“I miss you baby. Can we talk?” Sam hit the ‘7’ on her phone’s keypad to save the message. She didn’t want to accidentally erase it. Cam’s voice tugged at her heartstrings and she was reminded again of how much she missed him. They didn’t talk anymore, and it was for the better. Both of them were trying to move on since Sam had moved away.

It was for the better.

It was for the better…

Sam kicked a rock off the ledge of the decrepit wooden bridge she was standing on, watching the creek below her swirl away into a dark mass in the distance. It was Friday. A few hours after her last class of the day. She was sad.

This is where she came. Where she listened to old voicemails and relived the past, carving names of people who had long forgotten her into trees and throwing rocks at the sky when it didn’t cry for her like she did for them. She’d lie in the soft grass in the clearing of the trees, sometimes for hours, letting the blades tickle her and dot her arms with pastel pink rashes. The sun would attempt to break through the clouds but be denied, sifting gray light through instead and bathing Sam in a muted, depressive afterglow.

Sam figured that this was a good analogy for her life: a muted, depressive afterglow.
It was for the better.

She considered listening to Cam’s last voicemail again, reliving the moments before she called him back and they decided to part ways. Maybe she’d be able to pretend that they were still together while she listened to it, noting the way his voice caught on the word ‘baby’, her heart still fluttering in her chest when she heard him say it. Three thousand miles had proved to be too far for their love. Four years gone. Goodbye, teenage love. Hello, dusty clothes and college tests and splintered fingers from nailing your own coffin shut.

The buzzing of her cell phone jerked Sam from her self indulgent nightmare. Her mom was calling her. She sent the call to voicemail before replying with a text, telling her mother she couldn’t talk right now. But what did Sam want for dinner, Beth wanted to know. Sam gazed up at the darkening gray sky. What did Sam want for dinner? Sam wanted to know.

But the person leaning over her wanted to know something else.

“What are you doing out here so late?” He looked to be the same age as Sam: eighteen, maybe nineteen, with remnants of a youthful glow still coloring his pale cheeks. His inky hair stuck out at all angles in a feathery disarray atop his head and he peered down at her with cognac eyes full of sparks of curiosity. “Being out here at night is a deathwish.”

Sam noticed with disdain that he seemed to be making himself comfortable in the grass next to her. He rolled down onto his back, eyes glassy as they explored the sky with hers.

“I’m out here because I want to be alone.” Not in a forgiving mood, Sam was sure to use her voice to cut any hope he had of befriending her and carrying on a conversation.

“So am I. We could be alone together,” he said, shooting a glance over at her. She let out a sigh. Why not.

“We could.”

In the back of her mind, she was thinking how she should be concerned that a man out of nowhere had laid down next to her, in the forest, at dusk, with no real explanation, talking about deathwishes. But there was something about this boy that put her at ease. He seemed to cool the anger she had been constantly putting out into the world lately. The breeze picked up when he joined her, and they lay side by side until Sam actually felt compelled to engage him in conversation.

“Who are you?” She asked abruptly, disrupting the beautiful silence that had been permeating the heavy August air.

“I’m Gerard. Who are you?” Gerard rolled over onto his side, compiling a list of possible names for Sam until she revealed it to him. “Like Samantha?”

“No. Like Sam.” She smiled when he smiled at her smart-ass remark. “I hate the name Samantha.”

“Me, too. So your name is Sam, like Sam. That’s good enough,” Gerard said as he leaned back into the soft grass. Sam noticed with a hint of envy he wasn’t getting rashes from the sweet blades licking his skin.

“If you’re here to be alone, why are you talking to me?” Sam muttered, the words shooting into the night sky and hanging lowly over the two of them in the grass. Fireflies were beginning to creep onto the edge of the clearing from the brambles lining it, an eerie green glow illuminating the windswept sea of jade.

“Because you looked lonely. And I was beginning to get kind of lonely, too,” Gerard admitted.
“I’d been throwing rocks off the bridge a mile down and thought I heard someone over here. There’s usually never people in this neck of the woods. So I thought I’d come and bother you. Because I was lonely.” Sam sat up, raking her eyes over Gerard again.

He didn’t look like a serial killer. She decided she was safe, drawing her knees up to her chest from a singular chilling breeze that swept through the trees. “I shouldn’t have worn shorts.”

“Probably not. Get some meat on your bones or you’ll freeze in the winter.”

“Could say the same to you, sir,” Sam retorted.

“Can’t be bothered. Wouldn’t work anyway.” Gerard also sat up, crossing his legs in front of him as he plucked strands of grass from the root. “Are you new to Belleville?”

“Yeah. Is it that obvious?” Sam let out a nervous laugh with her reply, echoing throughout the clearing when in reality it was just Gerard mirroring her laughter. His laughs sounded like beautiful, pealing bells, Sam thought to herself.

“Fairly. You still have some sort of tan, you don’t have the supposed accent that everyone here does, and your outfit isn’t right for the weather. Also, you’re in the fucking woods at night. Nobody comes to these woods at night,” he added darkly, drawing a figure unseen to Sam in the dirt beneath the grass.

“Why? Do people actively avoid this area? Let me guess; it’s haunted,” Sam joked, rolling her eyes for punctuation. Gerard let loose another laugh. This one, however, did not sound like bells. This one sounded darker. If they were bells, they were the bells at a funeral.

“People in Belleville will believe anything superstitious told to them in an alley behind a school.”

“That didn’t answer my question, but okay.”

Gerard didn’t speak for a while, and that was okay with Sam. She had forgotten all about dinner, and all about going home. She was lying down with a stranger, thinking of someone she
left behind in California with a broken heart and quiet mind.

Maybe it really was better off this way.

---

“Will you come back here? I mostly hang out here when I’m not at home, so if you ever want to find me, just come here,” Gerard said eagerly. Having been in a comatose, apathetic mood for the last month since moving to the east coast, Sam felt some of her humanity beginning to creep back through her blood veins and out her pores in the sweat she was feeling drip down her neck as she ran back through the woods to get home at a decent hour.

“Sure,” she panted at Gerard without giving it a second thought. She’d later regret this because it meant she’d actually have to get out of the house and put real clothes on to see another person. A real, live person who wanted to see her. She wouldn’t go as far as to call him a ‘friend’, but this was the closest thing Sam had had to one in years other than Cam.
It’s better off this way.

“I have to go now, but I’ll probably be back tomorrow,” Sam shot Gerard a rare smile before crossing back onto the concrete sidewalk that ended in a dangerous half foot break into the forest, luring most runners into Sprained Ankle Hell.

“Have a good night, Sam.” She turned around to wave at him, but he was already gone. He was bizarre, but he was interesting, and he seemed pure. Unlike a lot of other people she rubbed elbows with on the daily.

Dinner had already been served by the time she crossed the backyard and stumbled in gracefully through the back door. Beth looked up from the dining table, nodding in the direction of a place setting to Sam. She took her seat, opposite her mother, and began to apologize for being late.

“It was a long day. I had some exams I needed to do online for college and I needed to unwind so I went on a walk through the woods back there,” Sam explained, motioning vaguely in the direction of god knows where. “It was nice. I didn’t have good enough reception to talk to you on the phone.”

“That’s fine. When do you start your classes?” Beth, Sam’s mother, picked at the Kentucky Fried Chicken she had ordered on the way home from her shift at the hospital as a nurse.

“Two weeks from now, I think. It’s a Monday for sure. I just...I can’t remember the date off the top of my head. I just did the placement exam today,” Sam said, stirring her mashed potatoes into her gravy.

“Well, I’m very proud of you, honey. Glad you’re getting a start on college. I knew you would do it,” Beth said, smiling at her daughter across the table. Embarrassment burned into Sam’s cheeks despite the fact that it was just the two of them eating dinner.

“It’s not that big of a deal. It’s only community college-”

“Hey, college is still college. And either way, you did it,” Beth pointed a forkful of coleslaw at Sam before eating it then rising to her feet. “I’ll put the leftovers away. I need to shower. I’m so beat from my shift.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll clean the kitchen, just go get comfy,” Sam said, patting her mom on the back and watching the look of relief spread across her face when she offered to clean. After the chicken was sealed in tupperware containers of various sizes and the counters were scrubbed with Windex, Sam settled herself into her room with a ‘goodnight’ to her mom. After a shower herself, she bundled herself under the covers and tried to not think about Cameron.

For the first time in weeks, Sam went to bed without listening to an old voicemail from Cameron. Instead, she fell asleep with thoughts of a brandy-eyed boy with pitch colored hair peppering her dreams.

Notes