THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW 21 I wiped my eyes and pressed my whole face against the glass. A splash in the river running alongside the rubber wheels, a sparkle of scales and the cascade of fl owing hair, a chime or a chirp or a laugh, I heard it. Not the tip of a tail—an imagined sight—but the entire silhouette of her as she swam and kept pace with us. I tugged on the girl’s arm next to me, but she did not see what I saw. Before the river turned gray and murky again, I waved and whispered thanks. 44° 2' 22.9" N, 75° 48' 37.32" W I felt wind spirits in the forests of Fort Drum. I kept pressed to the slatted fence behind my eighth childhood home and followed silently behind the boys who destroyed mine and my friends’ tree fort we named Walla Walla. It had taken days, hammers, nails, ropes, makeshift pulleys, beams, fathers’ help, sweat, and splinters to make our home in the woods, and only an absent afternoon and some spray paint to scatter it. I witnessed the aftermath, just as they congratulated each other and turned to leave. I couldn’t stop them, couldn’t make them pay, but I could follow and tell their mothers. Learn the identities of the teenagers who wrecked our haven. My boots dodged the dry leaves, my breaths kept even, and my eyes never left the turned backs of the boys in front of me before a gust whipped my hair in my face, static in the air threatening a storm, and two fi gures became none as they turned the corner and were taken by the breeze. I caught up, rounded the fence, saw an empty clearing with nowhere for cover. Where else could they have gone? What else could it have been but magic?
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