Prologue

Before I knew it, we were running again. It was just the way I liked it. We paused only to dump our bags in our lockers after class. After that, it was a race across the soccer field. That was, if you could call it a race.

My heart was racing but my breaths were even. A glance over my shoulder and I saw what I already knew I would see. Roland was falling behind, struggling to catch up with me. The look of relief that broke out across my best friend’s face was enough to make me grin as I slowed down my pace.

“It’s not fair. You’re cheating,” he said as he caught up to me. His hand was clutching and rubbing his side. “I have a stitch.”

“How exactly am I cheating?” I asked, still grinning.

“You do this more often than I do.”

“That’s called practice. I’m not stopping you from playing sports.”

Roland didn’t need to answer me. His expression kind of said all that he needed it to. We were going to be serious and pretend that I didn’t just say that.

We walked the rest of the way. Our high school was fading from sight as we passed the soccer field with its bleachers and the shed where the balls and gardening equipment were stored. The school was basically the center of our town, sitting a few miles south of the lake and surrounded by the suburbs.

It was the lake that we were headed to. When the town had first been built, the lake had been one of its major attractions. People didn’t seem to hold much store for it as the years passed by, though. The annual picnics and festivals stopped taking place there. Eventually the place had become messy and was in need of some serious maintenance. The wildlife had taken the lake back and the undergrowth had become overgrown and crowded.

Roland and I never minded all that much. It gave us a place to get away. No one else ever went to the lake anymore. We had been sneaking off to the lake since we were kids. Its popularity days were over.

When we reached the lake, we had to duck under a line of yellow tape before we could climb the wooden fences surrounding it and enter the park. The tape had been put up as a safety precaution for any small, wandering children. No one gained anything from appointing a lifeguard in an abandoned park but more than one person could lose everything because of one stray kid.

I was the one falling behind as we entered the park. Roland went ahead and I watched as he climbed over the stump and log that marked the entrance to our secret spot. There was a low-hanging branch and its leaves could be shifted to the side like a magical, nature gate. My best friend was already sitting on the ground, his back against that tree, when I reached it. The foliage kept us hidden as I sat down beside him.

“Can you believe it’s already almost over?” he asked.

“Kind of. Our first day of high school feels like a lifetime ago.”

“Nah, not to me. It feels like it was only yesterday.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I remained silent. I watched the lake, where a family of ducks was floating. It looked as though one of them had found something because it kept shoving its head beneath the surface of the lake, its wings flapping slightly, before it came back up and shook beads of water into the air around it. The other ducks gave it surreptitious glances now and then.

Roland was picking blades of grass out of the ground, tearing them down the middle and tossing them loose again. He usually only started picking at the grass when he was collecting his thoughts. It meant he probably wanted to talk about something. Asking what he wanted to talk about only meant I would scramble his thoughts again so I waited patiently, my eyes on the duck that kept diving into the lake.

“Do you think you’ll miss it?” Roland asked quietly.

“School?”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess all of it.”

“I’ll probably miss some things, but I’m pretty excited to get out, to be honest with you.”

Roland turned to look at me, his green eyes wide and somehow sad. His jaw clenched and unclenched as he tried to find the right words to speak. “I’ll miss you, Lyle.”

There it was. I gulped down the lump that had formed in my throat. “I’ll miss you, too, Roland.”

“Do you think we’ll ever find anyone?” He had turned back to the grass, ripping pieces of it out of the ground. “Like really, I don’t feel like I’m ever going to find the right person for me. You know? It feels like I’m meant to be alone sometimes.”

This was one of Roland’s many issues. He thought about it a lot and had been bringing it up more and more frequently in our final year of high school. I could understand why. We were sitting in the place where he had first come out to me. Ever since that day, Roland felt that he could be honest with me about anything. His biggest fear was that he was going to be alone for the rest of his life.

The worst part was that I couldn’t tell Roland what he really wanted to hear. I couldn’t tell him that he would be with the person he really wanted to be with. I couldn’t tell him that that person would feel the same way about him. I couldn’t tell him that they would be happy together. The reason I couldn’t tell him all of that was because I knew who Roland had feelings for and I knew that that person didn’t feel the same way.

The reason that I knew all of this was simple. I was that person.

Roland had had a crush on me for as long as I could remember. I was pretty sure that our friends knew it, too. He tried to act nonchalant about it but it was pretty obvious, even to some of the friends we didn’t spend as much time with.

That being said, I probably didn’t help the situation all that much. I never admitted to feeling the same way about him, but I also never rejected him. I was afraid of hurting him and of losing him. So when he started to do little things like hold my hand in junior school, I never pulled it away. I guessed that made the next thing that he said partially my own fault.

“Let’s make a pact.”

“A pact?” I looked up, pulled from my train of thought, to find that Roland had turned and was facing me. His hands were no longer tearing grass out of the ground.

“Yeah,” he continued, “If both of us are single by a certain age, then you and I give a relationship a shot. I won’t say marriage because I feel like that’s a pretty major thing to jump into.”

“Wait, what?”

“I figure thirty is a good number. The big three-oh. We’ll be old but not too old. It’s kind of like that age where it’s not yet too late, you know?”

“You want us to go out if we are still single by the age of thirty.”

Roland grinned, a big goofy grin. “Why not?”

“I could think of plenty of reasons why not.” I said. The grin had turned into an expression of hurt. “What if we aren’t single by then?”

“The pact does not count if we are not single, silly.”

“You’re not gonna ask me to like, slice my hand open and mix blood or something, are you?”

“This is a pact, not a spell.”

I felt myself blushing at the tone of voice Roland used. It was as if that part should have been obvious. None of this felt obvious to me, but I had no idea how to get out of it so I went along with it.

Roland hoisted himself up off of the ground and began wandering around, his eyes searching the floor. I watched his gawky frame as he climbed over a tree stump and disappeared from my sight.

“What are you doing?” I called.

“Ah-ha!” Roland’s voice floated back up to me, triumphant. It was shortly followed by Roland himself, his brown hair flopping about in the wind as his head came back into view. He climbed back over the tree stump, carrying a rather large collection of small pebbles in his hands.  “This will be perfect.”

“What exactly for?”

Roland didn’t answer. Instead, he made his way back over to where I sat and got down on his hands and knees. He dropped the pebbles beside me and shoved his hands into the dirt. As I watched, Roland cleared away some of the moss and undergrowth around the roots of our special tree. Soon he was left with a muddy surface to work with. He began laying out the rocks beneath the tree, using them to spell something out.

Once he was done, Roland sat back to survey his work, his hands a deep brown with mud. I stood up from my spot to read the words he had planted. He had scooped up sections of dirt and pressed the pebbles into them, ensuring that they would remain lodged in the earth. It was simple, straightforward, and didn’t reveal much detail at all.

“I take it we’re meant to sign?” I asked.

“Yeah. I have only a few rocks left so I figured we could just initial it.” Roland proceeded to pick up a few pebbles and created the shape for the first letter of his name as I watched. “Like this.”

“We could just write with a twig or something.”

“The whole point of using the rocks is that the pact is meant to withstand time. If we wrote in the sand with a twig, it might not even be there tomorrow.”

I heaved a sigh, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. I couldn’t really argue with that logic. “Okay.”

Roland glanced up at me, using a dirty hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “That’s mine done. It’s your turn.”

“Can’t you just do it for me?”

“Nope. That would be like asking me to forge your signature. It’s your agreement to the pact.”

That time I really did roll my eyes. Still, I bent over and grabbed a few of the pebbles he had collected. I put my “L” right beside his “R.” My hands were less dirty afterwards but I still felt the need to wash them. I stood when I was done, and Roland followed suit. We stared down at the letters in the ground.

“Excellent,” he said. “So, if we’re single by the time we reach thirty, we meet up in this exact spot and we take it from there.”

“How will we know when to come back?”

“We’ll come on the day we always celebrate our birthday.”

“Right,” I said, “Sure.”

“Shake on it?”

I turned to face my best friend. His arm was outstretched, his dirty hand waiting for my dirty hand. I looked up at his face, honest and innocent, and I couldn’t help but feel guilty as I placed my hand in his. I hoped against hope that in twelve years’ time, my best friend would have forgotten all about this pact.

The Pact between Us

Signed:

R + L