Work Text
“Do you remember summer vacations when we were kids?” Kendra read the message from Sarah with surprise. They hadn’t seen each other since the end of middle school, when Sarah’s family had moved a thousand miles away, to somewhere with a lot more people and a lot less heat. And, too, they hadn’t talked to each other for years, messages like beads on a necklace getting strung farther and farther away from each other until the string broke.But if Sarah didn’t want to waste time on even one hello, well–Kendra knew her well enough not to be surprised.“Yes, I remember,” Kendra typed back. “Why?”Sarah, of course, didn’t answer why. “Do you remember the ice?”The ice. For a moment, and not really knowing why, Kendra was tempted to answer “what ice?” or “it’s crazy what you make up as a kid, isn’t it?” But those replies would have been false as well as cruel, a betrayal of herself as well as Sarah.“I remember the ice.” She sighed, and decided if she was going to jump into this, she might as well jump in all the way. “I remember the boy, too.” Sarah had asked first. She wasn’t going to say, “what boy?”***What ice? What boy?In Kendra and Sarah’s little desert town, the only place to go swimming for free was a shallow, muddy pool at the bottom of an old quarry. It was the kind of place that only children ever went to: out of the way, difficult to get to, and possessing the kind of danger to reward ratio that adults universally rejected. When the air was hot, the water was warm, and though the pool got smaller every year thanks to the drought, the kids always came.And then one year, there was the boy. He looked a little older than the oldest kids there, and he was a lot paler than any of them. “Hi,” he said, looking around at all of them, for they had all gathered in a semicircle before him at the edge of the muddy water. Like the rest of them, he was sweating, though his sweat looked feverish rather than caused directly by the heat of the air. “Have any of you ever been ice skating?”The kids looked at each other. Ice skating? Of course not. It only got cold enough to freeze anything one or two days a year. Sure, there was probably indoor ice skating in the city, but whose parents had the time and money to drive an hour and a half there and back just to skate?“Would you like to?” the boy asked.“How?” asked someone. “It’s summer!” Kendra only knew it hadn’t been her speaking, then.“Like this,” the boy said, and he stuck the end of his walking stick in the quarry pool. When the pool iced over, it didn’t look muddy anymore. It looked dark, and clear, and cool rolled off it like movie theater air conditioning. The boy jumped on the ice and skidded to the center, looking a lot healthier. “Well? Come on? Wear shoes if you have them, but if not—I can make it okay. I can do that.” And so the kids did. As the summer passed, they could find the boy more and more often at the quarry, and he didn’t only make ice. Soon the kids started wrapping up their warmest clothes in the old towels they used to bring—for the boy made it snow for them, heaps and mountains of snow. In the snow it was easy to build, in the snow it was easy to be an angel. Even when the boy wasn’t there, they all knew he had been there, because when he left, the snow really melted, and it ran into the quarry pool, which grew larger and less muddy after every visit.The boy left one day in the fall, but the next year he came back. Then, he was able to tell them his name.***“Why weren’t we afraid?” Sarah typed.Quick answers sprung to Kendra’s mind. Because we had other things to fear. Because none of us knew enough about the world to know the ice and the boy were impossible. Because we knew well enough to take what was given to us if it seemed even sort of good.She gave the true one, though. “Because there was nothing to fear.”“I’m glad you remember,” Sarah messaged. “I’m glad you think the same way about it. When I moved away…I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to everyone else. But I want to live like I know it was real.”“It was real,” Kendra sent, feeling the pool of her mind at once grow just a little bit larger and clearer with the admission.