Bone Deep by O'Brien Kim;

Author:O'Brien, Kim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spencer Hill Contemporary
Published: 2015-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

Paige

“We played games.” As we walk, my hiking boots make soft crunching noises as if the ground has been starched. “They were all about fear—feeling it and then using it to give us magical powers.” I pause, hoping he won’t laugh. He doesn’t. “At first it was just running across a corn field by ourselves, but then it escalated. Before long, we were sneaking out at night, holding secret ceremonies, trying to talk to the dead.”

Jalen doesn’t talk or try to interrupt me as I try to summarize the next several summers—the risks we took, how our secret adventures bonded us so closely that neither of us could have other friends, nor did we want to. We shared everything about ourselves—our deepest, most private thoughts—and these became elements that I wove into our games. I feared snakes, so of course we sought them out, even touched them. Emily feared being alone, and so I would lead her blindfolded into the desert at night, leaving her in the scariest places I could find, to find her way back to camp.

There were fantasy creatures in our games. Coyumans—dangerous beasts who were half-coyote and half-human, but could be kept away if you could imitate their howl perfectly. And spirits—smoky dark creatures who moved through the night like shadows and possessed your body if they touched you.

The greater the fear, the greater the power it gave us. We believed fear let us tap into the power of the universe—even into the multiple worlds my father described in the myths he told us. We both claimed, one night, after inching along a crumbling canyon wall a hundred feet off the ground and no wider than our feet, to have seen the faces of old people watching us from the craggy face of the rocks.

By the time we were ten, we were very, very good at playing the game. It was our secret, and if we came home with bruises or cuts, our clothes torn, we were always able to explain it. It went on for years, I tell Jalen, until that final summer.

We found the cave by accident, one morning when we were exploring the rock formations rising in Macizo Canyon in New Mexico. It was well-hidden, the opening so disguised it looked like a shadow between two rocks. I stuck my face into the darkness. I couldn’t see much, but I knew it was a perfect place to play our game.

Emily grinned. “The best-told stories are the stories told just before dark.”

I hesitated. The last time I had played the game, I’d almost fallen off a very tall rock. For a long time now, I had wished we could stop playing these games. I actually thought what our fathers were doing was a lot more interesting, but I’d always done what Emily wanted me to do. The bottom line—I didn’t want to lose her friendship.

I promised myself this would be the last time. “Okay, but I’ll have to get inside before I’ll know the story.

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