III

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I went to school in the city. It let out and I hurried to the other side of town to where the city suddenly switched to woods. It was never empty. It was a place for running and playing with dogs and meeting secret boyfriends and committing crimes—point is, it was never empty.

I waited at the mouth of a path that carved through the trees. Charlie appeared out of nowhere and we started down the large path. Then we darted into the woods where there was no path, just trees.

If I squinted, all I could see was green. The trees were bursting with life. And where there is life, there is song. Birds flew overhead, whistling to one another.

We sat against an enormous tree. We were kind of close, kind of touching, kind of far apart, kind of wishing one of us would make some kind of move.

That was how our relationship was. It could not have been more obvious that we like each other yet we never said anything. There was always that little speck of doubt that we were wrong and if we came out and said it then . . . friendship over. Which was weird because we were so much more than friends; but we also were not dating. And yet we kind of were but just weren’t putting it to words and making it official.

A bird’s melody reminded me a lot of my song last night. “You know,” I began. “I wish we could only communicate through singing, like birds.” He laughed. “No, I’m serious. That way they can’t outlaw music because then there would just be silence all the time.”

“There might as well be silence now. People don’t talk about meaningful things.”

I inched closer to him. “Neither do we,” I laughed.

“No, we don’t . . . we sing about meaningful things.”

I smiled and rested my head against his shoulder. Yes, because friends do this.

“I’m jealous of the birds,” Charlie said abruptly.

I spotted the one that was singing my song and whistled back to it.

But I immediately felt Charlie’s hand cover my mouth. “Please don’t do that,” he begged me.

I peeled his hand off of my lips. I was smiling. “Why not, they’ll never know the difference.”

He was silent. He was always afraid of me getting mad at him. Not because I was stubborn and may or may not have had anger issues, but because he was afraid that the tiniest mistake would cause him to lose me. Knowing this, I didn’t pick fights with him.

“Would you die for music?” he asked me after only hearing the birds chirping overhead for a while. “Would you die so others could sing?”

“Yes, in a heartbeat,” I answered immediately.

He shook his head, smiling. “You don’t have the courage,” he teased me.

“I will die singing!” I declared jokingly.

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