Free A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun

man, taking one girl or another down behind the railroad depot, as if he were working through a list. This was before all his other friends, like that Dean, started becoming fathers and Trevor clamped down. Bryan’s father didn’t mind the drinking Bryan did then, but he was pretty convinced that if Bryan got family-happy, he would be the one who would have to support them all. Kind of curious, given the current conditions. But Bryan didn’t think about all that then. He was always egging me on, which is how I got the courage to try for Tessa in the first place. Bryan was flummoxed by my bad luck, Tessa’s reaction.
    â€œThey got those therapists up at the Centre now, pretty much free, Ursie says.”
    Both of us had mulled that idea over for a moment before busting out laughing. We couldn’t help but remember Jackie’s comments after her altercation with the local peace officers, who’d suggested, not altogether kindly, that Jackie see one of those counselors herself. They’d suggested one in particular, a butter-handed man with anxious eyes and a bad comb-over. He liked to make house calls, his cheap blue car filthy with dust from the backcountry roads.
    â€œPiss on that,” she told Bryan and me. “You ever notice that if you look close at it, ‘therapist’ is the same as ‘the rapist’? No coincidence there.”
    For Jackie, the Bad Man could hide anywhere, even in the middle of a word. Ever after, she would chide anyone she knew who went to see a counselor.
    Going off to see the rapist?
she’d taunt before following with warnings:
Don’t get into his Gremlin, ’kay? Seats got no springs, pedal got no brakes and him neither. Man says he knows hypnosis, then you better run, eh? Bastard’s got a notepad, you bet, every word you say going down in a file. Better stay crazy, fucked up, huh?
    Bryan says you know a girl likes you if she gets real loud whenever she sees you, but the only time Tessa yelled around me was when she was chasing me off, so either that meant she has no use for me or . . . oh, hell, I didn’t know. Still, it was Tessa who came to sit with me at lunch at school, handing off her sandwich after ever-hungry, big lout that I am wolfed down my own; Tessa, who even last year stood between me and other girls who would let me fondle them, her fists slightly clenched as if she were claiming territory. And for all her sweet look, that big grin and long fall of streaky hair, she still ignored every other fellow as well, even Bryan’s toasty friend Dean, who hovered around, believing for way too long in the powerful charisma that had seduced every other grade-ten girl. Dean is long gone these days, but I haven’t been one who’s mourned him.
    Still there were times when I tried to conjure up Dean’s ways, looking for seduction tips, anything to keep Tessa close to me long enough for me to change her mind and win her. All the way down the logging roads that morning, all along the highway, I had gazed off into the woods, glimpsing a dance of those golden God’s rays flickering between the trees, and I had felt a roiling building within me, a longing for Tessa that made me almost physically sick. The window beside me was open and blasting air as Bryan barreled down the highway. My long hair whipped around so that Tessa began batting it away from her own eyes. On a normal day, I would have shrunk away from her, holding my hair with one hand, desperate not to bother her. The day of Hana Swann, I half-leaned out the window, gulping air, and when Bryan finally downshifted for the turn into town and I was jolted backward against Tessa, the violence cheered me as if it were one clear answer to my yearning, and for a long moment I leaned against Tessa as if daring her to shrug me off.
    When, once on the sidewalk with Bryan’s truck rumbling away, Tessa squeezed my arm, I couldn’t believe it. She was half a