I'll Be Right There Read Online Free PDF Page B

unhooked my finger from Dahn’s and looked at him straight on. He stood still, like a man waiting to be sentenced. I opened my arms and wrapped them around him.
    “Don’t be afraid.” Those words were meant for me, too. “We’ll be okay, we’ll be fine.”
    The light from Dahn’s headlamp, which had been sweeping the ground for spiders, shone on my face.
    “Can I kiss you?” he asked.
    I didn’t say anything.
    Dahn’s lips hesitantly brushed my cheek, my forehead. After a moment, he brought his lips to mine. They were warm and sweet.
    “I never thought you would be my first kiss,” Dahn said.
    I couldn’t help but let out a small laugh. As if I could have known either that he would be my first kiss and that it would turn out to be so unexciting. Against the night sky, the mountain’s spine looked like a ferocious animal. Its dark silhouette, like a large black beast lying on its stomach with its mouth open, was growing more distinct. As we got closer to the mountain, I started to feel afraid. I suggested turning back. But though he shook with fear of the spiders that he would never have known were there if not for the headlamp, he was adamant that we go the rest of the way to my mother’s grave. Nocturnal birds took flight, moving from tree to tree, as if spooked by the sound of us arguing about whether to turn back or press on. We continued toward the grave. Dahn was so busy shining the light on the path and in the air, checking for spiders, that he had trouble keeping his footing. He kept moving forward, though, even while describing how his kneeswould go weak at the mere sight of a spider, and how seeing one in the daylight, even from a distance, could give him cold sores. I thought if he was that afraid, he could just avoid looking at them. Why the compulsion to hunt them down with his headlamp? What if he actually saw one? Maybe searching for them with his own eyes was his way of coping with his fear. So that’s the kind of person you are , I thought. I had learned something new about Dahn. At long last, Dahn guided me through the dark to my mother’s grave, fighting off the fearsome spiders along the way.
    “We’re here.”
    As soon as we reached the grave, Dahn let out a deep sigh. It was the joyful sigh of one who had conquered his fear.
    “Let’s bow,” he said.
    “At this time of night?”
    “Isn’t that why we came?”
    “No,” I said.
    I told him not to, but Dahn bowed anyway, the headlamp still in place. When he was done, he shone the light on the crepe-myrtle tree and murmured, “So this is where he moved it.” He went over to the tree, took out a cigarette, and lit it; meanwhile, the thread tied around my finger came undone. The crushed balsam paste fell in front of the grave with a plop. Dahn’s cigarette flickered in the dark. He must have been rubbing his face with it between his fingers, because the ember danced around like a firefly. In front of my mother’s grave, I grabbed a fistful of soil, squeezed it together in my hand like a ball of rice, and put it in my pocket. The soil was probably touching my mother’s ring. Swayed by a senseof emptiness that made me want to grasp on to something, I looked over at Dahn where he was fidgeting beneath the crepe-myrtle, the lantern on his head and cigarette in his mouth, unable to set his feet anywhere comfortably for fear there might be a spider beneath the tree as well, and I nearly asked him, Do you love me? If I had, Dahn and I might have drifted apart irreversibly. I swallowed my words and stared at my mother’s grave. Then and there, I decided it was time to return to the city.
    “Students are protesting every day at my university,” Dahn said.
    I balled up more soil from my mother’s grave and put it in my pocket.
    “I beat up one of my friends,” he said.
    “You did?”
    “It was someone I met my freshman year. He loved to eat. No matter what he ate, even if it was nothing special, he could make it look like it was