I found them soon enough—it helped that the bird-imitation calls kept coming—two guys, one tall, one around Gelsey’s height, both with their backs to me, both looking fixedly up at a tree.
“Hi,” I called. I was beyond worrying about embarrassing myself. I just wanted to go home and get some breakfast and put calamine lotion on my bites. “Sorry to bother you, but—”
“Shh!” the taller one said, still looking at the tree, in a loud whisper. “We’re trying to see the—” He turned around and stopped abruptly. It was Henry, and he looked as surprised to see me as I felt.
I felt my jaw drop again, and hurriedly closed it. There was no doubt in my mind that I was blushing, and I wasn’t even tan enough yet to hide it. “Hi,” I muttered, crossing my arms tightly over my chest, wondering why each time I saw him, I somehow looked worse than I had before.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in the same loud whisper.
“What, am I not allowed to be in the woods now?” I asked, not quite as quietly, causing the kid next to him to turn around as well.
“Shh!” the kid said, a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes. He lowered them, and I realized with a shock that this was Henry’s little brother, Davy—recognizable, but just barely, as the seven-year-old I’d last known. Now he looked a lot like Henry had at his age—except I noticed that Davy was very tan for this early in the summer and he was, for some reason, wearing a pair of moccasins. “We’re trying to track the indigo bunting.”
“Davy,” Henry said, poking him in the back, “don’t be rude.” He looked over at me again, and said, “You remember Taylor Edwards, right?”
“Taylor?” Davy asked, his eyes widening, looking up at Henry in alarm. “Seriously?”
“Hi,” I said, waving, and then immediately crossing my arms again.
“Why is she here?” Davy half-whispered to Henry.
“I’ll tell you later,” Henry replied, frowning at Davy.
“But why are you talking to her?” Davy continued, not really whispering anymore.
“Anyway,” I said loudly, “if you could just—”
There was a flurry of wings from the tree the Crosbys had been looking at, and two birds—one brown, one blue—flew into the air. Davy scrambled for his binoculars, but even I could tell it was going to be too late—the birds were gone. His shoulders slumped, and he let the binoculars drop on the cord around his neck.
“We’ll come back tomorrow, okay?” Henry said quietly to Davy, resting his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Davy just shrugged, staring down at the ground. “We should go,” Henry said, glancing up at me. He gave me a fraction of a nod before he and Davy started to leave.
“Um,” I started, knowing it would probably be better just to get it out, rather than stalking the two of them through the woods in the hopes that they might lead me home. And what if they weren’t even going to their house, and I ended up following behind them while they chased some other random bird? “Are you going back home? Because I’m a little turned around, so if you are…” My voice trailed off, mostly at seeing Henry’s expression, which was equal parts incredulous and annoyed.
He let out a breath, then leaned down slightly to talk to Davy. “I’ll meet you at home, okay?” he asked. Davy scowled at me, then took off into the woods at a run.
“Does he know where he’s going?” I asked, as I watched him disappear from view. He certainly seemed to, but that’s what I’d thought when I entered the woods as well.
Henry seemed to find this funny for some reason. “Davy knows these woods like the back of his hand,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up in a half smile. “He just took his shortcut—God knows how he found it. I’ve never even seen it, but it gets him home in half the time.” Then Henry seemed to realize who he was talking to. The smile faded, and the annoyed expression returned. “Let’s go,” he said shortly, and headed off in a totally different direction than I’d been walking.
We tromped through the woods in silence for a few minutes, Henry not looking at me, but straight ahead. I was just counting down the minutes until I would be at home and this would be over.
“Thank you,” I finally said after I couldn’t take the silence any longer.
“No problem,” Henry said shortly, still not looking at me.
“I just…” I started, not really sure where I was going with this, but feeling like I needed to explain somehow. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was just trying to find the way home.”
“It’s fine,” Henry said, a little less brusquely than before. “We’re going to the same place, after all. And besides,” he said, looking at me directly for a moment, that ghost of a smile returning, “I told you it would be inevitable.”
I started to respond when I noticed that our path was blocked—there were two enormous trees down, moss already growing all over their trunks. Mixed in around the fallen trees were pieces of lumber, boards of different sizes. “What is that?” I asked. The whole thing, the downed trees and the jumbled pieces of wood made for a huge obstacle—where the pile was the highest, it reached almost up to my waist.
“Last month’s storm,” Henry said, already starting to walk around it. “There was a treehouse up there, it came down when the trees fell.”
So that explained the lumber, and the occasional nail I could see jutting up through the beams. I started to follow him when a memory came back to me, hitting me with such force that I stopped walking. “Do you still have yours?” I asked. The second after I said it, I remembered he no longer lived in his old house. “I mean, is it still there? The treehouse?” Henry and his dad had built it together, and we had declared a younger sibling–free zone, and spent hours up there, especially whenever the weather was bad, and spending all day by the lake wasn’t an option.
“It’s still there,” he said. “As far as I know. You can still kind of see it if you look down the driveway.”
“I’m glad,” I said, not even realizing that this was what I felt until I said it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
I stared at the fallen trees as I walked around them, still a little shocked to see them on the ground, the opposite of where they should be. It seemed crazy that something so big, so seemingly permanent, could be knocked down by a little wind and rain.
Henry was already starting to stride ahead, and so, hurrying to catch up with him, I started to clamber over the downed trees. By then, I’d made it to the top of the tree, where the trunk had narrowed, and it seemed like it would be simple enough. “Ow,” I muttered under my breath as yet another twig scraped my leg.
Henry turned back and squinted. “What are you doing?” he called, starting to walk toward me.
“Nothing,” I said, hearing the annoyance in my voice, which I knew wasn’t exactly fair, since he was helping me get out of the woods, but all I was doing at that moment was trying to keep him from having to wait on me.
“Don’t,” he said, and I could hear that he sounded equally annoyed. “That wood’s rotten, it’s likely to—”