Page 11 of Their Secret Hideaway

Tabitha crosses her arms, pacing around me, almost ready to interrogate me. “You know folks usually have more to say about their parents if they're still in their lives. You talk about now as if it were ten years ago, Fox.”

I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to talk about how I’m doing things I don’t want to do. About how the old man is such a thorn in my side, about how he wouldn’t approve of me dating a hippie, let alone plotting to do more with her.

“Uh,” I say, looking for an adequate way to evade. “Look, we don’t have all night. Sun’s going to be setting soon. So can we punt this talk to later?”

Later, as in, fifty years from now. At least.

She narrows her eyes at me. “Fine, fine. Let’s get going then.”

I lock up my truck, grab my backpack, and we head into the forests. The ones closer to my childhood home, and not all that far from where Bear and Hawk lived back in the day. It doesn’t take long for us to get decently deep in the woods and for that old nostalgic sense of direction to kick in and guide me.

“All right, these two trees are still here, and the branches are too.”

We come to a pair of big oaks. Thick, and presumably older than even my grandparents.

“And what’s so special about these trees?” Tabitha asks with legitimate curiosity.

“Me and the boys used to hang out here all the time climbing these trees.”

“They do look very climbable.”

I put my pack down and begin to do just that. “We used to challenge one another to see who could get up the fastest. You know, as you expect ten-year-old boys to do.”

“Uh huh,” she says, watching me bemused.

I hustle up the tree. I must weigh twice as much as I did back then, but the tree holds up pretty well. “When we really wanted to challenge each other, we’d do the two-tree pull up challenge.”

She paces underneath the two of the trees, looking up at me as I literally monkey around.

“We’d climb over, and grab the branches between these two trees. They’re not very aligned with one another, so it’s actually a bit of a pain in the ass to hang from the two of them,” I explain as I do what my words say. “Then we dangle between them, and see how many pull ups we can do.”

She looks up at me as I’m dangling. “You’re about a dozen feet off the ground.”

“Ayup.”

“And you’re saying you did a strenuous exercise where you could lose your grip and fall down that distance? And there’s no mats like there would be in a school gymnasium where you usually do pull ups.”

“Uhuh.”

“That seems terribly dangerous.”

“Yep. Because it is.” I say this as I’m just freely dangling between the branches, and did about five pull-ups for the hell of it.

“I’m surprised the four of you didn’t break every bone in your bodies.”

“Not for lack of trying. But hey, we were kids. Or pre-teens. That’s what boys did for us. It’s stupid as sin but you couldn’t convince us it wasn’t the manliest thing imaginable.”

“As boring as I thought some of the cliche girl stuff was, at least none of it ever maimed me.”

I drop down from the trees, a perfect landing, just like back in the day. “I was regularly the pull-up champion between us four, by the way.”

She smirks. “I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself. The king of the twelve-year-olds.”

“I was very proud of myself. Until I realized probably what happened was I hit puberty first.”

Tabitha giggles.

“You don’t need steroids to get stronger when you have the good ol’ testosterone of youth fueling you.”

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