The Forgetting Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

general consensus was that she was untouchable, out of our league, although I don’t recall wondering whose league she might’ve been in.”
    â€œGirls like that,” I said, “spend a lot of Saturday nights at home without a date.”
    â€œI know that now, but I didn’t back then.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, though. I was less intimidated by her popularity than most of my peers. I hung out with her because she was a nice person and fun to be around. Michael, too. The three of us spent a lot of time together that year.”
    â€œSo there was you, and your best friend, and this beautiful girl,” I summarized. It wasn’t difficult to see where this story was heading.
    â€œRight,” he said. “There were other kids, of course. Like I said, lots of people liked to be around her. But for the life of me, I can’t remember who they were. In my mind, what it came down to was the three of us.”
    â€œThree is an unstable number,” I commented, and he nodded his agreement.
    â€œThere was a pond close to our house that would freeze over in the wintertime. We used to go there to skate and play hockey. I remember telling Alex about it one day after school, and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Take me there,’ she said, and so I did, neither of us bothering to stop home on the way. I don’t know where Michael was at the time, why he wasn’t with us that day, but he wasn’t. We took the school bus, Alex getting off at my stop instead of hers, and we walked two blocks down the street and cut left through the woods to the pond. It had snowed lightly the night before, and we walked mostly in silence, listening to the soft crunch of wet powder beneath the soles of our shoes.
    â€œI remember how, when we came to the edge, she dropped her book bag on the ground and just charged out onto the ice without testing it first, trusting that it was thick enough to hold her weightbecause I said it was. And of course I ran out after her, planting my feet when I was three-quarters of the way across and sliding the remaining distance to the opposite side. I could hear the ice cracking and settling beneath us—we both could—but she never paused, never cast an uncertain look down. I gathered a snowball and lobbed it out toward the center of the pond where she was standing. It missed her by a good two feet, but she grabbed her chest and fell to the ice like a wounded soldier, lying with her face turned up at the sky, her arms and legs fanned out as if she were in the midst of making a snow angel. I went back out onto the pond, dropping down on one hip and using my momentum to slide into her. We bumped and our bodies did a half turn on the ice, coming to rest with our heads together, our torsos angled slightly away from each other. Laughing, I started to get up, but she reached over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Wait,’ she said, and so I lay there in the quiet of the afternoon, looking up at the blanket of gray above us. I could hear the steady beat of my heart in my ears, and I wondered if it was loud enough for her to hear as well. I began to say something, but she said, ‘Shhh,’ and so we lay there together in silence as the wind moved through the trees and the ice buckled and cracked beneath us.
    â€œThat was when I started to wonder just how strong that ice was. There’d been a warm spell the week before, and I counted in my mind the number of days since then that the temperature had hovered around freezing. Five—no, four days, I realized, and I wondered if that was enough. I could feel the chill of the frozen surface biting through my jeans, imagined the paralyzing temperature of the water just beneath, and considered the thin barrier that lay between. In my mind, I could suddenly see it giving way, the two of us plunging downward, the startled expressionon our faces as our heads disappeared below the surface.