Free Bats or Swallows by Teri Vlassopoulos Page A

there.
“Hey,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” she asked me.
“Aren’t you?”
“They let us out early.” She was holding a copy of King Lear and a green notebook we had bought together a few weeks ago. I had a purple one.
“Are you coming to lunch?”
She shook her head.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Laura, what’s going on?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Why aren’t you telling me anything these days?”
“I don’t have much to say.” She left me standing there, baffled. I’d been angry about her behaviour all week, but at that moment I was confused. Sad. I thought of the time we’d walked away from our guitar teacher, how easy it’d been for us to turn our backs on someone we’d admired so fiercely at first. I didn’t like that power used against me. I’d never been dumped, not by a boy or a friend, and when I sat down on the steps to steady myself, I was surprised when my eyes spilled over with tears. I cried just a bit, and then I went to lunch and hoped that no one would notice my shaky hands, my red eyes.
That afternoon I couldn’t concentrate in class and so I wrote Laura a letter. It was six pages. I asked her if everything was alright and if she was mad at me and told her that she could talk to me about anything. I miss you , I wrote. I stuffed it into her locker at the end of the day and went home.
A few days later there was a reply from her in my locker. It was just as long as mine, on yellow, legal-sized paper. She was fine, she said. The letter was chatty and friendly and then, somewhere in the middle she wrote, I had a dream and in the dream I kissed you . I’d never had a dream like this about Laura, but I wasn’t surprised when I saw it in her letter. I read it over a second time and tried to figure out how it made me feel. It didn’t disgust me and it didn’t scare me. It affected me and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling. On a certain level, I understood, even if I didn’t have an adequate response.
    On Victoria Day weekend, Nick’s parents went away and he invited me over. He picked me up from the subway station in his mother’s car and on the drive to his house we stopped at a nearby convenience store and bought popsicles. Mine broke in the package, and I ate it with my fingers. His little brother watched television in the living room, but we ignored him and went straight to Nick’s bedroom where he made me listen to Tom Waits. We were making out and then we had sex. I hadn’t planned on sleeping with him, but it happened and it was nice and the only thing I regretted was that he kept Tom Waits playing on the stereo.
When the record ended, we heard small explosions outside. Kids were setting off firecrackers in the street for the holidays and we got dressed and joined them. Nick swiped a bundle of sparklers from his little brother, and we sat on the curb and lit them one by one, waved them around, the goldish yellow sparks flickering and spitting in the early summer night air.
    After our first letters, Laura and I continued writing to each other, writing more than we actually spoke. We even stopped hanging out together at school and it was strange, but there was something satisfying about the letters, a feeling of connectedness that we hadn’t had before. We wrote about everything, except I never said much about Nick and she never elaborated on her dream. The only time we stepped out of this pattern was shortly afterwards when she invited me to come with her to a show that weekend. It was at the house of a new friend of hers, she said, and she thought I’d like the music.
On the way over to the house Laura explained to me that her friends were Straight Edge, that they didn’t drink or do drugs,
“So there won’t be any beer,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Are you Straight Edge now too?”
“Kind of,” she shrugged. A boy in one of the bands was handing out