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I pass that abandoned bar where the Ku Klux Klan once thrived, meeting every third Tuesday of the month. The glass is long gone with boards, now spray painted with gang signs. Just outside, a group of teenage boys gather, wary eyes bore searching for trouble. I do not make eye contact. Instead I kick a pebble along the poorly paved alleyway. You can tell by their battered bodies that they are recent recruits to either the Bloods or Crypts gangs. I hear movement coming from their location. Surprised, I kick the rock too far in the distance and glance over, seeing a boy even younger than I looking my way. A harmonica hung around his neck and his arm shone with the itchy red of a new tattoo, in its beginning stages of infection. I glanced away once more, kicking a new stone.
         Though I feel you close, you are not among the dark shadows or sketchy alleys of the infamous Pennsylvania Avenue. The hookers patrol their corners and as drunken homeless men grab at me, I realize you have never been here and I shouldn’t be either. You are none of those things; I don’t need them to be happy or to find you. I cross the first bridge back home, but halfway across I stop. I steady myself on the slender ledge and look out across the water and call your name listening for the echo of my voice bouncing about the water and trees. Recalling the summers we came here to jump off into the sun warmed water below, I dive in. The water is more shallow than it once was, more shallow than I remember it being. My hands graze the reservoir bottom, skin briefly tasting a cold metal that I once knew. I could not see what it was, but I knew it was important to finding you.
Kicking to the surface, I blow the water away from my face, air caught in my chest as I realize it is the cross you wore around your neck. Diving down, I feel the reservoirs bottom for any trace of you. I grab a handful of soil before kicking back up for air. As I reach the surface, I open my hand. Seeing a shimmer, I grab the object and rinse away the dirt. I held a button into the light, Faded Glory Jeans raised on the cold metal surface. Unsatisfied, I swam to the nearby dock and set the button down. You were not the one to ever wear jeans; you preferred khaki slacks and a polo shirt to go with your perfect smile and reddish blonde hair.

I dive in the center and graze my fingers along the mud as the sun dips behind the trees, leaving me to read the Braille along the reservoir floor. Lying underneath a fallen limb was a rusted license plate but it was not just any plate. It was yours. As I trace my finger over the letters not needing the light to know what it said. My mind went back to that summer, you know, the one where the whole reservoir had dried up and there was but a stream, no more than a foot wide snaking along the bottom of this now watery area. It was the first time I realized you were not as quiet as you led on. We tore up the mud that was left, now dry and cracking with our donuts and drifts, always careful to avoid the trees that had begun to grow. You had lost your front plates here, and we had found them. But then we went for another spin and never did find them again.
Reaching the bottom once more, I grab the necklace as if I knew its exact position the whole time. Doggy paddling to the water’s edge, I fumble with the rusted metal latch, which, finally coming loose, I rest against my own skin; a piece of you close to my heart.
         I continue down the dirt lane leading to and from the boat dock. I reminisce to the summer nights we would come skinny dipping in this water. We felt so alive and invincible back then. The simple risk that the police on patrol could come through any time helped fuel that rebellion for just about everyone we knew.
         Reaching the main road, I stare across to the graveyard where faint sounds from a harmonica can be heard. Curious, I search between the headstones, looking for the source of the music. I finally find him, the boy from Baltimore earlier that evening. He motions for me to come over and continues playing.
         Listening to his music brings me back to the days we would sit in the park and you would play your harmonica for me. The swings would float back and forth in the summer breeze, unaware of the weight atop of them. You’d take it everywhere. Sitting in Denny’s restaurant at abnormal hours of the morning, and play over the Hot Fudge Brownie we would share as was custom to our visits. It was never the same tune, but always slow and somber.
         Then there was that tree, the one that we took leaves from each fall right when they reached that deep red shade. We always pressed them in that book on leaves, always finding it hard to wait until they were flat and dry. There was something about that tree that was different than the others, though they all looked the same. Its bark was a little darker, and the leaves a little brighter. The leaves still shutter as each car passes, memories of the car that left the silver paint chips deep in its mangled body coming to the surface. They say you died instantly, but if you had been wearing your seatbelt… better the tree than another car. I went to that tree the day after, though it was the beginning of summer, the leaves were the deep red shade of fall.