What They Told Us

And still, during those nights, when we were at the age where we were all supposed to be long over our wishes to be firefighters or ballerinas or scuba divers, Paulie would tell me we were going to the moon.

"We're gonna get out of here," she said confidently. "We're going to get a rocket ship and fly it straight off this rock. We'll build our own if we have to."

She stuck glow-in-the-dark stars onto my bedroom ceiling when we were thirteen. Over halfway to twenty-five, over halfway to the moon. She stuck them on there good. I tried to pry them off when I was fourteen and way, way too old for those sorts of things, but I couldn't get them off without messing up the paint on the ceiling, so I left them.

Paulie spent more time at my house than her own. I didn't think there was anything odd about that until almost high school, when my parents hinted, in tired tones, that Paulie spent way too much time around our place. They probably didn't think she was a good influence on me. She gave herself her first tattoo on her sixteenth birthday on the floor of my bedroom. It was a flower, painstakingly poked into her ankle. She offered to do one for me too. I didn't let her.

She never talked about her home life. I barely knew anything about her family at all, despite all the time we'd spent together all our lives. The first time I heard tears in her voice was when we were eighteen, the summer before we went away to college. It was over the phone – one of the only times she ever called me before coming over to my house. When she got there, it was the first time I ever saw her cry. I held her in my arms and shook with her as she told me everything her parents had told her – as I found out that all the bruises on her arms were not from gym class or bumping into things. She fell asleep on top of me that night, and I held on to her until I eventually fell asleep, once I managed to wrap my head around everything she'd told me. And I wanted to hold her like that forever and keep her safe from everything, but two weeks later we were leaving home and traveling two time zones apart.

We texted. We called every now and then. And I worried about her and she insisted there was nothing to worry about, that she was doing okay, just okay. And maybe I was too pushy trying to get her to tell me what was wrong, because she stopped talking to me so often. She would call me every now and then, sloppy drunk, one AM for me, four AM for her. Sometimes on Saturdays, sometimes on Wednesdays, even.

"I miss you," she'd day a lot. "I wanna come see you. As soon as I get enough money I am leaving this place and coming to steal you away."

And one day – in December of our sophomore year – she actually did it.

It was a Wednesday, and I was sitting up late doing homework, when my roommate came in and told me someone was waiting for me outside. I was confused for a second, and then my heart started racing.

I sprinted down the stairs and out of the dorm as fast as I could, hardly daring to believe it, and there Paulie was – dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, standing out in freezing temperatures.

She grinned at me.

"Hey," she said. "Wanna go to the moon?"

I blinked at her. "What?" was all I could come up with. The dream was long dead. The word 'moon' had not come up between us in almost three years.

She rolled her eyes. Her right eyelid twitched a little when she did it. Just like always.

"You wanna go to the moon?" she repeated. "You do, right?"

"Uh. Yeah, sure," I said. "Um. So... do I need to go grab my stuff, or..."

"Come as you are," she said, vaguely waving her hand. "C'mon. We're not going to get it prime-time or anything at this point, but it's worth a shot."