“Watch out, dipshit!!” Enna skidded to a halt, her bald bike tires leaving tracks on the asphalt. In front of her, Ulysses was crouched on the street, peering into the storm drain. His worn-out black hoodie made him difficult to see in the low light, which was why Enna had nearly run him over. He barely acknowledged her, instead pulling a clunky flashlight out of his pocket and shining it down into the depths of the gutter.
Enna swung off her bike and parked it on the sidewalk, crouching down beside Ulysses. She looked down the drain and then back at him, squinting. His face was hard to make out in the darkness, but from what she could tell it was scrunched up in concentration. “Hey.” She shoved him on the shoulder. He wobbled a little bit and glared at her. “What’re you looking at? You see a frog or something?”
Ulysses huffed and turned the flashlight off, stuffing it back into his pocket. “No, I didn’t see a frog. I’m not eight years old, I don’t care about animals anymore.” He stood up and hooked his thumbs in his jean pockets, casting another glance towards the storm drain. “It looked like… a hand? Like there was a hand reaching out of the drain, but it had too many fingers to be human. And it moved, like it was… beckoning me.” He shivered, looking away from the black opening of the drain.
Enna let out a low whistle. “Damn, man. Halloween isn’t for a whole month, and you’re already breaking out the scary stories. What next, you gonna tell me there’s a clown under your bed?”
Ulysses glared at her and flipped up his hood. “It wasn’t a story, Enna. Stop being a jackass.”
“Yeah, yeah. You think I’m gonna believe you after you convinced me that you eat six bugs every night while you’re sleeping?” Enna walked back over to her bike and leaned it off the kickstand. “I ain’t trusting you anymore.” She started walking towards her house.
Ulysses snorted and jogged a little bit to catch up. “That was when we were seven, and you’re still dumb enough to believe anything I tell you.”
“Am not!” Enna aimed a kick at him, but he jumped to the side, like he’d done a million times before. “I know tons of stuff. I know more about sports than you do.”
“That’s hardly a badge of honor,” Ulysses sniped, still grinning. She grinned back, and they walked to their houses in easy silence. One broken streetlight buzzed above their heads, flickering on and off in the dim autumn air. Most kids got home before it got this dark, but Enna and Ulysses weren’t most kids. Neither of them rode the buses, because both of them stayed at school as long as they possibly could. Enna had a good goddamn reason, as far as she was concerned. She was in every sports team she could get into, and a few that she wasn’t supposed to be on but that they couldn’t keep her off of. Soccer, lacrosse, track, wrestling, you name it. Most days she had practice from the minute she got out of last period. When there wasn’t practice, her coach would open up the field for her and tell her to lock up when she was done. Coach Gemma seemed to get why she preferred running herself to exhaustion over going home at a reasonable hour, even if she herself didn’t really have a reason for it. Ulysses, on the other hand, wasn’t even doing anything interesting. He just sat in the school library till it closed, doing his homework and reading whatever he could get his hands on. Enna didn’t get it, but that was his business. Practice usually let out at the same time the library closed, so they ended up walking home together more often than not. It helped that they were neighbors, and also that their parents gave similar amounts of a shit about when they were home.
“You wanna go to the hideout tomorrow?” Enna asked, breaking the silence. Ulysses nodded, scuffing his dirty sneakers on the leaf-strewn street.
“Been a while,” he said. “Maybe it won’t be fun anymore.”
Enna snorted. “What? No, the hideout rules. Just cause we couldn’t go all summer doesn’t mean it doesn’t still rule.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t it feel like kid stuff now?” Ulysses shot a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. “I mean, we’re twelve now. We’re almost teenagers. Secret clubhouses are for babies.”
“Ulysses, why do you love being wrong all the time?” Enna rolled her eyes at him. “It’s a cool abandoned shack in the woods and we can go there and say cuss words and nobody gets mad at us. We can talk about- we can talk about sex there if we want! There’s no rules and it’s just us and our friends and it’s great.” Sure, the shack was falling in on itself, and maybe sometimes they found needles and cigarette butts in there. But they had a couple of towels stored in a cardboard box that they could lay on the bare concrete floor and sit with all their friends and just be chill for a little while. They could bring snacks and leave the wrappers on the floor if they wanted to, and one time Emiel had brought a bottle of margarita mix that they’d smuggled out of their parents’ cabinet and they had all pretended to get giggling drunk off of it. It was a good place to be. They hadn’t been able to go for most of the summer, though, because the creek that wrapped around it had been flooded for weeks and none of them were willing to risk getting sick from whatever trash juice was in that stream. There was a good chance the place had collapsed by now, but Enna hoped not.
“I guess,” Ulysses replied, noncommittal. They walked in silence for a while longer until they turned onto their street. Even though neither of them were talking, they both got quieter as they approached their houses. Ulysses’ feet barely made a sound as he stepped over the curb onto the sidewalk. Enna found herself steering her bike around the fallen leaves. They walked together towards the two neighboring houses. Most of the houses in their neighborhood had been built off similar models, but Ulysses and Enna’s houses were identical. Mirrored, though. One front door on the left, one on the right. Both with small bedrooms on the second floor, weird-shaped rooms from the window poking out of the roofline. When she was little, Enna had imagined that the window in her room was a secret passage into her friend’s house, that the two houses were connected and that if she walked out of the window she could step straight into Ulysses’ room.
They had the next best thing, though. There was a huge oak tree planted between the two houses. Enna had heard her dad complaining about it for as long as she could remember, but there was nothing he could do about the way its massive limbs stretched over their yard and dropped leaves and twigs and acorns on the lawn. It was in Mr. Beijild’s lawn, technically, and Enna’s dad knew better than to bring it up with the man. Enna had lived in that house for as long as she could remember and she’d still only seen Ulysses’ dad a handful of times, but she remembered the cold way he would stare at her and the way Ulysses flinched when he moved too quickly. Everyone Enna knew avoided even saying his name. Her dad called him “that neighbor man” when he complained about the tree to her mom. Enna didn’t see what the problem was with the tree. Its branches stretched from window to window, reaching high above both houses and arching over their roofs. It had to be at least a hundred years old, and its limbs were plenty thick enough to hold someone’s weight. Even if that someone was twelve and a half and on the wrestling team. Enna and Ulysses had been sneaking across the tree into each others’ rooms since they were old enough to know how to open their windows. They didn’t do it every night, but when the silence in his house or the screaming in hers became unbearable they’d scramble across as quietly as they could and tap on the window until they were let in.
Not tonight, though. Enna could already tell that this was one of the nights where Ulysses didn’t want to be around people. She didn’t say anything as he walked away from her to his front door, just kept a watch on him until he got inside. It wouldn’t be the first time his dad had locked him out of the house. When he opened the door, he turned and nodded at her, and she nodded back and wheeled her bike into the garage. She locked it to her dad’s workbench, hid the key in her back pocket, and carefully turned the handle on the door.
Nobody was in the mud room. She toed her shoes off and picked them up in one hand, peeking around the wall into the kitchen. Nobody in there either. Enna could hear the tv chattering in the living room and relaxed. They’d already eaten dinner. That meant there were probably leftovers she could have. Sure enough, she swung open the beige fridge door to reveal cold spaghetti in a red Tupperware container. Jackpot. Enna scooped it up and shifted it to the hand holding her shoes so she could slip a fork out of the drawer. She bumped the drawer with her hip to slide it closed, wincing when it rattled. No change from the tv room, though. Thank god for Family Feud. She padded in her socks over the hardwood floors and up the stairs. Nobody yelled up at her to be quiet. Nobody stopped her as she opened the door to her room and shut it as quietly as she could. Nobody saw her breathe a sigh of relief and sit down heavily at her desk to devour the cold leftovers.
When the spaghetti was all gone, Enna picked up her discarded backpack and upended it on her desk. Out fell three notebooks, two and a half pencils, a baseball, and about a hundred crumpled up papers. She dug through the paper wads until she found the one she was looking for. Carefully, she smoothed the paper out on her desk and read the numbers on it. Then she opened a desk drawer and dug through it, mouthing the numbers to herself so she’d remember. Under two layers of socks and lint was a small box, which she opened, pulling out a walkie-talkie. Carefully, squinting at the numbers on the dial, she tuned it to the frequency written on the paper. She turned the knob on the top, pressed the button on the side, and spoke. “Hey? Emiel?”
She released the button and waited. Only a few moments later, the speaker crackled to life, and she heard her friend’s distorted voice coming out of it. “Hey!” Panicking at the noise, she turned down the volume dial, her heart pounding, but no yelling came from downstairs. Safe.
“Looks like it works!” Enna said into the radio. This walkie-talkie had to be the most expensive thing she owned, so it would have sucked if it hadn’t worked. Mostly for Emiel, who it technically belonged to. Whatever.
“Perfect! Am I coming through okay?” Enna could see what Emiel was probably doing right now- lying on their canopy bed, head dangling off the side, permed hair pooling on the floor, walkie-talkie held in one perfectly-manicured hand. She could hear pop music fading in and out in the background, tinny through the radio waves.
“Coming through fine. Hey, it hasn’t rained in a while, you wanna see if everyone else wants to go check out the hideout tomorrow?” Enna usually relied on Emiel to organize group hangouts. For one thing, they were allowed to use their home phone. For another, they were the one in the same neighborhood as everyone else, the fancy suburbs on the other side of the woods. That neighborhood had things like “functioning streetlights” and “well-paved sidewalks,” the polar opposite of Enna’s shitty street. It also had most of the people Enna hung out with.
“Yeah, good idea! I hope that place is still standing. Want to meet up there around lunch tomorrow?”
“Sounds good!” Enna could probably sneak a couple sandwiches out of the kitchen before then. Her mom worked on Saturday mornings, and her dad used that time for working on his car in the driveway. Not a lot of chance either of them would stop her from getting out through the back and getting Ulysses. “I gotta work on some stuff now, I’ll see you then.”
“Later!” Emiel clicked off their radio, and Enna did the same. She stuffed it back into the box and rearranged the layers of socks over it before shoving the drawer back into place. Her parents had mostly stopped going into her room, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious. She shoved the wadded-up papers back into her bag and opened one of the notebooks. If she didn’t start her homework now, she’d never get it done. She sighed at the incomprehensible words on the page and resigned herself to a terrible night.
Author's Notes:
Written 9/26/2017. This was definitely the most ambitious thing I had attempted to date.