was slanted.

We kept going south to the Hand Bridge. There we stopped, faced with an intense standoff between two witches.

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