Never at Night

I first met her when I moved in next door, about five. She sat in the big warm apple tree right on the boundary of our properties, on her side of the branches. She had band-aids all over her knees, and pink socks with Minnie Mouse sneakers. I was shy, but the tree looked so inviting and she didn’t pose a threat. We sat on opposite sides of the tree for hours and watched my mom yell at the movers over and over again—over a vase, the sofa, and my shiny new canopy bed that slid down the porch steps and landed on the mover’s foot with a clatter and a scream of agony. We sat until my mom called me inside, and her dad called her inside, and we both scooted off the tree and to our respective houses without saying a thing to one another. But we both looked back.

She and I started kindergarten together. She learned my favorite color was pink; I learned that hers was black. We realized we were both left handed, and that we both inhaled macaroni and cheese. We held hands in the playground and jumped rope on our own at recess. When there was a fire drill, she’d shrink back into the wall and start to cry, and I’d take her hand and bravely lead her out the doors to stand by the rest of the class, between the first graders and that boy who ate his boogers.

We’d always meet at the tree. It was our halfway point; if we had a fight, the tree was the place where we made peace offerings, if we shared a secret; the tree heard it, too. Sometimes in the dead of night I’d look out my window and she’d be sitting in the tree, her back to me, swinging her legs, looking down into the grass. Sometimes I’d climb out my ground-floor window and join her, but we never talked at night.

Our dads thought it would be fun to build a tree house for us, so we could have tea parties and whatnot in our own private hotel, but our mothers shook their heads. It was too high, they said, it was too dangerous. Eventually, the dads, with the help of her and me, won out and the tree house went under construction. It never got finished. Somewhere between the floor and the walls, the dads got in a squabble over sports and neither would throw aside his dignity and apologize. The tree house was big square floor high up, with a rope ladder. Pitiful tree house it may have been, but she and I enjoyed it.

Nobody talked to her. We were both quiet, but nobody would make conversation. She didn’t mind, though. Bathroom gossip stopped abruptly as we came in, and she was last picked to present her artwork in class. I thought it was beautiful. Everyone else drew butterflies and cars and rainbows, but she didn’t. She drew different things. The teacher frowned when she saw them, but I smiled. She was so talented. She told me that sometimes I was her inspiration, and it made me feel like I was flying inside.

We started jr. high together. I joined the drama club and journalism and she didn’t join anything. She started wearing more black, and I was busy almost every weekend. When I invited her along she politely declined. Sometimes, after I got home, I’d see her sitting in the tree, looking at the grass. I’d sit by her, and sometimes try to make her smile, but she would never answer. We don’t talk at night.

Her parents started fighting a lot. We’d hear them screaming at each other during dinner, but we never said anything. She started to come over more often, and we’d sleep in my room in my big fluffy bed with pink pillows, and she’d look so out of place in her black t-shirt and underwear. But she clutched my teddy bear tight and slept anyways. She hardly ever smiled, or talked, and spent a lot longer in the bathroom than anyone else, but I was happy to be her support.

When I was 16 I came home from a long night of partying. I was a little drunk, and instead of going straight to bed and sleeping it off I climbed up the worn rope ladder on the tree and almost fell off in surprise when I found her, hugging her knees in the middle of the platform. She buried her head in her knees when she saw me, and for a moment she was nothing but a shadow.

She told me that her parents divorced, and her dad was living at her uncles. I smoothed my skirt and she told me how she was in love with a boy at school and she thought he loved her too, but when she showed him how much she loved him he pushed her away and called her a slut. She told me how she had been feeling lately, and she showed me her wrists and her legs and her stomach, and she made me promise not to tell anyone. Then she lay down and stared at the moon, tears streaming down her pale face, her raven hair stark against the rough wood.

I stayed with her until my head hurt and my eyes were drooping, and I begged her to come down with me and spend the night, so we could talk and sleep nestled together in my pink bed with the fluffy pillows. She would be safe and warm and in the morning we could talk some more, but she shook her head and smiled wanly at me, and said she’d be fine. She climbed up higher in the tree, higher than ever before, and told me she would just stay a little longer, and I said okay and told her I loved her and she would always be my friend. She said she loved me too, and I reluctantly went to bed.

It was three then. I woke up an hour later to sirens and screaming and lights and chaos, and I rushed outside in a tank top and my underwear. A stretcher laid beside the tree, her mother screaming and sobbing beside it. My mother and neighbors gathered around, hugging her, suffocating her. Everybody was crying and wailing and mourning, and I stood, half-awake, half-hung over, and only just realizing the horror of what had happened.

Nobody believed that she would jump.