Beyond Rose Street
“Don’t tell anyone what happened to Tyler.”
I stop running just long enough to turn, hoping for more instructions, but Leyton is already sprinting up his porch steps and through his front door.
“Should we—”
He slams the door behind him. Even from where I stand I can hear the lock click.
Fifteen minutes later, I stumble through my own door and find my folks watching an old episode of Family Matters. “Hey, son.” Dad pats the sofa beside him.
I head straight down the hall, pretending I can’t hear Mom ask if I had fun with my friends. Not bothering to remove my jeans and jacket, I crawl under my blankets, burrowing so deep I almost block out Dad’s earthquake belly laughs.
At this exact second Tyler’s mom is sitting in her den—which always smells of cinnamon—chewed up pen in hand as she wrestles with her Sudoku. Does she already sense something is wrong? Tyler never gets home until after midnight. She might not realize he’s missing until she calls him down for pancakes tomorrow. Even at the age of twenty-one, he’s the sort of guy who helps his mom make banana chocolate chip pancakes every Sunday morning.
By the time my bladder forces me to reemerge from my blanket cocoon, my bedside clock claims the time is one in the morning. The house is painfully silent. The sound my feet make as I creep through our one-story ranch is too similar to Tyler’s sneakers scraping against the barn’s bare floor.
I pee, flush, wash my hands and dry them on one of Mom’s new hand towels (“They’re peach, not pink.”). As I step out of the bathroom, I plan to turn left and head back to my room with its warm blankets and shelves stuffed with tattered Calvin and Hobbes collections. Instead I turn right and slip out the backdoor. I let my feet do all the thinking. It’s not until I’m pulling my bike from the garage that I realize I’m going back there.
One day when we were in kindergarten, Tyler pulled me toward the blocks, announcing, “We’re building a spaceship today.” Since then he’s decided everything we did; play Bioshock or Halo; watch movies at Oakland Cinemas or blow all our money at Eastside Comics in Dover; build a fort by the creek or shoot BBs at an old canister of propane. When the BBs failed to produce the Michael Bay-style epic fireball we’d both imagined, Tyler leaned against his air rifle, spat out his gum like it was a wad of chewing tobacco and said, “That was fucking anticlimactic.” He was the first kid I knew who cursed. He was also the only kid I knew who used words like “anticlimactic.”
As I bike past Leyton’s house, I picture myself banging on his door, threatening to call the cops, refusing to leave until he comes out and helps me.
I keep on pedaling, though, head down, peering through the darkness. The frigid March air cuts through my T-shirt, but I barely notice it. All I can think about is where I’m going.
Then, all of a sudden, I’m there. A green sign labeled “Rose St.” glints in my bike’s headlamp. Most people don’t even notice this road. It’s nothing more than a strip of gravel
