The Fall of Never(117)

“Higher than that? Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall again?”

He shook his head, but his eyes had crept up and to the right in contemplation. “I can climb to the top,” he stated.

“Wow. You’ve climbed to the top before?”

“Well, no, not yet. But I’ve been practicing. I climb up a little at a time, and each time I go up some more and up some more and pretty soon I’ll make it to the top. Just not yet.”

“You should be careful,” she told him. “You could fall and hurt yourself again.”

“You too.”

“Me too what? What do you mean?”

He pointed at her forehead and said, “You’re bleeding too. What happened?”

She brought a hand up to her forehead and gently touched the tender area. When she brought her fingers away, she saw they were slick with blood. Staring at it made her feel dizzy and she thought she might pass out. For a second or two, while talking with this boy, she’d forgotten all about Simple Simon and the Land of Never.

In my head, she told herself. All of it.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The boy shrugged. “Oh,” he said. Then he nodded toward the brook. “Clean it with the water. It’s clean water. Cold. It’ll make it feel better.”

“Will it sting?”

“No.” Then: “Maybe a little. But not much. You’ll be okay.”

Smiling, she hunkered down beside him along the edge of the brook. With both hands, she reached into the brook and cupped some water, brought it up to her face, hesitated.

“It feels good,” he promised her.

“Yeah,” she said, and patted her hands against her forehead. It stung, but felt good, too.

“I’m Gabriel,” said the boy.

“Kelly,” she responded, a blushing heat flooding her face. Then said, “Do you want to come see a baby?”

Gabriel smiled. “I’ve never seen a real one before,” he said.



Kelly spent the following few weeks getting to know and befriend Gabriel Farmer. He lived with his parents in a small cottage on the other side of the wooded valley and was an only child. He seemed fascinated by the idea that Kelly had a younger sister, and although he never questioned her about it much, Kelly knew he wanted to ask her what it was like…if it was like anything at all…

He taught her to draw. On warm days, they’d sit by the brook and scrawl with crayons in Gabriel’s notebooks endlessly, laughing and telling jokes, and sometimes shooting spit-rockets into the brook water.

“You ever see anything strange down here?” she asked him once.

Not looking up from his artwork, Gabriel said, “Nope. Like what? Bears?”

“Not bears.”

“What?”

She shrugged, her eyes trailing off into the forest depths. “I don’t know. Just stuff. Nothing, I guess.”

Gabriel laughed. “Look at this.” He held up a picture of Kelly in a pink princess gown and pointed hat. She held a star-crowned wand trailing glitter in one hand.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a green lump at Princess Kelly’s feet.

“That’s me,” said Gabriel. “A frog.”

“A frog?” Kelly laughed. “Why a frog?”

Blushing, Gabriel turned back to his drawing pad and rubbed at his eyes from beneath his glasses. “Because that’s what the prince looks like before the princess kisses him.”

She laughed harder and stuck out her tongue. “Oh, gross!” she said.

“Yeah, I know—”

Giggling, she leaned over and kissed Gabriel Farmer on the cheek, shocking him into silence. As she pulled away, the boy clamped a hand over the targeted spot, too embarrassed to look her in the face. She could see tiny droplets of sweat breaking out along his face and neck.

“Nope,” she said, “still a frog.”

He laughed. “Shut up! Shut up!”

“Give me that.” She grabbed the picture from him, examined it at arm’s length. “Kellerella,” she muttered, her face completely sober now.

“What’s that?”

She looked at him. “What?”

“What you said,” he said. “Like Cinderella.”

The palms of her hands began to sweat. “Yeah,” she said, “like a fairy tale.”

Hours later, as she headed back through the forest toward home, she heard the clatter of something up ahead and froze. Movement caught her eye and she turned in time to see several white objects drop from a tree branch and rattle to the ground. They were forks, she saw. Plastic forks with all but one prong busted off.

“Simon,” she whispered.

One of the boy’s pale, thin legs swung down from the tree branch, dangled several feet in front of her. Its sudden appearance startled her and she jumped back, uttered a small cry. Craning her neck, she could barely make out Simon’s poorly-defined form crouched among the leaves and branches of the tree.

“What are you doing up there?”

He tossed another fork down at her and spat on the ground. “Found a new friend?” he said.

“His name’s Gabriel,” she said.

“Do you like him? Is he your boyfriend?”