~ Shadows ~
by Elsieaustin
danae_ariel@yahoo.com

SUMMARY: A chance meeting leads Tara away from her routine. A tragic event sends Heidi away from her family home and to Minnesota. This is their story.

A/N: In Xena fandom, there is a term to describe the reason the show touches me as deeply as it does: Romantic Friendship. There are way too many misconceptions about Romantic Friendship?and it is way too hard to describe in abstract words?but it is a beautiful thing for itself. This is the picture my imagination paints for me.

DEDICATION: To my family. You know who you are. And to my XOC family. Always in my heart.

I'd like to thank Dreamer98 / SkyPie, Pandora10, and Wlfeyes for the encouragement and all the good suggestions. Special thanks to LadyRowanD for the brilliant beta-reading job. You caught things that would have been invisible to me. Thanks, all, for the compliments, encouragement, and for being such good friends.

It's stupid to sneak away from the youth group before the main rally. All the leaders expect you to be a pain in the ass and not want to be there, so they watch you with eagle eyes until you're in the auditorium. But once in the auditorium, all you need to do is hide behind the taller kids until one of the leaders spots you there, then drift to another leader's group and back toward the exit, then slip out the stage doors.

I was at McDonalds. The remains of my ice cream cone stuck to the corner of my orange tray. I pulled the rest of the paper placemat away. Someone had left a pencil in the plastic seat beside me. I used it to doodle on the placemat. I hadn't wanted ice cream. I'd wanted a cheeseburger, but I'd only had a crumpled dollar from my coat pocket. Mom hadn't seen the need to send money with me to the Dawson McAllister youth rally, since the group would feed and take care of me.

I wasn't an average Christian teen rebel. I actually wasn't a Christian at all, but my mother didn't know that and neither did anyone else in my church. No one but me knew that I thought of the world in such practical terms. Definitely no one knew that I wanted to be an accountant and that I believed in science over religion. My mother didn't know that I hated church youth rallies. Everyone else expected me to, at least until the Saturday night sessions when everyone hugged and cried and decided they were glad they'd come.

I didn't just hate church youth rallies for the way that I was bored out of my mind. During my first rally, there had been a moment when I'd wanted to feel what everyone else was feeling, while my rational mind screamed at me the whole time that my feelings were nonsense. I hated that feeling more than anything else. And then there had been those rare moments when the speaker had started to make sense, and I was painfully aware that my own sanity was a veil over something deeper, when I had to cling all the harder to that sanity inside my head or lose who I was. I hated those feelings, too.

So after that I always ran away. And there I was, in McDonalds, doing math on a placemat rather than singing songs with all my so-called friends. I idly started running business figures for the soft-serve ice cream?

Damn, the singing from across the street was loud enough to hear over the kids in the playland.

"Damn," I said out loud, feeling very pleased with myself.

My cell phone rang. I didn't need to look at it to know that it was my mother. She'd pulled this at the past four conferences, calling when I was supposed to be in rally to make sure I didn't answer. She even caught me skipping out once by calling my cell phone.

I ignored the phone, and crossed the street. I slipped back into line just in time as the group headed back to the hotel for "breakout session" Bible Study. I hid behind the taller kids, just like I had when I'd slipped out of line two hours earlier. I could fool Bert, the head youth leader. He thought the two older girls I always hid behind were my friends. He also thought they had crushes on him. I glanced at Bert and whispered to them as he passed us. One of the girls elbowed me hard in the ribs and gave me a "knock it off" glare, but Bert seemed fooled.

Good. Now if only I could convince two different group leaders I was in their breakout session and hide back in my sleeping bag for the night, I thought I might actually enjoy this trip to Minneapolis.

I lived in Brainerd, Minnesota. It was just me and my mom, although the Brainerd Evangelical Free Church was a huge part of our lives. Every summer she sent me to a week of Bible Camp, and every winter she sent me to District Free Church Youth Conferences. This year was special because Dawson McAllister had come to Minneapolis. Whoever the heck he was supposed to be. I always smiled and nodded when Mom talked about church. I had memorized all the right things to say so she'd leave me alone. Of course I wanted to go hear Dawson McAllister speak, I'd said.

Someone much shorter than I was brushed by me from a different line. It was hard to keep her in focus, since she was doing the same thing I was in trying to avoid the adults, but she didn't look like she was headed to one of the hotel rooms. Hmm. Another teen rebel. I had to stay behind Meghan's head, or Linda, my own room leader, might notice where I was. I edged a little closer to Bert and away from Linda. Long black hair brushed my cheek, and the same girl ducked right under my head and out into the hallway. She moved off to the left in the opposite direction of the general crowd. I made a careful mental note of the direction. Then I caught Bert's eye and glanced toward the nearby ladies' room. He nodded. I slipped behind Meghan, through the bathroom line, and off in the same direction the other girl had gone, through the crowds. She was fast but I was faster. The crowds cleared as I ran, and the side hall she'd gone through was long enough that I saw which door she went through on the end before she had a chance to vanish.

I'd thought she might have been one of the youth leaders' kids, but I decided that wasn't true when I caught up a bit. Her face was kind of thin, like mine, and she couldn't really have been that much younger than my sixteen years. She was tiny. Graceful, with waist-length black hair and a stride like a dancer.

She ran as if something was chasing her - something that only she could see.

I followed unnoticed all the way to the end of the corridor. I wasn't coordinated, and I couldn't phase through things like my hero, Kitty Pryde, but I don't think she heard any of the noise I was making. The door opened to another corridor, and the other girl was almost to the end. She ran faster. I called to her, but she didn't react. I sprinted after her and burst through the passage at the end of the hallway, into a deserted common room.

Most hotels had common rooms on the landings. In this hotel at the moment, all of the ordinary common rooms were full of noisy teenagers singing praise songs (and occasional teenage boys changing the lyrics to said praise songs). This was the first hotel that I'd ever seen that had an empty common room tucked far away like this.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness inside this new little room. It couldn't have been that much bigger than my own bedroom, a tiny attic room above a staircase in a Minnesota farmhouse. It was shaped differently than my room, though. High and square, with one couch and two chairs. It was empty except for the girl I'd followed. All of the hotel guests not affiliated with the conference were hiding in their rooms, or staying at other hotels.

While I had been pounding down the hallway before, the girl I had chased had taken all the cushions off the couch and chairs, and made them into a makeshift altar. She was praying with low, unintelligible words while she clicked a string of beads in her hands.

It was not the first time I had walked in on somebody praying. My youth group friends, Bert, my mom, had all had their private devotions that I'd occasionally stumbled upon. I'd always been repulsed by a subtle artificiality I couldn't name. Usually I had just left the room. Once I had asked my mom to explain her prayer to me, and she had looked at me as if I had dropped in from another planet for asking the question. So she made me say the Lord's Prayer three times.

There was nothing artificial about this prayer, at this time. It was as if there was a battle raging around the solitary, bowed dark head. I saw the room, and I saw the other girl, but I also saw a kind of daydream of a field of angels and demons. She had dropped her sword. It was a beautiful picture, but it frightened me. It was the same as the intensity I'd noticed in moments before, where my own rationality was just a mask over a kind of reality that was deeper than the deepest ocean, only more intense even than that.

I grabbed a cushion, then slowly knelt beside her.

She didn't notice me. The beads slipped through her fingers in the same regular rhythm. Click, click, hiss, formless word, click. "Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy."

"You can stop now," I finally whispered. I used my very best Christian high schooler talk. "I think God heard you."

Her face turned toward me, and I got my first good look. The beads still slid through her fingers. But her eyes met mine. They were huge and dark, and hidden behind black hair. Her skin was smooth and dark. There were tracks of dried tears on her cheeks. She looked as if she was about to say something, but no words came out.

I waited and then whispered. "What is it?"

She turned away and rose from the cushion.

The daydream faded as she did it, and we were alone in the room.

I abandoned pretenses. "Okay, so I don't know if there is a God to hear you or not, but what is it? You didn't look like you should be alone," I babbled. I knew I'd intruded. I didn't care. I'd also just seen something real that I didn't understand, and I was still afraid enough that I didn't know if I was making any sense. But the other girl's pain called to me through my own fear.

"I am not?" her voice was part wonder, part exhaustion, all ragged edges. She fell back to the cushion.

I slipped an arm around her shoulders, then lifted her away from the couch cushion so she sat leaning on me instead. She cried as if she'd just lost a battle. Or won one. I wasn't sure.

It had to have been past one in the morning, and my legs were starting to cramp. Into the dark, I whispered, "Do you think we can find our way back to the group?"

"Probably not." She hesitated, then laughed. It sounded good.

I laughed, too. "I haven't the foggiest idea where we are. Do you think they'll look for us?"

"Probably not."

Hmm, I was going to have to miss the breakout session after all. What a shame. I slowly pulled away from the other girl and inspected the couch. "It's not big enough to sleep on. Let's just arrange the cushions on the floor."

She helped me quietly, then lay down at the very left side of the cushion pile. I kept to the right. The little room was quiet, and I wondered if I could sleep. Then I heard soft words again, and the battle daydream was back, and I started to tremble. I reached over and gently pulled on the other girl's shoulder until she turned. We faced the battle of the night guarding each other's backs.

"Are you an angel?" was the last thing I heard, but sleep took me before I could reply.

I woke alone. I was cold and in big trouble. A scowling Bert, who'd been up all night searching the hotel for me, informed me that he would advise my mother to ground me for a month. Mom grounded me for two months, locked the computer for the rest of my junior year, and turned off my phone.

When I could sneak Internet time at school, I pulled up the list of all the different churches who'd sent groups to Dawson McAllister Live. There were a couple of hundred. I wrote each youth pastor the same email: "I'm looking for a friend I made at Dawson McAllister. She's small and has long black hair. Please tell her a girl named Tara from Brainerd prayed with her and give her my phone number."

Two years later, with no calls, I got desperate enough to visit some of the surrounding churches during youth group time. But the stranger had vanished. Maybe it was she who had been the angel.




You don't go outside in Minnesota in February if you can help it. You don't play in the snow. You don't take the long way around the ice sheets to watch the play of gold on white. That's for November, when the wind is soft and the snow is clean. In February all the snow is icky and the wind can cut you in half. So you run from your car through your parking lot up the stairs to your apartment hoping the wind doesn't take your nose off.

At least, that's what I did for my first two years at Bemidji State University. I lived on campus for my first year. I went through four roommates in that time. One couldn't seem to locate the shower. One thought that 2 AM was the best time for parties. The other two were okay, but by then I'd set my heart on having my own space. So I found a studio at Monopoly Apartments. It was more expensive than the dorms. Mom paid half the difference when I told her it was closer to the Free Church than the college was. That was the truth. But really, my conscience bothered me a little because I didn't go to church once during my time at college. Mom called my cell phone every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. I trained myself never to answer the phone at those times.

I did a lot of crazy things. The weirdest things would occur to me when I was alone. Like "borrowing" the Fievel Goes West soundtrack the neighbor kids had left out in the hallway and locking my door and dancing to it. If I knew no one would catch me, I just acted. If I knew I was being watched, I'd put the crazy ideas to sleep. And I never remembered the ideas the next day.

I knew how to play the game when I was with my college friends. The summer I turned twenty-one, I left summer school with a group of them and got exceptionally drunk in Mexico. I told Mom I was there on a missions trip.

The truth was that neither of those lives really fit me. I didn't know what did, except that I loved numbers. And I loved the way I felt during those moments when I was able to just look at the snow and let my mind go blank and dream my dreams.

Having my own apartment gave me a lot more space to dream.

I was back at my own apartment complex, after a particularly boring shift at Burger King. Before opening my car door, I put the strap of my school bag on one shoulder and the strap of the old duffel carrying my uniform over that. I got out as quickly as I could. Frozen air sliced across my face, and I could have sworn it would leave a wound that would turn into a scar. I swore loudly. Then I ran. I almost made it to the stairs before my scarf blew off. I swore again, more creatively this time. Any other winter I would have left the scarf where it was, but my Raman Noodle budget and Burger King income wouldn't have let me buy a new scarf even at Goodwill. So instead I dumped my bags inside the main door to the apartment complex and ran back toward my scarf, pulling out more inventive swear words every step of the way.

There was someone making snow angels in the main complex yard behind me. Little kids were nuts. They'd play there on the coldest nights. But the person making the angels wasn't a little girl.

I grabbed the scarf, ran in the door, shouldered my bags and sprinted up the stairs, then threw myself in the door of my apartment and locked it. I stood in the entrance and shivered until the heat from the heater reached through my body, and then I ambled over to my window. She was still out there. Not just alone-on-the-playground alone. Alone as if she was hearing the silence before the sunset of the world.

I acted on one of my crazy ideas. I put my jacket, coat (yes, both), boots, scarf, hat, and gloves back on. Then I ventured down the stairs. The wind caught my scarf again. This time I let it fly where it would, and it landed right next to the girl I'd seen earlier. She lay in her snow angel, head turned up toward the sky.

Huge brown eyes and braided black hair met my eyes as I moved closer.

It couldn't be.

She looked at me. Her expression didn't change, but her eyes sparkled. She slowly took my scarf from the ground beside her, and dragged it in slow motion across the angel in which she still lay. Then she rose in one graceful motion and leapt out. There was a butterfly in the snow before us. She waved my scarf at me, whipped it so that the edges brushed my cheeks, then ran away from me. My scarf flapped behind her.

I laughed into the wind and ran after her.

Playing tag in the wind is more complicated than ordinary tag. The wind pushes you back and forth. Sometimes you feel as if you could lean on it, as if it would hold you up and you wouldn't have to work to stand. I'd tried that a couple of times before and it had never worked. I tried it again that night, and I wound up unceremoniously dumped into a snowbank. Tag turned to hide-and-seek, since I was in the snow above my head. She found me pretty quickly. Then she hid between two trees in the growing shadows, and I had to search the entire yard to find her.

"It's late," she said as stars pierced the wind from above us and the temperature dropped even more. "I'm going to be back out here tomorrow." She tossed my scarf back to me.

I caught it and wrapped it around my neck. "At least tell me your name?" I said.

She grinned. "Heidi. And I will ask you yours if I see you tomorrow." Then she vanished into the shadows, and I had no idea even which complex entrance she'd chosen.

"Heidi," I said softly.

Then I realized that I was standing in the middle of the coldest day of the year in Bemidji, MN, just staring motionless into the snow, and my hands were going to be frostbitten. I turned and dashed all the way back to my apartment and my hot shower.

When I arrived back at the complex the next day, she was waiting for me. She'd taken some of the lumps that always fell to the side of the road when the snowplows went through (which was every day) and built the beginnings of an igloo. She tossed me a particularly heavy snow/ice chunk. I grunted.

"It goes there, silly," she said.

"Hi, Heidi," I said. "I'm not Silly. I'm Tara."

She gave another one of those smiles, and her eyes sparkled with every glint of the ice around us. "Tara," she said.

Then she threw another snow chunk at me. I ducked and scooped up a lump of snow to throw back at her. I wasn't fast enough, though, and I wound up with snow down my back. I ran around in little circles making a whole lot of noise, then shoved a snow lump into Heidi's coat. She yelped and giggled, and we played in the snow like little children.

"Come upstairs," I said. "My apartment isn't much, but I do have hot cocoa, and you can dry off."

She shook her head. "Not yet," she said. "But I will be back outside to finish the igloo in an hour. And I promise not to throw any more snow at you."

Heidi never said "meet me when we get home and go to Caribou for coffee," or "let's go see a movie on Saturday," or, "it's happy hour right now at the bar," the way my dormmates did. She said, "I'll be in the Caribou kiosk reading plays tomorrow evening," or "this is the last night The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will be at the children's theater and I have two tickets for seven o'clock." She told me what she'd planned and then waited for me to show up. I always did.

I just chalked it up to all those crazy things I did, things I couldn't explain to myself.

I realized that Heidi was more creative than I. She did all the things I had always done by myself. But she did them even more so?with more imagination, more dreams, more sparkling smiles.

We knocked down a March slushfort one Saturday evening. Heidi said, "I feel like roller skating."

"You didn't say, 'I'm going to be at Smart Skate in an hour,'" I teased.

Her face was blank. "What?"

"Never mind. Um, would you like to go roller skating with me?"

Heidi always smiled so easily. "Yes."

I smiled too, and motioned her over to my car. As I fished in my pocket for my keys, I pointed to the grey Monte Carlo and said, "this one's mine. It's not much, but it's the one my mom didn't want, and -"

There really wasn't any "and." My car was a piece of junk.

Rather than keep on babbling, I unlocked the passenger side door. I retrieved my textbooks from the front seat and tossed them in the back, and then gestured Heidi inside.

She pushed the button to turn on the radio. My radio was on really loud, but at least I had remembered to turn it to the Christian station. I always played cds for my dorm friends (not that I was ever the designated driver), so I kept my radio locked on K-Love, setting number 6, in case I ever had to go back to Brainerd to drive my mom anywhere. "Jesus Freak," Heidi said, naming the song.

Another of my crazy ideas hit me. I wasn't alone and couldn't act on it, my brain screamed at me. But I did anyway. I rolled down the windows, and together Heidi and I belted out every word of the song.

It didn't matter if anyone heard me. I'd told all my dormmates that I was a Christian. I had to, because I never knew which ones would meet Mom. They just thought I was a cool Christian, one who'd get drunk with them and who was worth having sex with. Maybe if any of them heard me now they'd think I was drunk. Besides, there was something so exhilarating about yelling that loudly right out in public.


"Come up and have hot cocoa with me," I said. Actually, this time I almost begged. It was getting toward one o'clock in the morning on a Sunday night / Monday morning, and I had class in a few hours. I was chilled through, and not the least bit sleepy.

Heidi nodded.

"I mean, I'll be upstairs having cocoa?" her face fell. "And I want you to come up and have cocoa too," I added. "I'm sorry. I was just teasing."

"Do I really do that?"

"What? Say you'll be someplace instead of inviting me along? Yeah, but I think it's cute." Wrong word. "Creative, like it's a style that you have and no one else does. Please, come up. I'm freezing."

Heidi slowly followed me up to my apartment. I kept checking to make sure she was there because she walked so quietly behind me. I opened the door and we stepped inside. I threw off my winter clothes and headed toward the microwave.

"Come in," I coaxed, and offered to take Heidi's coat. She handed it to me, but in slow motion. She looked around. Her eyes flicked over the entire Essential X-Men run in my bookshelf.

I grinned. "Make yourself at home," I said. I still had a couple of the boxes of fancy cocoa that Mom kept sending me for Christmas. I chose the last two envelopes of the Chocolate Hazelnut brand and came back into the living room three minutes later carry the mugs.

If she'd seen this apartment, my roommate last year (take your pick which one) would have taken me to task for the comics and then demanded to know where the alcohol was. If Mom had seen this apartment, she would have wondered why there wasn't a Bible anywhere in sight. Heidi drank her cocoa quietly. I'd gotten so used to Heidi choosing the things that we did that I felt awkward in that moment.

I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, even though it sounded inane, the kind of thing you'd ask a classmate in a study group rather than the woman you'd been throwing snowballs at and skating with for over a month. "You go to school here?" I knew almost nothing about Heidi's daily life.

Heidi shook her head. "I'm a waitress at Denny's. Some days I work ten to six; on weekends I work eight to one or two in the morning."

"That's why you're up so late?"

"I like it late at night. I don't sleep a lot." She looked as if she was going to add something, but dropped her eyes to her cocoa mug instead.

Crap. If it had been any of the other college kids, I would've just blurted out "why?" For that matter, if it had been any of the other college kids, I would've known why. But this young woman, fast becoming my best friend, seemed more faerie than human. And of all the crazy ideas that came into my head, pressing her to tell me stuff she didn't want to say was not one of them. "I have class earlier than that in the morning," I said. "But I was having too much fun out in the snow to want to come in."

"This is the first time in a long time that I've just played in the snow," Heidi said. "It's been a lot of fun."

"Really? You look like you do this by yourself all the time."

"No, I just do different things by myself all the time," she said. Her eyes sparkled, and she was faerie in a good way. "I want to be a ballerina someday. So I dance by myself." She put down her empty mug, then pirouetted around my coffee table.

I clapped. She was so graceful. And the awkwardness was gone; we were back to playing in the snow.

Heidi stopped dancing and came to stand beside me in the same place she'd been before. She took a deep breath, her eyes measuring every inch of my rather plain, wind-chapped and freckled face. "Except the Dawson McCallister conference. I didn't do that by myself."

"It is you," I said.

That sparkling smile lit Heidi's face. "Do you know how long I've been looking for you?"

"Not as long as I was looking for you! What were you doing there, anyway?"

Heidi paused. She set down her empty mug and played with her fingers. "I'll tell you someday," she said finally and met my eyes again. "Um, what were you doing at the conference?"

"Oh, my mom thinks I'm a Christian," I said. I laughed. "Seems silly to me now. I'm free here. She still calls me all the time, though."

Heidi didn't say anything else. Her eyes flicked back to the comics. I brought the first volume down, and took it over next to Heidi. "We can pretend this is one of our plays," I said. "We just each have more parts to read.

That was the funniest thing I think I'd ever done up to that point in my life. I mimicked being Colossus and throwing Heidi at my threadbare futon, and she retaliated by pretending to be Nightcrawler and "teleporting" right on top of me and knocking me over. Heidi did the best Magneto voice I'd ever heard, so I ran around the place doing my Lockheed impersonation. Finally we sprawled on the floor in a pile of comics, as the dawn began to paint pastel colors across my apartment.

I was just going to have to skip class. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to fall asleep right there.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Heidi pulling on her things near the door. "Huh?" was the most intelligible word I could come up with.

"I have to work. I'll be downstairs making snow angels again tonight," she said. Then she added, "On second thought, no, I won't. I'll be upstairs in apartment 435, waiting for you to come bring your comics." She wrote something on the little board beside my door, then slipped out.

Six hours later when I dragged myself off the floor, I went over to the board to read the message. It was a ten digit number. I programmed the number into my phone, then typed in a text message: "See you tonight. Tara," and hit "send."


Heidi's apartment was smaller than mine. Where mine was colored in grays, hers was in golds. A stained-glass crucifix covered the only window.

I came in, and suddenly felt as awkward as Heidi had looked. This wasn't the sort of place I could just throw my clothes down. Well, at least until Heidi tossed her coat to one side of the door and beckoned me to the table in the middle of the room. "Come on, I remember exactly where we left off."

"Can I ask you something first?" I said.

"Sure," said Heidi.

"Why are you a Catholic?"

We both settled down cross-legged by the coffee table on the floor as Heidi thought. Her eyes darted all over her apartment. I followed her gaze, noting just how many little artifacts there were in different places.

"You know that feeling you get," Heidi said softly, "when you've been reading a dark, beautiful story for hours and hours and you want to be inside it?"

I nodded. I did get that feeling. I just couldn't have put a name to it before.

"Or you know that feeling you get, when it's late into the night and the stars are all piercing through your window, and you wonder what it must be like to be outside time? You know?when you wish you could stop worrying about stupid little things like tips and torn coats because who cares anyway?"

I nodded again. Then, unexpectedly, I said, "Or when your mom calls fifteen times to find out when you're getting a real job and you don't know where home is?"

Heidi gave me that brilliant smile again. "Yeah. That one. There's something about God that heals that feeling?that is that feeling."

"But I asked why you were Catholic."

"That's why, I guess. I can't really explain it." She looked shy, and again the faerie was gone but the girl remained.

"Good enough for me," I said. I wasn't a Christian because I didn't have a reason to be one. I did have a reason to daydream and make up dark stories and live?live locked inside my own world most of the time, I realized.

The moment passed, but we didn't feel like making idiots of ourselves anymore. Instead, we both sprawled on the floor and turned off the lights, and just talked. We told each other fragments of dark stories, things we had always dreamed but hadn't bothered to put into words.

"I'm ready to tell you," Heidi said. "If you still want to know. Why a seventeen year old Catholic was at an Evangelical youth conference."

"I thought you were about fourteen!"

"I get that a lot."

"I'd imagine so." We both laughed, but I sobered more quickly than Heidi did. "Tell me," I said.

Silence.

"Heidi?"

"I'm not sure I can after all."

I had probably had more experience consoling drunk, weeping college students than Heidi had. Or at least, I had far more experience at playing nursemaid than I did at putting words to my dreams. I sat up, still on the floor, leaning back on the edge of the couch. "Sit with me," I said.

Heidi came over, and I slipped my arm around my shoulders. "I'm listening," I said.

"Well, I got there on a Greyhound," she said.

"Your parents put you on a Greyhound?" I said, curious.

"They didn't know. They didn't care."

"Of course they-" I said, and then I stopped myself. Mom would have the world's biggest cow if I bought a Greyhound ticket and went off to some other city without telling her. But it wouldn't be because she cared in the way I had been about to tell Heidi her mother would have cared. So maybe her mom really didn't. I should believe her until I had a reason not to.

Heidi shook a little. I could hear her laugh, but it sounded hollow. "I get that a lot too, when I try to tell this."

"They don't know where you are, and they don't care," I said, paraphrasing what Heidi had already said.

"Right. Um, okay, it was my sister. The middle sister. Grace. She was always my favorite, you know?"

I was an only child, so I didn't know. I made a noncommittal noise.

Heidi stopped talking.

"Heidi? I really am listening. I'm not good at this, you know? Talking?"

Heidi laughed. "I thought you were an angel or something," she said.

Without scoffing at her, I said, "Oh, you don't want to know some of the things I've done. I'm no angel."

"I knew that. Angels don't pretend to be Colossus and throw people into futons."

We laughed. Then we stopped laughing, and the room was full of only starlight. "Grace?" I said.

Heidi took a deep breath, and then took up her story. "We all went to Catholic school. Grace went to Catholic college. She came back and wouldn't leave her room for a week. She said that none of the students liked her. Mom said that was nonsense. But I saw some of the emails they sent back and forth, before Grace managed to lock the account, and she was right, you know? They really didn't like her." Heidi was trembling now.

I kept my arm around her and rubbed her shoulders a little. "It's okay," I said. "I believe you. I bet she did too."

Heidi said, "I didn't tell Grace I'd snooped in her email. I didn't really try to talk to her. I just stayed out of her way. Then we drove to Alexandria to shop for our oldest brother's birthday. She was so quiet the whole drive there. Then she slipped away from us, and I followed her. I saw her gazing at the music cds. She saw me watching her and told me she didn't know how to be Catholic anymore."

Silence again. "What do you think she meant?" I asked. I was burning with curiosity at this point. I'd never known how to be a Christian.

"Just that you have to know someone else believes you can, I think. Otherwise how could you believe that God believes in you?" Heidi said.

I thought for a moment, then admitted, "I didn't understand any of that."

"Sorry." She lapsed into silence again.

"Can you tell me what happened?" I added the "can you" part because I honestly didn't think she could go on with her story, but I wanted to quit asking stupid questions.

"We went back to the others. Dad reamed us both for drifting off. We bought our presents and had dinner at Applebees. Mom kept asking us all these questions about our schoolwork. Grace put down her fork and spoon and walked outside. Mom and Dad just kept on eating. I stayed there with the rest of the family. Grace was standing in the snow outside. Mom told her to get in the car, and she ignored her. She was just watching the snow fall. I climbed into the car with everyone else. I didn't believe we'd just leave Grace behind. Dad drove away."

"What did you do?"

Heidi laughed bitterly. "Did a Chinese fire drill first stoplight and ran back to my sister, of course," she said. "We both had credit cards. Presents for our sixteenth birthdays. I used mine and got us a hotel. Then I tried to make my sister talk to me. And she did, eventually."

"What did you talk about?"

"Hope," Heidi said. "The way that she couldn't understand how to be any good to anyone else and the way that God makes us good and we can figure out the way together. I think she believed me. We had so many plans, you know? We were going to leave Minnesota together. We were going to find jobs someplace warm and build our lives."

I was silent this time. I tightened my grip again, and held Heidi as closely as I could as she shook. I could feel my own trembling start, and I silently cursed it. Grace could as easily have been me. If I'd stayed put at some random church function, Mom would've just assumed I was having a tantrum and left me in the snow as punishment.

"We had a fight," Heidi said finally. "Grace and I. The next day. She wanted McDonalds, I wanted something that wasn't fried. The rest stops had restaurants within walking distance, for Pete's sake, but our bus was going to leave. I was just annoyed. She was my sister, after all."

Was.

"She asked if I was going to stay with her," Heidi said. "I said of course I was, and she asked why. She must have hated herself so much," Heidi sniffled audibly now, "and I was mad at her but I didn't hate her. I said that I'd catch the later bus and to go on without me. I just needed a few hours away from her, you know?"

I was scared to ask what had happened then. But it became clear that Heidi wasn't capable of getting out the words anymore. "And when you met up?"

"We never did. She didn't make it to the next stop. I was annoyed and just kept on going. I almost got out of Minnesota. Then I asked after her at the bus stop in Minneapolis. They searched her ticket and found nothing. I called the police. They told me she'd killed herself. Right after that last stop."

Enough words, and yet there really weren't words for anything like this. I could piece together the rest of the story. Heidi had gotten back on the bus, seen the conference for some reason, and decided it would be a good place to pray for her sister's soul, and that's when I had met her. That explained the field of angels and demons?right? There was really no such thing?

It didn't matter. I didn't say the obligatory "I'm sorry." I just held her.

"I was all she had," Heidi whispered - almost too softly for me to hear. "Everything. And we had a stupid fight."

Eventually we both cried ourselves to sleep.

We didn't have a lot of time to talk in the morning. That was okay with me. Just like talking after waking up after that long-ago youth conference would have been awkward, I think talking after a night like that would have been awkward. There was a special warmth in Heidi's see-you-later hug, though. That night we built a slushfort and knocked it down in a hail of snowballs. Most days, our relationship was still like that. We never knew, though, when we'd abandon our current project and start sharing stories back and forth, through ice-bitten lips in the frosted air.

We went to Smart Skate twice. The second time, I had my first experience with crazy duos and trios. Heidi was normally so graceful, a dancer in each moment of her life. But not on the skating rink. There she was almost as clumsy as I was. Crazy duos and trios is this skating game where each time they blow the whistle everyone has to change directions while still holding hands in twos and threes. Lots of people get thrown in lots of different directions. I think both Heidi and I managed to turn ourselves upside down falling at one point. We were both too stubborn to let go and too uncoordinated to stay on our feet or even on the floor of the rink.

I called her twice. The first time when we'd spent another insane evening reenacting comics and I'd forgotten my textbooks buried in the pile and needed them for a test. The second time the next day when I got a D on said test. There were just these little things that Heidi said that made me think that schoolwork didn't really matter quite so much as it seemed to me.

We talked about everything under the sun, but never again about our families. We each had our isolated Bemidji, MN world. I was a stranger drifting through a world of strangers at college. Heidi was a stranger drifting through a world of strangers at her restaurant. But when we were together, it seemed like the rest of the world was open to us.





The first day of summer school began with the wrong textbook.

In the first five minutes of Intermediate Systems Management, I opened my book to find that there was no illustration 5.0. "For students with the previous edition of our text," the instructor said kindly, "the current edition is available in the bookstore for sixty-eight dollars.

I swore all the way to the bookstore. Heidi hadn't been able to break me of that. But she introduced me to the concept of swearing in Star Trek languages. Klingon obscenities were easy. We had decided about midway through the winter term that it wasn't fair that Vulcan didn't have a published dictionary as well, so we wrote one. C'thia meant moral logic - that was from "Spock's World," and it was hard to describe. D'athia was the commonplace word for logic, and that was one of our inventions. Topiak n'elleth meant?well, I won't tell you what it meant, but it involved the hearer's ancestors and several other species not found on Earth.

That's what I said to the teller at the bookstore. She thought I was very weird.

My phone chimed softly as I left the store. "The Terebithians think you're their queen. -The Faerie," was displayed in blue letters on the little screen.

I typed back, "Open season on trolls tonight."

"I will be troll hunting by the University Lake at 7 PM," flashed on my phone.

"8 PM?," I typed back. "My evening class ends 7:30."

"The Terebithian Princess grants the Queen an hour reprieve."

"Dork."

After a couple of months with me reading nothing but comics, Heidi decided that I needed to expand my reading horizons a bit. So we agreed to an exchange. Each week I read one book that I hadn't read before, and Heidi read one comic that she hadn't read before. That last week we had read Bridge to Terebithia. We'd read it out loud together, sprawled on the couch cushions in my apartment. When we came to the end and I couldn't keep reading because I was crying, Heidi took over. It had been another of those timeless nights, when it didn't seem to matter how late it was, and our voices hung in the night, where falling asleep right there in a tangle of limbs and pajamas felt like the most natural thing in the world.

I flipped my phone closed and went to the library. I had an hour and a half to get an early start on my first set of spreadsheets.

You have to understand something about summer school at Bemidji State University. Students don't come to learn, and teachers don't expect students to learn anything. The teachers babysit during the day, and then all the students hit the bars in the evenings. The year before I'd half-attended classes and half-partied in Mexico. Even on those Wednesday evenings when I'd been in the United States, I hadn't had to remind myself not to answer the phone since I'd been too drunk to hear it.

This year I didn't want to go to the bar. Everyone else did, even in the morning and afternoon hours. I was just lucky that there were so few of my old dormmates attending that summer, since otherwise they would've wanted to know why I was studying. So I stayed in the empty library and hid from the party scene, all at the same time.

I wasn't sure why I didn't just go to the bar that afternoon, then go fight trolls with Heidi at night. The only explanation that I could come up with was that somewhere in that past year the things I had thought were crazy and irrational before, now I did with Heidi naturally. While, the things that I had just done naturally before, now I was following one of my crazy impulses to avoid them.

My watch struck noon just as I put the finishing touches on my spreadsheet (go me, first week's homework already done). I left the library and went to Starbucks. I took a turkey salad sandwich from the sandwich cooler, ordered a skim milk latte, then took both over to one of the little tables. I took out my laptop. It was awkward sitting alone in the cafeteria, but it wasn't awkward at all sitting alone in a Starbucks with a stack of comics.

Accounting Lab was scheduled to last from 4 PM to 7:30. That day we just got the syllabi, heard a quick set of term definitions, and were free. I opened my phone to text Heidi and let her know I could hunt trolls earlier after all.

It rang.

I answered without thinking.

"Tara? You're not in church," my mother said.

Topiek n'Elleth. Damn. I never answered my phone on Wednesdays because I was supposed to be at church. Why hadn't I at least checked who was calling? Damn it all. "Um, I'm not feeling well?"

"You sound fine to me."

I coughed into the phone.

"Tara, you are lying to me. How long have you lied to me?" Mom said.

"I haven't lied to you. I wasn't feeling well today. Stephanie said she'd take notes in Bible Study for me."

"There's no Stephanie in your youth group."

"You checked on me?" I was so angry I could hardly talk. "I am an adult, and?"

Mom said, "If this is how you are going to use your freedom, Tara, you are coming home right now. You'll miss the first week of the summer term, and we can talk about what it means to be a Christian."

"I'm not a Christian." I said it a lot more quietly than I thought it. A group of last year's dormmates walked by. I half-heartedly waved to them. Nothing going on here. There might have been something unusual about yelling into a cell phone while walking on campus at Bemidji State University. There was nothing unusual about talking quietly into one.

My mother said, "Tara Melanie?"

"I'm not a Christian," I said more loudly. "I never was. And if you can't accept that..." I didn't finish my thought. I wasn't sure if I wanted her to believe me or not believe me. I dropped my phone to my waist, and slowly flipped it closed.

It rang again. I checked to see who was calling this time. Heidi. That was all right. I opened the phone again. "Hey," I said, trying to sound bright. "The evil tutors for the Terebithian Queen have allowed her two precious hours freedom with which to hunt trolls."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing?"

"Tara," Heidi said quietly.

"My mom just found out I'm not a Christian," I said.

"Come over?"

"I'd really rather just go troll hunting," I said. This time there was no pretense in my voice. I really didn't want to talk about it then. Or, well, ever, but knowing Heidi I'd have to one of these days.

"Only if you call your mom back first," Heidi said.

"Oh, you should talk?"

"I went back to my parents once." Heidi's voice was absolutely flat. "A year after the funeral. Another Greyhound dropped me off at the stop two blocks from the house. They hugged me like you'd hug a stranger and asked what I was up to. No mention of Grace, no mention that they'd ever missed me. My room was a library."

There was absolutely nothing I could say to that.

Apparently neither could she, from the awkward silence on the other end.

"Heidi? I'm sorry."

She sighed. "I'm sorry too, Tara. I don't want to start a fight with you."

"I'll call her," I said. "And then I will be at the lake at 7 PM to hunt trolls."

"I'll be there."

"Okay. Bye," Heidi said.

I hung up, slowly. I almost said, "I love you," but?I didn't ever say that. Not out loud, not by text or note, not ever. Heidi understood.

Slowly, I dialed in Mom's number. It rang three times. "You have reached Melinda. I'm sorry I can't come to the phone right now, but if you'd leave your name and a brief message?"

"Mom? It's Tara. Mom, we can talk later. If you want, I'll come home tomorrow. I didn't mean -" well, there was nothing I'd said that I didn't mean. I wasn't a Christian. I thought it was wrong that she made me pretend I was. "I still love?" again my voice trailed off, but I'd said the important word. "Okay, bye."

I parked in one of the different school parking lots, then walked to the lake. There was this little path that ran next to the water. It was gorgeous during the day. There were so many different colored leaves, and the lake showed through the branches the entire way along the path. Once we had made the journey on bicycles. We'd walked up each hill, then held on to the bikes like crazy on the way down, one at a time so we wouldn't fall over each other any more often than we already had. At night, though, it really wasn't safe alone.

"Heidi?" I said.

A bright light shone right into my face.

"Heidi, you scared the crap out of me!"

"Ah, but you need the Terebithian word for 'crap,' she said, and tossed me the flashlight. "Look! There's a troll over there!"

It was actually scary! I felt like I was nine years old again. Only this time, the villains poking their heads out of every bush weren't Magneto and Apocalypse existing in my own imagination, but freakishly-detailed trolls that came to life in the magical, whispered voices in the soft night.

After one particularly long run halfway down the path from a troll that got too big for both of us, Heidi tripped over a rock.

"I've got you," I said, catching her before she fell too far. "Maybe we should call it a night on the trolls for now?"

"Yeah, we probably better," Heidi said with a laugh. "I don't have to work 'till ten tomorrow, and I know you don't have class. Do you want to talk all night?"

"Sounds like a plan," I said, as we walked back to the parking lot.

You know how you know there's something wrong a split second before it happens? Not early enough for it to really be a premonition, just early enough that your intuition knows before your mind does. I knew there was something dreadfully wrong an instant before I saw the single red flashing light.

Two stone-faced policemen met Heidi and me.

"Tara?"

"Yeah, I'm Tara. What happened?"

"May we drive you to the police station, Tara?" the first policeman said.

"No," I said. No one was driving me anywhere. "What happened?"

"This isn't the best place."

"What happened?" I said. "It's Mom, isn't it?"

Heidi came up behind me. She was like a warm pillar of wind at my back, one that would hold me up if I just leaned in the right direction.

"Tara?" the policeman said.

"Tell me," I said.

"There was a freak car accident in the city in Brainerd." He didn't go on.

"And?" I said.

"Your mother made a trip to the Walgreen's and drove back to her house," he recited. "A car with two teenage drunk drivers came down the adjoining street going eighty miles an hour?"

He didn't want to say that Mom had died. "Tell me she was at the house an hour ago," I said.

"Tara?"

"Tell me," I said. My voice came out in slow motion. "I want to know if she checked her messages."

"Yes, she was probably at the house an hour ago. Her errand wouldn't have taken longer than a few minutes, and there's no sign that she was out earlier. We're still investigating, of course?"

"I'm not coming back to the station," I said.

"You shouldn't drive." He looked as if he was going to say more.

I cut him off. "Heidi can drive me home," I said. "I'll be in touch."

"Tara?"

"Please," I said.

The policemen both left. Figured. The one time that I actually showed anyone even a little glimpse of what I'm feeling, and that was the thing that made them listen.

Heidi gestured to her car. "Come on," she said.

I couldn't explain why it was so important that I had my car with me. "I'm okay. I'll follow you home." She looked like she was going to protest, and I said, "Heidi, please. I'll spend the night with you. I can drive."

She nodded. "I'm going to be in my apartment in fifteen minutes," she said, and her voice cracked a little.

I shook my head. "Don't," I said. "Thanks. I'll see you there."

I didn't turn on the radio. I don't remember any of the turns of the road that evening. I remember arriving in the now-familiar parking lot. I remember making that journey, that first I used to make at a dead run to avoid the cold, and then I used to make in wonder and joy. That night I made it in a dream.

Heidi opened the door and gestured me inside. There was none of that awkwardness that there might have been half a year ago. She held out her arms, and I came, and again we sank to the floor and she held me. I couldn't cry in that moment, but somehow it was like she understood that. Like she knew I was already weeping in my heart, and if she held me long enough, it would come.

"She got the message, right?" I said.

"Message?"

"You told me to call her. I left her a message. I even said 'I love you.' Sort of. I stopped in the middle. But that didn't matter."

"I love you."

That broke the last of my walls, and I sobbed into her shoulder until we were both exhausted. Heidi didn't cry with me as I had with her. Instead, after awhile, she sang to me in a soft voice. Old lullabies that I didn't recognize. But it was enough.

I don't remember falling asleep. If I did sleep, the hands on the clock and the stars visible in the sky from Heidi's window barely moved. I lingered in the half-sleep for a little while. Not thinking, not feeling. Just listening to Heidi's exhausted breathing, and watching the ends of her long black hair dance slowly on the blankets she'd conjured up from somewhere.

I knew by this time that Heidi wasn't a faerie. She was just a girl. Well, a woman. But she couldn't stand between me and the shattered pieces of my life. I couldn't be a second Grace for her. I had to leave, and I had to get a hold of myself, and I had to come back.

I eased myself out of the tangled hug we'd fallen asleep in. Heidi whimpered in her sleep, and I shifted so I was the one holding her. If I stayed, I would fall back asleep. The dark and cold that came in even in the summer could never consume either of us as long as we were together.

But if we fought, I'd fall apart. I had to be stronger than that, for us both.

I eased away. It was cold outside of those blankets. In the summer, the cold numbed rather than cut. I quietly slipped my sweatshirt back on over my shirt. Then I slipped into the kitchenette at the other side of the studio from Heidi's couch, where she slept on. I pulled up the little message board she kept by the refrigerator, similar to mine. I wrote right over the grocery list in the dark: "Thank you for holding back the darkness tonight. You're" and I dropped the pen and dashed away the renewed tears, "the best friend I will ever have. I'm going to go away for a bit to get a hold of myself so that I can hold off the darkness on my own. But I'm coming back. I promise you."

I was out of space, and I still couldn't tell Heidi I loved her.

She knew.

But my heart still broke into a million pieces as I set the door to lock behind me and slipped back out into the Minnesota night.

I pulled at the handle of my car. It clinked. I had my school bag from the morning class a lifetime ago, but Heidi had taken away my keys when I'd walked into her door. That was just as well. I didn't need to leave my car at the airport. Instead, I flipped out my cell phone and called a taxi.

"I don't care which bank you use," I said. My voice rose rapidly. Just like at school, it was perfectly normal for people to walk through airports holding conversations on their cell phones, but not perfectly normal for people to yell into them. "Mom's account was Compass, right? Just sell stuff and put it in there. No, I don't want the house. Yes, just take the storage unit for her stuff out of her savings. I'll go through her things one day."

I was never setting foot in Brainerd again.

"Compass! Yes! No, no, yes, just DO IT." Two guys in business suits dropped their conversation to look at me. I gave them the finger. "No, I'm not staying for the funeral. I'm not even in Minnesota anymore." Okay, that was an exaggeration. I was in the airport in Minnesota. I already had my ticket. I'd gone up to the counter, offered the debit card for the account that held all of my personal money, and asked for a one-way ticket to someplace warm. The lady had said she had a standby seat available for Sky Harbor in Arizona, and I'd said that would do. I had ten bucks in my account. Once I'd confirmed my seat and used five of it to get a double-chocolate mocha, I'd picked up my phone to yell at my mom's accountant. Why couldn't he just save everything for me and let me go?

I felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff with my wings spread. I wasn't about to fly, but maybe I was about to hang-glide. To let go. I stood before the wind, unafraid of it or of the height, because the wind blew right through me without finding any purchase.

I thought about hanging up on the stupid accountant, but he finally did what I'd wanted. My inheritance would be safe, and I would fly away.

"I have to go," I said. They were calling boarding for my flight. "Yeah, connection to make. I'll be in touch. Bye."

I didn't whisper any Vulcan swear words into the phone. That part of my life wasn't over, but I couldn't let it be who I was right then.

Arizona is really hot in the summer.

Hot, dry, dusty, no cell phone reception, and did I mention hot?

I'd stepped off the plane and wandered around the airport for a little while, marveling at the heat. Then I'd walked out of the airport proper and marveled anew at the heat. If the wind was a pillar you could lean on, then the Arizona desert heat is a solid brick wall. You run your head into it over and over again, then you find you can endure it.

I stopped at the information desk and asked politely where I could find summer work. The lady gave me an odd look, then said that I could always search online for places that were hiring. I said that I was here for the summer just to work. Her friend came up and said brightly, "Are you with the group who is going to the Grand Canyon?"

"Yeah, sure," I'd said.

"You're brave," she said, giving me a sympathetic look. "One of the lodges needs someone to pick up trash along the hiking trails and then clean the stalls for the mules."

"Where do I go?" I said.

Eventually I stepped into a van with twenty-something silly high schoolers. I stared out the window. Then I fell asleep. Then I'd stared out the window some more. Then I fell asleep again. Then I thought about sending Heidi a text message. Just to let her know I was okay. I pulled out the phone, and it said, "no reception." I flipped it open and shut a few more times, swore at it, and buried it in the bottom of the school bag that was my sole legacy of Minnesota. I fell back asleep. If you could call it that - it was the sleep of apathy.

I spent every spare minute of my time at the Canyon asleep.

I didn't have a lot of free time, though. I picked up a lot of extra shifts.

It might be more accurate to say that I spent every minute of my time at the Canyon asleep, free or not. Later I would have no memory of picking up trash, cleaning stalls, or guiding tours.

They say that you have to watch out for nightmares after a huge loss. I was surprised that never happened. I was afraid to sleep alone, so I didn't.

I hadn't been a virgin before. Just like I hadn't really stayed away from all the things that Mom thought a good Christian high school girl should stay away from: drugs, parties, teenaged boys, and people who use lots of curse words. But, not even as a secret from Mom, I'd never played the sex is conquest game before. That summer I did. I learned every nuance of the game. And later I wouldn't remember a single lesson.

One bright September afternoon, two weeks before all the summer workers would have to leave the Canyon anyway, I took a trip into town with my current conquest, Cameron. He said he had something he wanted to tell me. I said that I was sick of sand in my hair and wanted to go to a real Wal-Mart.

He left me at the store, then drove off, saying, "I'm sick of you, Tara," over his shoulder as he left.

I meandered around the store and bought a mocha at the store McDonalds. Seriously. I cared that little. I had all my identification and credit cards with me, and there was nothing back at the cabins that I cared about. Finally I figured I'd better at least call a taxi and figure out how I was getting back to finish out those couple of weeks of work. I flipped out my phone before I remembered that it didn't work.

Only there was a signal in the store. I had one text message. It read, "I'll be at St. Philips on Thursday afternoon, praying my heart out for you. May angels surround you while you're gone. -The Faerie."

It was dated later on the day that I had left in the very early morning.

I stared at my phone. For the first time since that first night, I started to cry. I put down my phone and put my head in my hands at that table at McDonalds, and sobbed into my arms. Then I stood up. I called my boss at the Canyon and said that it had been fun, but could he please find someone to cover my shifts for the last two weeks of the summer. He said sure; I think he was relieved that I'd be leaving and taking my drama with me. Then I called that cab.

It was time to go home.





Cameron dumped me at Wal-Mart about noon on a Wednesday. The Greyhound shuttle from the Canyon back to the airport left every hour on the hour; I caught the 2 PM shuttle. When I got in to the airport, I bought the least-expensive of the crazily priced last-minute tickets, which still didn't take up a fraction of the overtime money I'd earned. I boarded almost immediately, flew overnight, then took an "Airport Taxi" from Minneapolis back to Bemidji.

The shuttle from the Canyon to Sky Harbor didn't take six hours. It took six months. The flight to Minneapolis didn't take five hours. It took five years. Universes formed and died during my journey from Minneapolis to Bemidji.

I wouldn't let myself cry again. I held on to the seat handrests tightly enough to tear the cloth beside all three of the seats that I used. It was the emotional equivalent of the time I had to bite down on a tongue depressor so the doctor could sew up a deep cut I'd made in my arm when I was nine.

I wanted my mommy. I wanted the quiet belief in?something?that Heidi had when she prayed, something to keep me away from the edge that I would fall off if I only let go of the handrest. I wanted to erase the past few months. I wanted a husband. I wanted to be good for a husband. I wanted a hug. I wanted something to last forever. I wanted to kill trolls on the bike paths by the lake in Bemidji and be the same?no, be a better woman. I wanted the words 'never again' to stop running through my head.

I wanted something to make the pain stop. But every time it seemed like I could understand one bit, it would get swallowed in a new horrible thought, and I'd go back to concentrating on my grip and staring out the window as if I were going to burn a hole through it with my eyes.

Bemidji State University, 15 miles, came into my view - the first thing to register since the journey had begun. I pulled out my phone to reread the message from Heidi. The phone screen came away streaked with blood from my hands.

I found an uninjured finger and thumb, and used them to tip the driver out of my earnings from the tips people had given me. I'd count that later. I had only my nearly-empty backpack and the clothes I was wearing. I wondered what had happened to my apartment, and then realized that it was the first time since that awful night that it had even occurred to me to wonder.

That was my first thought. My second was that I'd forgotten how cold Minnesota always was. The wind sliced through the fall-colored leaves, right through my t-shirt. I wrapped my arms around myself and started to walk. I was dizzy. I hadn't eaten since breakfast at the Canyon the previous day.

I approached the steps of St. Philip's. It was silly to think that Heidi would have waited there for me for three months. Absurd, really. People didn't sleep or work in churches. Maybe Heidi came back a lot, but there was no particular reason for her to be there at that point. Besides, she might not be ready to see me. I just wanted to see the church itself. Didn't Catholics light candles when they prayed?

I'd been able to feel that longing. The longing for one greater than me to pick up all the shattered pieces I'd made of my life and take me home. But not the longing I felt for the human woman, the faerie-girl who I'd grown to depend on so much. I couldn't. I wouldn't be another Grace.

Might as well get out of the cold. That was all I wanted. I pushed the heavy door open with my elbow and slipped inside. It was just as cold, but there was no wind. The sanctuary was huge. It was vaulted and decorated, with a huge crucifix displayed at the front and pews that looked like they'd been made in another century placed all down either side. I smelled incense and heard trickling water. Soft voices rose and fell from a lighted room at the back of the church.

I walked up the aisle slowly. Wasn't I supposed to kneel or something? I didn't know any Catholic prayers. I'd been in church as a kid as often as I couldn't escape Mom long enough, but I'd never been inside a Catholic Church before. There was a little sign placed off to the side, in an alcove below a statue I didn't understand. The sign said, "Mary's Prayer Group, 1 PM Thurdays. Leaders: Tami Connell and Heidi Wynham."

I froze. Then I turned to leave the church. But there was a flood of light into the hallway, and the voices stopped.

Heidi stood in the doorway, framed by the only bright light in the huge room. She looked exactly as I remembered. Long, long black hair fell from her head down the light yellow dress that she usually chose. Her face was thinner than before, but still elfin.

Now that she'd seen me, I couldn't leave. So instead I did one more of my crazy things that made sense - I ran back up the hallway. Heidi met me midway, and caught me up. I think we managed to lift each other off the floor.

"I told you we were faeries," I joked, slipping back into the old patterns before I could stop myself. Then I realized what I'd said. "Um, Heidi, I'm sorry -" Sorry for what? For running off? For not being good for her? I tried again, "I'll just let you - "

"You're not going anywhere," Heidi said. With one arm still firmly around my shoulders, she led me into the back room. I did try to slip away a couple of times. Heidi was smaller than me, but she'd always been stronger anyway. Two days of traveling through a black hole of emotional chaos without eating hadn't improved my strength. I don't think I was trying to get away too hard, though. The sense of being welcomed met something so deep in me that I couldn't push it away.

"This is my best friend," Heidi announced to the room at large. She ushered me to a seat on the floor right beside her, then handed me a string of beads. "No one expects you to know the prayers," she said quietly to me.

I wouldn't have left at that point, but Heidi didn't let go of me anyway. I don't remember anything anyone said, or anything I did. Just my little tiny cocoon of warmth within a very cold world. I was home.

I stumbled a bit getting up from the floor. Heidi picked me up and helped me the rest of the way. I'd forgotten how strong she was. One of our old Vulcan swear words slipped out. For a moment, the grim determination Heidi had been moving with fell away and she grinned at me, but then the resolve went back up. Yelling, "See you next week, Tami," over her shoulder, she steered me firmly out of the room, back through the church, up the steps, and across the street to a coffee shop.

Not Starbucks, I noticed. And not Caribou, for which Minnesota was so famous. Some local place.

Heidi deposited me in an armchair near the window as if I were a child, then helped herself to a plastic cup, filled it with water from the fountain drink machine, and shoved it into my hand. "Drink," she said.

I drank the water. While I was drinking, Heidi went back to the counter to order food.

"I'm not hungry," I mumbled in her general direction.

If she heard at all, Heidi ignored me. She marched back up to the counter and returned a few minutes later with two cups of soup and a plate of sandwiches.

"Can we go back into the church? I've never been in a Catholic Church before," I mumbled.

Heidi ignored me again. She shoved a sandwich into my hand exactly the same way she had made me drink the water. "We should've left the group and fed you," she said. "I wasn't thinking."

Thirteen "mommy" jokes popped into my head, but I concentrated instead on my turkey on wheat. Extra lettuce and no pickles. Even after all this time, Heidi remembered the type of sandwich I always ordered when we ate together. And that hadn't been very often.

"Whoa," she said softly. "Not so fast."

"Right." Why was I acting like this, anyway? I already knew that I wouldn't be hungry after a two day fast, and that I should eat anyway but eat slowly. Or, at least, I thought I knew that. Everything was still fuzzy.

Two sandwiches later a memory hit me as if I'd stepped through a portal. I was back in the Canyon cafeteria. One of the guests made an off-color joke. I echoed it, loudly, and I must have been drunk because the table spun and I was lying on my back on the floor. No one was mad at me, or at least no one nearby. Cameron was laughing and telling me to tell it again.

"Tara!"

I was sitting in a little coffee shop across the street from St. Phillips Catholic Church in Bemidji, MN.

"Sorry," I said.

"You went somewhere else," Heidi said. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"I?" any other time I'd have told her everything. But I would not be another Grace. I would not have a big fight with Heidi and have her leave me?and we'd both be lost. I'd just come home. I didn't want to leave it so soon. And I definitely didn't want to visit the deep oceans lying just outside the screen doors.

"Tara. Talk to me."

"It's not you," I said. "It's?I?can we please at least go home and talk there?"

"Can you at least promise me you'll stay with me?" Her voice was gentle, and tinged with panic. Both were worse than anger would have been.

"You have to promise me something first," I said.

Heidi met my eyes and brushed her hair out of her face with her fingers. It was even longer than before, I noticed absurdly.

She wasn't going to speak, so I said, "Promise you won't see me like Grace."

She recoiled. "Grace?" her voice was choked with pain, but she said, "I still don't understand."

"Grace depended on you and you were there for her. Then you fought and she had nothing left. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to have nothing without you."

Her face was so much more expressive than usual. Confusion washed over it, then anger, and then compassion. "You have a lot besides me," she said. "You have yourself, you have your dreams?it's just that you don't have family without me anymore, Tara. But I don't have family without you either."

"Now I don't understand," I said. I felt even worse. My cut hands were starting to hurt again, and so were various other places on my body that I hadn't known had been damaged.

Heidi spoke half to herself. "God never meant us to live without family. That's why we long for it so much. Sometimes shit happens," she met my eyes with a shadow of the old glint, "and we lose our family. We have to be strong enough to survive when that happens. But I don't think God made us to stay there. And I think God understands when we don't have what it takes to stay there. Like Grace. But you're already strong enough. You didn't have to prove it."

"I think I get that now," I said. I moved around again.

Heidi peeled back the shoulder of my t-shirt to reveal a deep burn. "Okay, we're going to finish this conversation later. Right now you and I are going to Urgent Care."

"No," I said, but I didn't pull away. "I don't even remember getting that. I feel like my brain was frozen in ice these past few months."

"I guess your heart was," Heidi said.

"I mean, though, my insurance has expired by now. I'm surprised they didn't cut off my cell phone. In fact, I don't know where I'm going at all, because I don't know what happened to my apartment."

"They didn't cut off your cell phone because I found your password on your laptop and paid your bill online," Heidi said. "And all your things are safe. When your July rent was due, I went in and moved everything into storage." She blushed a little. "Except the comics. Those are at my place. I've kept on reading them."

I didn't know what to say. After a few seconds, I tried, "I'm sorry," again.

"Tara. Listen to me. You are not the only one who has ever skipped town and left all your things behind. I know how it feels not to care." Her eyes dropped again to the burn on my arm. She ran a soft hand around it, just touching the cloth of my shirt on my shoulder. Then her head dropped.

Aches or no, my strength had returned, and I could be the one to hold Heidi up. Right there in the coffee shop, I wrapped my arms tightly around her. "I promise," I whispered. "I'll never leave again. Not unless we do it together."

"I promise too," she whispered.
Heidi's apartment looked the same as it always had. Dark-lit in comparison to the fall light outside, but with the same gold- and red-tinged colors. Vibrantly Catholic. The only change was the prominent row of X-Men comics on the single shelf above Heidi's desk.

"You're going to Urgent Care in the morning," she said.

I nodded. "Just as soon as I call my insurance company." I went over to the couch and sat down. "Let's buy a house."

"What?"

"Let's buy a house. That would be more comfortable than an apartment."

"You're serious," Heidi said. More softly, she added, "I still work at Denny's. I can't afford?"

"You can if you let me handle the down payment. Listen, between moving my stuff and paying my bills, I owe you the half you would've paid," I said, guilt rushing through me again. I fought it back and went on. "Half of the mortgage can't be more than your rent for this place. And I have my money from Mom to cover any emergencies."

Heidi grinned. Except for that moment when our eyes first met back in the church, it was the first time I'd seen her really smile since I'd come back. She settled herself on the floor beside the couch where I sat, just like the faerie I always called her. She said, "Remember I told you I want to be a ballerina? Minneapolis Ballet comes through here every once in awhile, and they've given me two auditions. Oh, I wouldn't go to Minneapolis. But it's good practice for the auditions that are sure to come up soon here in Bemidji."

It was my turn to say, "You're serious."

"Yeah," Heidi said.

"And what would the Terebithians think if their Queen became a famous dancer?"

"The Terebethians are glad that the evil ogres returned their Queen at last." Heidi laid her head down again.

"No more tears," I sniffled, "or you'll make me cry too."

"I don't think that's a problem!"

I said, "Does it ever go away? This sense that things just aren't?real?"

"Yeah. Eventually." Heidi's laugh washed up out of that same deep ocean that I'd been trying not to think about. "It's what Catholics call the dark night of the soul, when everything is so chaotic and confusing that you're not able to sense God's presence." She broke off. "I'm sorry, Tara. I know you're not a Christian."

"Someday," I said. "I promise."

"Don't make promises - "

"No, really. I can promise." I didn't know how I knew I could promise. It was one last extremely crazy thing that I did without thinking about it. And yet I did know. I'd been dead inside, and I was beginning to come back to life, and life was going to look different going forward.

"Good," Heidi said simply, and she pushed herself on to the couch beside me and laid her head on my shoulder.

We didn't talk for a long time after that. The moon moved across the sky, and it shone through Heidi's open window and left shadows on the carpet.

"I was in one of those youth group meetings," I said. "A long time ago. I had run out of the comics I'd stashed in my purse so I was paying attention for a change. I only caught a couple of lines, but it was a book quote, that sometimes we can't hear God because we're yelling too loudly."

"C.S. Lewis," Heidi said. "A Grief Observed." She met my eyes and added, "I've never read it either. But look," and she pointed to her desk. I'd seen all the photos, but I'd never noticed that there were little scraps of paper here and there as well, with quotes scribed in a neat, clear hand.

"We should read it out loud," I said. "Just like the comics."

So we did, as the moon continued its progression now unnoticed by us.

I woke up bright and early for my urgent care appointment?on Saturday.

Heidi told me about Friday. We'd fallen asleep just before dawn with the almost-finished book lying open on the floor beside the couch. Heidi had woken up Friday afternoon, made me wake up and eat cereal, then gone to work. She'd come home with dinner, woken me again and made me eat my half, then curled up almost in the same position and fallen back to sleep on the couch. Heidi assured me that I say amusing things in my sleep. Not all in English.

The doctor at Urgent Care wanted to admit me for a week, but I talked him into two days. I spent a rather pain-filled weekend having compresses and chemicals applied to various appendages, and listening to countless lectures on how stupid I'd been not to have had it taken care of before. That part of my heart seemed still encased in ice.

Heidi snuck in before visiting hours by pretending to be the volunteer who pushed the library cart. Then I got out of bed and pretended to be the other librarian. We made it through half a wing before anyone caught us.

I went to Heidi's prayer group again that next Thursday afternoon. Afterwards two of the guys who worked nights came over to watch movies and play games for a few hours. I was jealous for about two seconds that Heidi had done so well making friends, and then Jeff told him that he had the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers game for X-Box. That automatically made him my best friend.

We settled back into a routine. Heidi worked and went to church, and I spent my mornings patching things back together with the school - at which I was due to start again in the middle of November, pending a whole load of lectures and penalties for skipping town. We did our house-hunting together during whichever hours Heidi wasn't working. We kept each other up late.

It wasn't the unrestrained play that we'd had together. I felt like I'd grown up a great deal?and for some reason, Heidi had grown up in the same way. But she hadn't suffered or faced anything brand-new.

Well, except losing me, my ego said.

"No, it's not that," Heidi said when I found the not-too-arrogant words to ask her. "You get to a point where you feel a million years old. Then you get past that point, and you find out that you can be a little girl again."

She never pressed me about going back to church. But one Sunday, I awoke to the smell of blueberry coffee from the kitchenette on one side, and a little note on the couch pillow saying, "I'm going to be at St. Philip's at eight thirty singing in the choir."

"You're in your own kitchen at seven thirty," I said. "And I hope you're driving to St. Philip's."

Heidi just smirked and came over to the couch and handed me a blueberry muffin. She'd been sleeping in her own bed, and we'd been spreading sheets over the couch for me, to be cleaned up every morning. Whomever got herself out of bed first made coffee and breakfast, then coaxed the other one out of bed with said coffee and breakfast.

Mass didn't actually start until nine. It was different than a Protestant church service. Not the songs, and not even the basic format of the service. But the smell of incense hit me right as I walked in. And somehow, because it was new and exciting, it made everything easier to listen to.

"We pray for those who are ill," said the priest, listing several names. "Lord, hear our prayer," the congregation echoed. I could hear Heidi's high-pitched voice from my right. "And we pray for those who have died, especially Grace Wynham and Melinda Everett."

Heidi held on to my hand so tightly that I thought it would fall off, and I welcomed every bit of pressure. The moment came, and passed, and we both just held on.




That day was almost five years ago. I am writing now from my desk, in the upstairs office of the house that Heidi and I share. She has a bedroom, and so do I. There's a guest bedroom, and then the upstairs office that she and I share and the downstairs office that is half library, half impromptu dance studio, and all cluttered. In this office, we each have our own desks. I use mine much more often for work than Heidi does. I'm an accountant for the university where I once went to school. Sometimes I do freelance projects, and usually at least once a week I find an excuse to work from home. Since Heidi is a dancer, she only uses her desk for paying her own bills or writing letters. Or drawing. She's publishing an Internet comic strip that only I have any idea has anything to do with her.

It's Saturday afternoon. It's late October again, and there is already "sticking snow" on the ground. The sun shines brightly on it, and I trace the hills and contours on the front lawn with my eyes as I write these words with my pencil that has the little Care Bear on the top in place of an eraser. I've found some of my inner little girl again. I haven't journeyed far enough from that horrible summer to be Heidi's playmate, but little bits have come back.

We've had three serious fights since moving in together. None of them destroyed our sense of family. None left me with nothing, the way Grace had been left with nothing. We're okay.

The first fight was my fault. It happened right after we unpacked in this house. Heidi moves through all this space like a weightless faerie, and sometimes I still forget that she's a real woman tied to this earth. I forget that I have the power to let her down. I forget how much she missed me during that one horrible summer, and I forget how much she wants me around.

Two weeks after we got our house, Heidi landed her first ballet performance. She assumed I'd be right in the front row with flowers cheering for her. I should have been, if I hadn't let my jealousy get the better of me. I saw the dress rehearsal. It was the first time I saw, how talented and beautiful my friend really was. I knew in that moment that she didn't need me there, and I sat there surrounded by empty seats, smiling and laughing, and crying inside. I drifted off into the numbing snow as people started to file in for the performance. I walked all the way home and hid under the covers, and slept the sleep I would have slept in the Canyon.

If I'd been asleep I would've heard my door softly open and close as someone checked on me. Two hours past dawn the next day my phone chimed. All the text message said was "get your butt on the skating rink before the Saturday morning light show starts."

I got my butt on the skating rink. Literally several times, since I was much too shaken up to balance.

Heidi didn't look too sorry that I'd fallen, but she laughed and swung me into Crazy Duos and Trios just as she had when I still felt as if I was a little girl.

"I'm sorry," I said as we walked back to the car. "I'll be at your performance tonight."

"Talk to me," she said, simply, the three words I'd learned I couldn't deny.

"I was jealous."

"You're human. I'm a better skater than you are, just like I'm a better dancer. Doesn't mean I'm not your sister."

It was all so ridiculous and obvious that I did the first thing that occurred to me, which was to slip under her arm, run to the side of the lot, scoop up snow and throw a snowball at her. For the next two hours we whooped and ran and made idiots of ourselves all over the now-deserted Smart Skate parking lot, and I found out how much clumsier than normal Heidi is the day after dancing.

Two years later we had a series of quarrels about stupid little things. A wall had grown between us gradually, and suddenly little things that Heidi did, like reading in the lounge chair humming, bothered me as they never had before. I sniped, and she scowled, and then she spent an entire afternoon by the lake sketching without me.

I still didn't want to lean on her more than she could bear. But there was this guy in the picture, who'd probably contributed to the wall.

I hadn't slept with anyone since the Grand Canyon. I didn't have the energy to date. But it was more than that. Every time since the Canyon that the opportunity for sex presented itself, I saw and felt Cameron instead. But Alex was different. He was sweet, and he liked to talk about all the same things I did, and the outpouring of words when I was with him was such a welcome change from silence and sniping at Heidi. I could've made out with him anywhere. The first few times we did that in his car or in darkened movie theatres. One evening we got lazy and made out in the couch in my living room.

Heidi walked in from her dance practice. She gave me a disgusted look and walked out the front door.

I told Alex I'd be right back and ran out into the yard after Heidi. "Oy! This is your house too. We'll go back to Alex's to make out if it bothers you."

"Tara, I don't care where you make out! You're not supposed to be doing that at all."

"What?"

"You're not married to him, dumbass."

"I'm not having sex with him, dumbass. And even if I was, I'm not a Christian. It's not wrong for me."

"You don't get to choose right and wrong."

"Yes, I do. You know what? Never mind. We're going to make out right here. If you can't put up with me and Alex, go somewhere else."

"I will."

I never knew where Heidi did go that night.

I didn't want to talk with Alex. I wanted to go back in the house and have sex on the couch and have it be like all those times when I was fifteen. But Alex took the choice out of my hands by appearing on the doorstep behind me. He said softly, "I'm going."

"Alex, wait!"

"I don't need your drama, Tara."

The bright, warm spot he'd made in my heart was gone and there was really no place left to run. I did, though. I went out in the snow and ran for several hours.

Guilt and the ghost-voices of people you've hurt? You can't run from that, not even through the numbing snow.

I gave it up at two AM and slumped back into the house. I vaguely remember changing out of my wet clothes and into pajamas and then getting into bed, so maybe I wasn't as apathetic as before, since I can remember something.

At about three in the morning I heard a key in the front door lock. I hadn't been sleeping, but I turned over on my side in my bed and lay still. I heard the soft swish of my door on the carpet that told me it was Heidi, checking on me. I rolled back over and sat up.

"I'm so sorry," she said before I'd had a chance to get a word out. Then she backed up, vanishing like she used to do on bare feet.

I got up and chased her. Heidi is fast, and quiet, but there are only so many places you can go in this house. Plus, we've played tunnel explorers a zillion times. We both know every nook and cranny. She gave up running, and I found her half-hidden in the shadows in the kitchen, nursing hot tea.

"You're worth ten Alexes," I blurted out.

She pushed away the tea and met my eyes. "I should never have made you choose."

"It doesn't matter. Alex left."

She buried her face in her hands. "I'm sorry."

I padded over behind her. "Heidi, look at me. No, really. We'll talk about right and wrong later. You're home."

"Okay," she said.

"There's still something wrong. What is it?"

"Christianity, I guess," she said. "You know how you said it wasn't wrong for you because you're not a Christian."

"I never was a Christian, you always knew that?but I promised I would be someday," I said. Then I thought of an irrelevant but fascinating question that might break down a little of this awkwardness. "Do Catholics think Protestants aren't Christians?"

Heidi's face lit, and it was like all those things we'd talked about for years came rushing back into her head. "They are," she said, leading me into the living room. "It's different for people who start out Protestant. Most Protestants don't even know what Catholicism is."

"The Sacraments," I said, trying out an unfamiliar word.

"Yeah. Marriage is one of them?" Heidi said, and then she explained exactly why she'd been upset, growing more animated by the moment.

We talked the remainder of the night and into the morning. The next day I found a little note with my coffee. "I'll be in the attic in the lounge chair humming," it said. "I won't come downstairs until I'm done."

I could hear very, very faint notes of the Beauty and the Beast theme from the attic. So I burst up the stairs singing it at the top of my lungs. Then I talked Heidi right back into humming downstairs.

I'm not married now. Neither of us is. Or, well, dating. Probably either Heidi or I, or both, will find someone before our lives are over. We've talked about it quite a bit. She said that we've gone through so much together, that we can handle sharing each other. I said that God would let us stay secure in each other when we had husbands. Heidi gave me one of her ear to ear grins.

The stupidest two things that ever happened this year turned into our third quarrel. Heidi got mad at me for not explaining the mortgage well enough, which was dumb of her. I got mad at her for not mentioning me when she received an award for best female chorus dancer, which was just silly since she didn't have time to thank anyone. So she blurted out what she was mad about, and I blurted out what I was mad about, and we sniped for a few minutes. Then one of us threw in a Terebithian word, and we fell on the floor laughing. I could almost imagine getting up and putting on my Storm costume and chasing Heidi through the house throwing lightning bolts. Maybe I'll be young enough next summer.

I'm not a Christian yet. Somewhere in the five years between meeting Heidi at that first youth group and seeing her again in the snow, the "I'm not a Christian," that I'd told myself every year of my childhood morphed into "I'm not a Christian yet." Then after the Canyon, I found I could honestly promise I would come to the Church someday. Christianity is so quiet. I noticed that the first morning I saw Heidi praying her Rosary while she made coffee and toast. Many nights when we fall asleep talking, tangled on the couch together, I can hear the soft murmur as she prays.

Christianity isn't something that comes into your life and changes everything, the way people used to tell me in my childhood. It doesn't demand so much as shapes. Why do I still get that little wisp of joy on the wind when I reread my X-Men collection? Why is family so precious, and why does losing my mom still hurt so much? Why do I like being an accountant, and what do I do when I don't? Those are the types of questions that weave themselves through the rhythm of each of Heidi's and my days, and somewhere along these years I started answering them with "God," just as Heidi does without even thinking about it.

Some August, I will ask Heidi to be my sponsor as I go through the initiation to be a Catholic Christian. Not next year. I guess I'll know. I'll ask her on her birthday. I think she'd like that.

Heidi has tried to reach her parents twice since I got back from the Grand Canyon. Both times by phone this time. Both times they had polite, civil, conversations, and I sat there with Heidi throughout. And then held her, for the only two times she's broken down completely since I've known her.

But we are family.

A voice filters up through the office door. "I'm going to be at Smart Skate in a half hour!"

I yell, "You'd better mean that you're going to be in the car in ten minutes, unless you want to drive."

"I'll be in the car in five minutes, and you'd better show up and drive, because I can't find my glasses." One of the things that had let me know I was Heidi's sister in fact was the first time she took out her contacts and let me see her in glasses. She doesn't usually wear contacts anymore, except for performances.

I put down my pen.

I had gone to the office closet to get my skates. Heidi and I sometimes sneak in and tie each other's laces together. Well, truthfully, we usually sneak in and tie our own laces together by mistake. But this time Heidi hadn't tied my laces. Two seconds ago I checked the laces to my skates and found a note instead. She could have put it there a week ago or a month ago, or a moment ago. It's a torn piece of paper from the bottom of one of those ever-present notepads accountants keep. It says, "I love you."

I put down my pen again, take my skates, and take the downstairs steps two at a time. I say it out loud as I ease into the driver's seat. "I love you."

Elsieaustin's Scrolls
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