"Keeernaaah!" her mother suddenly called out in her drowsy memories. Keernah shuddered and stirred with her eyes still closed. It hadn't been like this: actually, she and the boy played and walked together until dark. Only then their parents started to expect them back and called out and looked for them, and...
A cool wind blew into her face and seemed to try and raise her eyelashes. Keernah realized, to her great disappointment, that she was sitting on a cliff. The seawaves were monotonously splashing in front of her, and her parents were walking nearby and noticed where she was.
Keernah, too, was a bit surprised to find herself there. It took her a good minute to recall vaguely that she'd got to the place to think about her friend, and then she probably fell asleep.
But she apparently kept thinking of him even then. Her hand felt warm inside. Keernah slowly unclenched her fingers, suspecting there was something alive beneath them. The dark stone she'd found was wet and dully glowing in scattered light.
"Keernah! Get down immediately!" insisted her mother from the shore below.
But Keernah wouldn't hurry up. She scrutinized the stone thoughtfully and decided she did not want to skip it. The whole idea, all of a sudden, lost all the charm for her. Keernah slowly climbed off the cliff and silently walked past her exasperated parents. She was going to hide the stone in their car, because she was seldom allowed to take street things home and wouldn't run the risk of losing her special find.
In the upper part of the stone she discovered a tiny natural hole – it was so conveniently situated that the stone could be almost perfectly balanced if being hung on a thread. Keernah waited till her parents forgot what she had been doing on the beach and asked if they could give her a very thin but strong thread. It was necessary then to tell them why, so she had to show them the stone, explaining it was a keepsake from a friend.
The parents didn't look like they believed Keernah, but they promised to get a thread for her anyway. Mom stared critically at the stone and asked if Keernah's friend really hadn't had anything smaller and lighter to give. The girl started to feel insulted, but her father noted that a big pendant could be used as a self-defence weapon. Mom instantly changed her mind about the size of the stone, and Keernah suddenly thought that each of her parents was right to some extent. Her friend had had actually given her too much to forget or to bear lightly his absence in her life. Also, had he turned into a stone, he would have tried to protect her even then Keernah could not doubt it. She well remembered the boy drive off the angry dogs that would nearly break off their leashes when she went past them. They barked and growled like mad, getting froth at the mouth, but only when they saw her together with the boy. When – seldom at the time – she walked alone or with her parents, no village dog paid attention to her.
At the same time, the dogs reluctantly became quieter and sat still after he said to them a few strict words or made some gestures. He was not surprised at their hatred for Keernah, though.
"These beasts are jealous," he used to tell her, "They think I have to play only with them."
Keernah actually realized he hadn't turned into a stone, but she still felt there was a small part of him there: she recalled him too clearly when holding the thing in her hand for him to not leave a trace of himself in the stone. The trace was better than nothing anyway. It didn't really matter to Keernah that her parents suspected she'd found the stone somewhere rather than got a gift from a friend. After all, they could only see the outside of the stone while she knew what it was inside.
However, the pendant had never once been tested as a weapon over the next decade of Keernah's life. Sometimes, she did think about using it for self-defense but always thought better of it.
Meanwhile she used it quite often just to daydream, to sort through her memories, or simply to recall again that she was still the same girl who had had the best friend in the world. The stone made her memory really vivid; actually, she remembered things pretty well, but all of it was confused and muddled in comparison with the effect the pendant produced. This was not just her imagination at all – with the pendant's incredible help, Keernah would sometimes recall very important moments that other people remembered and hoped that she had forgotten them. She did forget, but suspected she had and so deliberately turned to her wonderful stone to find out what actually had happened. The benefit of it was too great to think it just a coincidence or good luck.
That was the way the stone protected Keernah: breaking not skulls but hostile intentions. Keernah appreciated this, but she did not often use the pendant to revive her early childhood memories. If someone else had such a stone, Keernah would do everything to get it, believing she wouldn't let it slip out of her hands for days. But reliving the time with the one who was no longer near appeared to be very hard. The imperfection of human memory revealed its sense to Keernah.
Every now and then, however, she did like to yearn and feel warm tears slowly flowing over her face. Like they were flowing now.
She remembered bringing the boy home for the first time – under the pretext of sheltering from the rain, but she actually wanted to show her friend to her parents and the other way round. He'd said he liked them – why not let him have a look?
He did look at them for a long time and unnoticeably for anyone but Keernah. She started to worry a little – maybe he just stopped liking them?
"Well?" she said impatiently, "Do you like them, eh?"
The boy didn't reply at once and kept watching her parents for one more minute. They were still young, energetic, and sure they'd overcome the hardships of post-crisis life with the power of their relationship, knowledge, and determination. They were chatting with their friends, laughing, drinking tea and thinking that the children near them were just playing some odd silent games.
Keernah finally got angry and dragged the boy into another room.
"Don't you like them?" she asked intimidatingly. "They aren't like yours at all, are they?"
"They really are," the boy said without batting an eye, "That's why I like them. I wish I was your brother or you were my sister. That would be so good."
"Liar!" Keernah screamed even though she wasn't angry anymore.
"No, I'm not. Don't you want to be my sister?"
"I do. I mean you lie that my parents are like yours. They aren't at all!"
Keernah had already seen the boy's parents and couldn't muster the courage to tell him she didn't really like his mother and truly hated his easily irritable and angry father.
"Oh," he said, "I forgot to tell you: I live with my second parents, and yours are like my first ones."
Keernah's mouth dropped open. She'd heard adults talking about having a second child, but she had no idea that children could have second parents.
"And where are they? she asked in amazement, trying to imagine how she followed the boy to have a look at them.
"I don't know."
"How do you know then you have some first parents? Am I going to have the second ones too?". Keernah had already got used to the fact that her friend's don't knows were full of wonders if only she asked.
"It's way better if you never never have," the boy said very seriously.
Scared Keernah came up to him and whispered, "How did you get your second ones?"
"They don't tell me. Dad says that I was abandoned at their front door, and Mom says he's just joking. But when she thinks I can't hear her, she tells him to shut up."
"Shut up?!" Keernah repeated in horror, for she only heard the word from street bullies. "But maybe you can just follow him quietly when he goes somewhere and he will eventually lead you to your first parents?"
"I tried that already. He only visits our neighbors or goes away by car."
"Of course, he goes to them!" Keernah said confidently. "Look, next time he wants to go, you warn me, then I ask my dad, and he takes us after your one in our car!"
"I don't know," the boy hesitated, "He goes to someone else, maybe. Once he said he'd kill my parents if he could. Then why would he go to them?"
"But he does joke about it!" Keernah cried out impatiently. "If he wanted to kill them, he'd kill you too. Your Mom might be right. Look, though, how do you know that my parents are like your first ones? Did you see them?"
"I think I did but can't recall them. I remember better what they were inside. Yours remind me of them a little. I'm like them too. And my second ones are totally different!"
"Oh..." the girl wondered, somewhat ashamed of not noticing it earlier – she had seen his fair-haired parents more than once. "You believe you're looking like your first ones on the outside too? I'm not; I'm blue-eyed, but neither of my parents have blue eyes. They say I got the color from my grandmother."
"Mom asked me to tell other people that I look like a grandmother I've never seen." the boy sighed.
Keernah frowned, for she'd meant to surprise him with the thing she'd learned just recently; but then she nearly turned pale with a sudden fright.
"Are my parents really my first ones? Need to ask..."
"Wait!" the boy grabbed her by the arm, guessing faster than Keernah herself that she was going to do it right away, "They are your first ones and they don't lie about your grandmother. It's all right."
"How do you know?"
"Even with blue eyes, you do look like them. And you're like them inside."
Keernah pursed her lips but believed him. He was better versed in this "inside" than she was – yet. However, she was gradually starting to understand it clearer as well. At the moment, it occurred to her that the own children of the boy's second parents would only be as nasty and cowardly as all the others she'd met. Not as amazing as he was.
"I'll recognize your first parents if I see them," she said. "They might live somewhere in my city. I'll tell them where you are. They probably have lost you!"
The boy smiled affectionately and sadly at her: as if being grateful but knowing she would not be able to fulfill her promise. Keernah came even closer to him, stared into his large, elongated eyes, which she liked so much, and gave him a big hug.
"I will find them!" she insisted, whispering in his ear. It was obvious to her that he wasn't hoping to ever see his true parents again. For some reason, though, she did not get angry at the boy for doubting her; instead, she felt a new and strange mix of soft sorrow, tenderness, and warmth toward him.
"And you can tell them I love them," the boy whispered in her ear too, hugging her back.