1
Cherri
“Hurry up! Keep going! We just have to get back home, and we’ll be fine!”
My chest burned as the familiar voice screamed from behind me. We raced through shrubs and trees, the leaves and branches slicing against my skin as we fled. Getting a few cuts or scrapes was better than the alternative, so I pushed past the pressure in my legs and the shortening of my breath and just kept running.
My home wasn’t far from where we were, a mile or so maybe. The trip to the park had been a relaxing stroll. My heart raced then, too, but only because I was finally going on my first date with the guy I was crazy about. After years of just being friends, he finally packed up a picnic and invited me out to a park in the nice part of town, complete with candlelight and the sunset. We were finally moving forward, and then everything went wrong in the blink of an eye.
“Deon!” I shouted.
“Keep running, Cherri.” His hand found my back in the encroaching darkness. “Go straight from here, and when you get to Clearview Avenue, take a left and go around the long way. It’ll take more time, but hopefully, he won’t know to chase you that way.”
“Wait.” I came to a stop and turned around. Deon’s normally slicked-back red hair and budding facial hair looked disheveled, and his dark gray eyes were wild with panic. “What do you mean, chase me? Where are you going?”
He put his hands on my shoulders. I could hear the sounds of footsteps crunching in the leaves, getting closer with each step. “We’re gonna split up.”
My whole body prickled at the words. “What? No. I’m not leaving you.”
One of his hands combed into my blond hair to pull my head toward him. For a brief moment, I thought he might kiss me, but he just set his forehead on mine. “We have to. We’re too loud together. I’ll meet you at home, okay? In our spot, in twenty minutes. I promise.”
My throat burned, and my eyes started to water. Nevermind the fact that I was afraid. I didn’t want to leave Deon’s side. “Okay.”
“Go.” He pulled away from me. “Go!”
With one final look at Deon’s face, I turned my back to him and rushed off. His words rang through my mind as I followed the instructions he laid out for me. I got to Clearview Avenue, bursting through the manicured shrubs, and took a left. This way was one I’d taken many times on my way home from school, though it wasn’t the quickest route home. Clearview was a one-way with no turnoffs until nearly the highway when it bumped into a frontage road that led all the way down into the slums where I lived. When I was on the frontage road, I could no longer hear the steps of my pursuer and slowed my pace. It took nearly the entire mile-long stretch down the frontage road to catch my breath, and when I was finally turning into the run-down neighborhood that I lived in, I’d never been so happy to see the peeling paint and condensed homes.
My house was way at the end of the block. It was a small, green-slatted house with two bedrooms and one bathroom. I imagined my twin-sized bed inside and how nice it would be to just flop down onto it, but instead of going home, I walked to the tall oak tree on the abandoned lot halfway between Deon’s house and mine and slid down to sit beneath it. The sun, which was meant to be the backdrop for my date, was nearly set, and I sat in silence while it crawled closer and closer to the horizon, eventually dipping behind it an hour or so later.
Deon never arrived, and the longer I sat beneath the tree—our tree—the less and less of the neighborhood I was able to make out. My green house blotted out from existence, turning into a shadow first, then just disappearing as if someone had taken a pair of scissors and cut it out of the picture. The old cars parked along the street started to disappear, darkening to voids, then just falling out of view. I sat up straight, and my stomach twisted into knots as I watched the houses, one by one, fade away. People who’d still been sitting on their stoops, watching the night sky and chatting with their neighbors, turned to dust before my eyes and blew off in a wind I couldn’t feel. Darkness surrounded me, an endless sea of nothingness, and I was alone apart from our tree.
“Deon?” I called out, but there was no response. “Deon?”
I stood up, and the second I pulled away from the tree, it, too, disappeared into the darkness, and I was left standing alone with nothing and no one.
“Deon!”
“Cherri!”
I sat straight up in my bed. I was shaking, and for a second, I was afraid I’d been taken to an unfamiliar place. I wasn’t in my ratty, old twin bed, but in a magnificent four-poster queen with a comfortable white down blanket draped over me. The sun spilled in through ceiling-to-floor windows with fresh white paint, and regal purple curtains were tied to either side of the windows. I wasn’t in the room I was used to.
“Cherri.” I turned my attention to the voice that called my name, and my heart started to calm. Looking back at me, through a reflection of my own crystal blue eyes, was my younger brother, Gus. His short, scraggly blond hair was still in bed-head mode, but his expression was panicked, and his arms were clenched tightly onto my arm. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
Finally, my brain started to tether to reality. It’d been nearly four years since I slept in that old twin bed, since that tiny, green house had been our home—since I’d last seen Deon.
“Hey, bud,” I greeted Gus finally, seeming to calm his fear a little. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“I came to get you for breakfast, but you were screaming.” He hiked his feeble, nine-year-old body up onto my bed and sat cross-legged in front of me. “Who’s Deon?”
Gus and I used to share a room back in our old home. A path of fortune for my dad at work had taken us out of the slums and up to the ritzy part of town, to a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home where we slept in different rooms. Thankfully, those old days of humility kept us close, even when we were no longer struggling for money.
I curled my arms around Gus and pulled him over to me. He repositioned so that he was sitting in my lap and leaned backward, and I gently pet his head. “He’s an old friend of mine.”
“I don’t remember him,” Gus replied.
“Yeah, you were still pretty young. I knew him from before we moved.”
“Did you stop being friends after we moved here, like what happened with Tia?” Gus asked.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from chuckling at Gus’s comparison. There was a young girl in our old neighborhood that Gus liked to run around after, but she didn’t like him much. Gus could be excitable, and Tia was very subdued. When we moved, Tia must have decided she was finally free of the little boy who would run around after her, and in order to keep him from being too sad about it, my parents had to tell him that he couldn’t be friends with her anymore because we moved.
“Something like that,” I replied.
The truth was, I never saw Deon after that day. I thought maybe he’d gotten caught or something, but when I went back to visit with his mom, she confirmed that Deon was fine, but he didn’t want to see me. For everything we’d been through and for the fact that he’d been my first crush, maybe even my first love, it was heartbreaking that he’d suddenly stop talking to me.