Split up?
Stefia’s parents?
“You’re kidding, right?” I asked. “Like...the Stefia we just went to the Granite Ledge parade with last week?”
“Son,” dad said, scooping a second helping of macaroni and cheese onto his plate, “do you know any other Stefia?”
I set my fork down and stared at the globs of cheesy noodles on my plate. Part of me said the news didn’t matter. Like, why should I care? People split up all the time.
But a bigger part of me knew it did matter.
“Like…they are getting a divorce?”
“Yes. I believe so,” my mother said, pouring herself a glass of milk and then refilling mine. “I’m sorry.”
It seemed to me that my parents were oddly detached from the situation. It was almost as if the fact their best friends had split up would force them turn inwards and reflect on the state of their own marriage, chalking up how we are not like them in one column and how we are more similar to them than we’d like to admit in another. They didn’t want to make those lists, and so they just ignored the situation all together.
I put my napkin on the table, pushed my chair away, and stood up.
“I think I’m done eating.”
It really shouldn’t have mattered to me. It’s not like they were my parents.
“Elliot,” my dad said. “Look, it’s gonna be okay…”
I held my hand up to signal he should stop talking.
He did.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just…I need to go for a walk.”
**
I found Stefia alone at the park on a swing. She was barefoot, twisting her big toe into the trench underneath the swing made by years’ worth of kids dragging their feet to slow themselves down.
I took a seat in the swing next to her, smirking to myself because at almost fourteen and pushing five foot nine, I was sort of like the giant in Gulliver’s Travels. My butt barely fit in the swing and the seat was too low, which made my knees sit parallel with my shoulders. She didn’t say anything, just stared at the hole her big toe was making.
The park was surrounded by spindly pine trees that rose around us like sharpened pencils poking at the sky. Kids had made hiding places at the bottoms of the trees, using the heavy, low branches as shelter during their games of Ghosts in the Graveyard or Bloody Mary.
After a while, Stefia looked up from her swing at me with a wobbly smile—mostly out of obligation, I think.
“I’m assuming since you’re sitting here and haven’t said anything,” she started, “that it’s because you heard the news and you don’t know what to say.”
“That would be a correct assumption,” I said.
Two kids bolted from under the pine trees and zig-zagged across the short clipped grass in an impromptu game of tag. Their tennis shoes stomped at the ground and their giggles floated on the breeze.
Stefia and I had done that so many times.
“You really don’t have to say anything. It’s okay.”
“Maybe,” I started thoughtfully, “I should have googled ‘the right thing to say when your friends’ parents split’ before I came over here.”
“Nah,” she said, picking up her feet and letting the swing move. “Google probably would have been wrong.”
“Google is never wrong,” I said. “Ever.”
I picked up my feet and tried to swing but since I was too tall and too heavy, I didn’t even move. Stefia laughed.
“Hey,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Your parents. Them breaking up. The divorce…or whatever. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said, pumping her legs and swinging higher. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know…but…”
“Wait,” she cut me off. “I think you actually did Google to find out the correct response, and I’m sorry is what Google said.”
I laughed.
“Google is totally lame,” she said. “Totally. It doesn’t even make sense. Why does someone say they are sorry for something they didn’t have anything to do with? You can’t apologize for something that isn’t your fault.”
“Hey, we could Google why people say sorry…”
“We could.”
She dragged her feet to stop her swing, kicking up sand and covering her purple toenails with a layer of dust.
“Listen,” I said, not looking at her. “I don’t want to get weird or anything, but you know…if you ever want to talk, and your girl friends are all busy or something…”
“Elliot?”
“What?
“I thought you didn’t want to make this weird…”
“Oh. Was it weird?”
She smirked.
“A little.”
“Well, I just…you know, wanted you to know if you ever…”
“I get it, Elliot. Thanks.”
She grabbed on to the chains and lifted herself from the swing. She walked away from me, slowly, kicking at the sand and tiny pebbles that settled around the playground equipment.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“I’m gonna go to the pine trees,” she said. “I think I’m just gonna hide out for a while. Know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
She turned and walked towards the tree line that seemed to stand as a picture frame around the entire park. She headed for the north corner, the thickest and darkest part of the pine trees.
“Hey!” I called to her.
“What?” she answered without turning around.
“You…want some company?”
She stopped walking. She looked up at the sky and I could see her shoulders rise and then fall in what must have been a huge sigh.
She didn’t answer me but she also didn’t start walking so I got out of the stupid miniature swing I was still sitting in and jogged up behind her.
“Hey. I asked if you wanted some company.”
I put my hand on her shoulder and she turned around to look at me.
She was crying.
“Oh, god. Stefia, I’m sorry…”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t remember a time in my life that didn’t include Stefia, and yet I couldn’t remember a time she’d ever cried in front of me.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s going to be okay… it’s going to be fine…”
“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
“Like, anything. Just don’t talk.”
“Okay.”
She glared at me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Just come sit with me in the trees.”
“What?”
“Just come sit with me,” she said slowly, “and don’t talk.”
I almost said okay, but then I remembered, and I just nodded.
She sniffled and fixed her eyes on me. Then she turned back towards the forest and I followed her into the cover of pine trees.
I wish I could look back on that day and remember it as being full of comfort. I wish I could say that it was the day I knew I’d had some part in helping Stefia move forward, but that’s really not the case.
You see, I look at that day as the beginning of the end.
**
At first when I heard someone was opening a theater just outside Granite Ledge, I thought it was a joke. Who in the world would open a theater in a community made of drunks and farmers? Who is going to pay money to watch people parade around on stage in costume?
And why in the world would Stefia want anything to do with it?
But that theater took off like no one would have ever imagined. Suddenly there was culture in Granite Ledge, propelled forward by a gussied up Stefia who paraded herself around and poured herself out to her pile of adoring fans.
The first play she was in, I thought okay, whatever. It’s something for her to do. Something to distract her from the mess
with her parents. But as time went on, it almost seemed as though the theater was a distraction from real life.
Or, from like…fishing with her friend.
Or hanging out at the park.
Or getting ice cream at Beidermanns.
Or just sitting around laughing about stupid cat videos on YouTube.
There was never any time for anything but the theater.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. People thought she was amazing. She captivated the town in a string of performances that were worthy of a small town Tony. But when I watched her in a show, I just saw Stefia reading lines.
“Why do you care?” mom asked me one Sunday morning. We sat at the table eating pancakes before we all went fishing at Red Lake.
“Because it seems like she’s pretending.”
“Well, it is acting.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, and forked three pancakes off the platter in the center of the table.
Why didn’t anyone understand what I was saying?
By the third show, over a year from when we hid out in the pine trees, she was a completely different person.
“It’s like now she’s a whole other story,” I complained to my dad one evening while watching my youngest brother get pummeled in his homecoming game. “She’s like a character from a book that she never would have thought of reading before.”
“Son, if you haven’t figured out by now that girls—women—are weird, then you’re slower than I thought.” He playfully punched at my shoulder and looked amused.
“I don’t think this is just her being a weird girl.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t put my finger on it. She’s not the Stefia I used to know.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “She’s growing up. You’re growing up. People change as they grow.”
I shook my head.
“I just think there is something going on. She’s just so…I don’t know, antithetic.”
“That’s a five dollar word, son,” he said, sipping from the straw in his soda. “You use those words around her? Maybe that’s why she seems different. She doesn’t understand what the hell you’re saying…”
“Dad, stop. You know what I mean. She’s like, night and day different. I can’t even talk to her…”
“Then don’t.”
“What?”
He set his soda down, looked out onto the field for Mitch, and then popped his fist up in the air in some father-son moment of encouragement.
“Listen, son. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t change the mind of a person who doesn’t want to be changed. She’s going through some stuff right now, sure. But you can only do so much to help her. And then…well, you just…”
“Give up?”
“No, don’t give up. Just, I don’t know…keep an eye out for her, but don’t get wrapped up in the mess. If she needs you, she knows where to find you. She’ll come around.”
**
I’d kinda forgotten about Stefia by the time our senior year started.
Okay, that’s not the truth, but that’s what I tried to convince myself and everyone else of. I failed miserably because, well, you know when you just miss someone and you just need to see them? I’d stop by Stefia’s locker at school a couple times a month to make small talk. I’d show up at the coffee shop every so often and order a latte just to see how she was. She was always distant; some stiff and unconcerned version of Stefia that Stefia would have hated if she’d seen it in the mirror.
Shortly after our senior year began, my mom announced she’d been diagnosed with a touch of cancer. The doctors said things like found it early and treatable and operation and full recovery but my brain spun in dramatic circles around the less positive and completely possible outcome. And as I contemplated life without my mother, I knew there was only one person I could talk to who would even remotely understand life without a mother, and suddenly I needed to talk to Stefia. I asked around school the next day and found out she’d be at theater that night for final dress rehearsal.
I knew dress rehearsals went late, but I was a patient person. I casually strolled through her neighborhood about 11 pm, listening to the late night noises of small town Minnesota, waiting for her to get home so I could talk about my mom.
“Why don’t you just text her?” Mitch had asked me earlier that evening.
“She never answers when I do.”
“And you haven’t taken that as a sign yet?”
“Shut up.”
“Listen,” Mitch said. “I get it. You used to hang out and play pirates and build forts, but we aren’t kids anymore. How long are you going to waste your time with her?”
I had shaken my head when he said that, and I shook my head again as I walked to get rid of the conversation. I was not wasting my time. Something in my gut told me so.
An old car rolled quietly down the road and pulled into the driveway directly across from Stefia’s house. It pulled under the security light of the garage, revealing a nice old Cutlass from the early 70s. Olive green or maybe some weird greenish yellow, it was hard to tell in the fluorescent of the bulb on the garage.
And then I saw Stefia get out of the passenger side of the car. But she didn’t walk across the street to her own house. She shut her car door, giggled something I couldn’t quite hear, and followed the driver to the front door of the house.
The driver fumbled in his pocket for something, presumably keys to unlock the door, which seemed to take much longer than it should have.
As I watched them, something just seemed…off. Not right.
It’s just that she was standing so close to him, you know? The boundaries that should have been there were sketchy. That bubble of personal space that everyone has…was completely missing from the both of them.
He finally got the door open and made a sweeping gesture in front of him to signify he was a gentleman and she should go first. She walked ahead of him and I could have sworn I saw his hand brush her ass as she passed.
But it couldn’t be. Because…
Let’s get one thing straight. I knew that Stefia wasn’t into me. I wasn’t into her like that, either. Honestly. So what I felt that night wasn’t jealousy over her losing her personal bubble of space with some guy. No. It was disgust—because the guy she’d lost her personal space with looked old enough to be her father.
Suddenly, I had an overwhelming urge. I needed to follow her.
Before I knew it, I’d crept across the street, ducked behind the hedge that lined his driveway, and was sitting between his trashcan and a giant hose reel in front of his garage. I couldn’t believe I was going to spy on her. What if she found out? And what was I thinking I would find, anyway?
I was hoping I didn’t find anything. I was hoping I was wrong.
It took me a full five minutes to get the courage to stand up from my hiding spot. Then I slinked to a sidewalk between the house and garage, hoping there were no motion detector lights waiting to reveal my whereabouts. It took another three minutes for me to listen in an attempt to figure out where they were in the house. I only occasionally heard voices and couldn’t make out any of the muffled words.
There was a window that would show what I believed to be the front room of the house, and I figured it would be a good place to start looking. I stretched my neck to try and peek between a slit in the blinds. I was just too short so I looked for something to stand on to look in. I found a couple loose paver bricks and quietly stacked them to make myself tall enough. I stood on the bricks, slowly moved my head to line up with the blinds and…
Oh. God.
Fuck.
I mean, Seriously. Fuck.
Now, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about what I saw on his red leather couch.
But I was sure enough.
My mouth watered with the acid of nausea and I heaved. I lost my footing on the stack of bricks, which caused them to topple over.
A dog barked from inside t
he house.
I ran.
**
Even though it was 1:15 in the morning, I made up my mind that I would wait for her. And because the bottom of a tree makes a pretty good place to hide, I decided to camp out under the giant tree in her yard while I watched for her to return home. Eventually, she would have to come back.
At 2 am, she snuck her way into her driveway. I waited until her bare feet hit the grass.
“Hey,” I said, from where I sat.
She jumped and then clutched her hand to her chest, gasping. She looked towards the tree, barely able to see me except for the three quarter moon.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You scared me.”
She took a few more deep breaths.
“Elliot, what are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
I looked across the street to the house she’d just come from. The lights were all dark now, including the light that had illuminated the front porch.
I stared at that house. And when she realized I was hyper-focused on his front door, she knew.
She knew I’d seen I’d seen something.
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough.”
She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and then pulled at a rubber band around her wrist.
“Look. Elliot. I know it probably looks like something is going on…”
“You’re right. It does.”
“But…it’s not what you think.”
Then she fixed the most charming and plastic smile on her lips, almost like she was posing for a camera. Like, if she said it as convincingly as possible, then I should believe whatever came out of her mouth. The only problem was that she wasn’t convincing. At all.
“Who lives there?” I asked, pointing across the road.
“His name is Niles.”
“What were you doing?”
“Are you spying on me?”
“No. What were you doing?”
“What are you…my father?”
“I’m only asking because…”
“Maybe you shouldn’t worry about it, okay?”
She jumped down my throat just a little too quickly for me to believe that I shouldn’t worry about it.
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