I put them back in my pocket. I didn’t want to take the chance of losing them.
And then he said, “Hey! Hey there! You! Hey, guy!”
I looked up.
There was a boy standing in the dirt road, watching me. His nose was twitching and his eyes were wide. They were blue and bright. Short blond hair. Tanned skin, almost as much as mine. He was young and small and I wondered if I was dreaming again.
“Hello,” I said.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Ox.”
“Ox? Ox! Do you smell that?”
I sniffed the air. I didn’t smell anything other than the woods. “I smell trees,” I said.
He shook his head. “No, no, no. It’s something bigger.”
He walked toward me, his eyes going wider. Then he was running.
He wasn’t big. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. He collided with my legs, and I barely took a step back. He started climbing me, hooking his legs around my thighs and pulling himself up until his arms were around my neck and we were face to face. “It’s you!”
I didn’t know what was going on. “What’s me?”
He was in my arms now. I didn’t want him to fall. He took my face in his hands and squished my cheeks together. “Why do you smell like that?” he demanded. “Where did you come from? Do you live in the woods? What are you? We just got here. Finally. Where is your house?” He put his forehead against mine and inhaled deeply. “I don’t get it!” he exclaimed. “What is it?” And then he was crawling up and over my shoulders, feet pressed against my chest and neck until he clambered onto my back, arms around my neck, chin hooked on my shoulder. “We have to go see my mom and dad,” he said. “They’ll know what this is. They know everything.”
He was a tornado of fingers and feet and words. I was caught in the storm.
His hands were in my hair, pulling my head back as he said he lived in the house at the end of the lane. That they had just arrived today. That he had moved from far away. He was sad to leave his friends behind. He was ten. He hoped to be big like me when he grew up. Did I like comic books? Did I like mashed potatoes? What was Gordo’s? Did I get to work on Ferraris? Did I ever blow up any cars? He wanted to be an astronaut. Or an archeologist. But he couldn’t be those things because one day he’d have to be a leader instead. He stopped talking for a little while after he said that.
His knees dug into my sides. His hands wrapped around my neck. The sheer weight of him was almost too much for me to take.
We came upon my house. He made me stop so he could look at it. He didn’t get down from my back. Instead, I hitched him up higher so he could see.
“Do you have your own room?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s just me and my mom now.”
He was quiet. Then, “I’m sorry.”
We’d just met. He had nothing to apologize for. “For?”
“For whatever just made you sad.” Like he knew what I was thinking. Like he knew how I felt. Like he was here and real.
“I dream,” I said. “Sometimes it feels like I’m awake. And then I’m not.”
And he said, “You’re awake now. Ox, Ox, Ox. Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
He whispered, as if saying it any louder would make it untrue, “We live so close to each other.”
We turned toward the house at the end of the lane.
The afternoon was waning. The shadows were stretching. We walked among the trees, and up ahead, there were lights. Bright lights. A beacon calling someone home.
Three cars. One SUV. Two trucks. All were less than a year old. All had Maine license plates. Two thirty-foot moving trucks.