Originally published in Wanderings.

I met Emma when I was nine and she was older. I was in the park playing snakes in the grass while mother was in getting her hair done. I crawled belly-down around trees and over paths while dog-walkers and baby-strollers clicked and rolled around me. I didn’t have any friends to play with — not in our city, where the people kept to themselves and smelled gray, like steel wool. There was nobody at my school I knew who could lie in the grass with me and not play guns.

I slithered around the park until my shirt was soaked clear through and I started to shiver. That’s when Emma said, “What a funny game.” She was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table nearby, leaning back on her arms like bridge struts to support herself. I didn’t say anything back. She had green eyes and she used them, always moving, always blinking. I remember her skin was green, too, and I remember that the sun came down through the trees and so everything was green. “I know a good game,” she said. She slipped off the table and landed awkwardly on her feet. She almost lost her balance and grinned. “Follow me,” she said.

I stood up and followed her like any other kid. She led me back into the trees, where all the other people’s sounds turned into antsteps and rain. She pushed deep into a band of bushes, letting the branches snap back into my face, showering me with dew. Then she stopped and faced me. She smiled like a girl and reached her hands above my head. She shook the branches she could reach and drenched me with morning drops. I didn’t complain much — I could have gotten any wetter — but I think I scowled. Emma answered it by withdrawing her hands. Clenched between them was a riot of green leaves, their angles and veins all in tangles and misunderstood shapes. She rolled the leaves in her fingers, making them dance until I almost believed that her fingers were the dead things and the leaves the living. Then se closed both hands as if she were praying, catching all the green behind her skin. She didn’t pray, though. She let her eyes go back and forth all over me. When I was about to chatter my teeth on purpose, she opened her hands like a butterfly’s wings. 

Standing on her palm was a tiny bird, a green sparrow with twigs for legs and the spear of a birch leaf for a beak. It was as perfect and delicate as an origami animal, and, at first, that’s what I thought it was.

“Teach me how to do that,” I said.

Emma blew a kiss over the bird and its feathers ruffled. Its head turned and I turned to stone, as if my next breath would frighten the creature away — of, if not the creature, then the quiet birthday feeling that had filled me up.

The bird picked at its plumage and cocked its head to one side. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Emma. I didn’t answer, still afraid to move. “Well?” she prompted.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said Emma. She sounded satisfied. She sent a ripple down her arms; when it reached her fingers, the bird took flight, leaving behind a small cloud of downy leaves. I tried to keep it in view, but I lost sight of it in the branches, or maybe it had turned into just leaves again. I didn’t think so, because I could still hear the small desperate flutter of its wings.

My neck went still from staring up. Emma tucked her fingers under my chin and pulled my gaze down into her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then slipped like a cat between two shrubs. Her passage let a wisp of light into our hiding place.

When mom finished getting her hair done she said I couldn’t take any leaves with me, and I had to drop two pocketfuls on the ground.

#

The next day, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but mother made me anyway. She took me to church, where I didn’t talk much to the other kids and she sang way louder than I did on the hymns. I told her a couple of times that I felt like throwing up, so she let me pass the sermon in the bathroom.

On the drive home, I listened to the rain and asked mother what miracles mean. She didn’t understand me, though, and said, “Something wonderful that you can’t explain.” That made me think of maths, which isn’t what she meant. 

I didn’t make it back to the park for almost two weeks. I missed three days of school during that time because I was sick. Mother took me to the doctor on a Friday, and after the checkup she had to go to the drug store, so I asked if I could go to the park while she shopped. “Don’t you want to look at the toys?” she asked. I told her I didn’t want to and she dropped me off next to the monkey bars.

Emma was sitting at the bottom of the little kids’ slide, kicking gravel with her bare feet. I didn’t say, Hi, and she didn’t look up. 

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be in school,” I said. She nodded and drew a plus sign with her big toe. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked. Instead of answering, she patted the slide beside her. I sat down. She smelled a bit like burning insulation, so I asked her if she was feeling all right. 

“I am,” she said. “What are you learning about in school?”

I squinted, trying to remember anything that might be more important than Emma. “We learned about Cortez last week,” I said.

“Tell me about Cortez,” said Emma.

I shrugged. “He killed a lot of people he shouldn’t have. He brought diseases from the old world and he wiped them out without his soldiers.”

“I like that story,” said Emma. “It’s sad.”

“I could tell you others,” I offered.

“I would appreciate that,” said Emma. “You don’t know how much.”

I wanted so badly to ask her how she had made the bird out of leaves, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth she would disappear, as she had from the bushes. 

She looked up from the equations in the sand toward the sound of a barking dog. I watched her eyes trace shapes around the figures of the dog and his owner, around the old couple reading on a blanket, around everyone else but me — she seemed to be using her stare to cut holes in the world, to section off the people she could see like cookies on a sheet.

Mother came and found me and said, “Come on.” Emma gave me a wave with the tips of her fingers. “Who’s your girlfriend?” mother asked after she closed the car door.

“Mom,” I said, and I rolled my eyes.

#

It was summer the first time I tried to kiss Emma. Mother had told me to stay in bed that night, to save my strength. She said I had mono, the kissing sickness, but I figured if I had a kissing sickness I ought to at least have my first kiss.

Mother was right that I didn’t have much strength, but I had enough to make it to the bus stop before service ended, and the only thing I felt wrong was a vibration in my legs every time I took a step, as though my bones were humming.

Somehow I knew she’d be waiting for me, and she was, waiting at least. She didn’t notice me, even when I coughed — I couldn’t help the coughing. She was standing out from under the canopy of trees, hands loosely at her sides, staring up at whichever stars she could see.

“There aren’t very many,” she said when I turned me head to follow her stare. With something as wide as the sky to focus on, her eyes were just about rolling from their sockets. Mine weren’t; I just locked onto the brightest I could see, called it Mars, and tried to catch it moving. 

“There are plenty,” I said. 

Emma nodded and made a smile I was sure was for me, though it was aimed toward infinity. “Would you like to see them?” she asked.

“They look just like the sun,” I said.

Her hand caught mine, fingers locking into fingers. “Don’t hold your breath,” she said. My bones stopped humming. The weight left my body; my blood seemed to run faster and freer. I looked down. The shadowed park was gaining a shape, like the horizon accepting a curve at the right distance. I could see the slide and the monkey bars and the bike path and they all drew closer together. I couldn’t help asking, “How do you do this?” Her answer was a grin.

We floated up through the grimy air, the buzz of artificial light below us, driving us further away. When we crossed out of the bed of smog it was as if a curtain had been torn away. The sky grew even larger. It was cold inside of me. Stars exploded into view like ants from a crumbling hill. My breathing slowed; it felt as if my lungs were freezing. Emma smiled and pointed with her free hand. Her lips moved, but I don’t remember any of what she said. I could tell that there was heat out there in the universe; I could practically see it, but I couldn’t feel the barest blush of it on my skin.

Emma took me down. I coughed when we re-entered the hanging exhalations of the city. When I could see the park and feel my lungs expanding, I tried to lean over and kiss her. She caught my face in her hand and turned both away. “Please don’t spend your innocence on me,” she said, and we fell the rest of the way.

#

While I was sick in bed I couldn’t visit her, not because mother told me not to, but because I could barely get my legs to hold my body up and balanced.

A new doctor told me new things, and mother said we could afford it, whatever it was. She heard a story on the news about asbestos being blamed for an outbreak of sickness in the area of the park, and she told me I couldn’t play there anymore. To make up for it, she bought me toys and books and video games. It was nice of her to do it, but I ran out of interest in them all. My bed became a swamp of plastic and paper. I wanted Emma to visit me, but she didn’t know where I lived, or even that I missed her. She must think I didn’t want to see her anymore, I thought. I wondered if she cared, or if her eyes just kept on slicing fractions off the world.

Then one day I almost didn’t wake up, mother told me, and I when I finally did it was in the hospital. It smelled of paint and varnish and gave me a headache. I figured I’d be able to go home that night — being so close to so many doctors should have done something to me. After dark, while the nurse turned my arm numb with her needles, mother asked me if I wanted her to stay the night. I told her I didn’t want to stay the night. She promised she’d come back first thing in the morning.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The nurses clipped back and forth in the hallway, and every couple of hours they returned to put medicine in my IV and cold hands on my face and chest. I tried watching TV. A game show almost put me to sleep —almost, but not quite. I was just beginning to see dreams in the drab colors of the screen when the show went all to static and a shadow fell over my bed.

It was Emma. She padded into the room so silently that I thought she might be floating. She put her finger to her lips and made my smile stay quiet. She sat on the bed next to my shoulder and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see that her eyes were still, her pupils at rest on my face. I hoped I looked as strong as mother had taken to telling me I was.

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered. “I still like the sad stories.”

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “Do you remember when I took you to see the stars?” She asked it as though I could forget, as though it had been nothing more than an idle conversation on a drearily normal day. I told her that, of course, I remembered. “I spent my innocence on worlds you can’t believe — neither could I, when I came to them, but I learned to. I learned everything about them. I have to apologize because I’m grateful to you for your open eyes. Your innocence is gone, and now you have no excuse for ignorance, but you have given me surprise. I have hoped for ages that I could find something that would build an unfamiliar expression on my face, a disquieting, perfect sensation in my nerves. I don’t think I ever will.” She was smiling as she said this and there were two tears on her face in symmetry. “But I do not discount the pleasure, and the envy, of seeing that wonderment on another person’s face.”

I opened my mouth to ask her things I didn’t need answers for. I think I mostly just wanted her to hear my voice. She put a warm hand over my mouth and went on. “I’m sorry for what I stole from you.” She withdrew her hand.

“It’s all right,” I said. My head was throbbing from the hospital smell and my gut had gone cold as a fist in winter. Emma smiled at me and got up to leave. I reached out a hand to stop her and, though I only brushed the fabric of her jeans, I succeeded. “Will you kiss me?” I asked, and two more perfect tears spilled over her lashes. She leaned over my body. Her dark hair fell in light waves over my face. She whispered something that I didn’t catch  — it sounded like a name from a history book — and then she touched my lips with hers. She tasted like ozone, hot and important. She smelled like a tree, like the breeze of a bird’s passing. She felt like fire, so hot I can barely write it, and it stayed with me long after she had slipped out of my room. I don’t think I’ll feel anything like that again.