Page 9 of Falling Too Late

“Ohh.” I couldn’t imagine my mom dating anyone. My dad had been dead for seven years, and I didn’t think she’d even looked at another man the same way. “Well, can I walk you as far as you will let me?” She looked up at me with hesitation. “Or not. I promise I’m not trying to be weird or anything.”

I wasn’t ready to walk away from her yet. She seemed spooked from the fall, and I wanted to make sure she got home okay. I wanted to make sureshewas okay.

I could see she was debating it. “Okay. Just until the tracks though.”??

We walked together in silence for a while. I kept her walking next to the fence line. She ran her fingers over the panels absently.

“Have you always gone to this school?”I had wondered if maybe she’d transferred into it, and that was why I had never noticed her before.

“Yeah. Why?”?

“I’ve just never noticed you before,”I said aloud.

“I’m not very noticeable.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve been out of school for two weeks and the school hasn’t called my house and asked where I am.”??

“Does the school really do that?”I had no idea.

“Yeah. If you don’t give the school notice as to why you are gone or bring in a doctor’s note, they call your parents to make sure you aren’t ditching.”

I wondered then how many times the school had called my mom with no answer.She disconnected the phone during the day so the phone wouldn’t wake her up.

“Huh. I didn’t know that,” I mused.

“I guess you have never been sick before.”She looked up at me with those forest-green eyes.

“No, not really. I have ditched before though,”I admitted.

“Me too.”?Her face fell a bit.

“Where did you go when you ditched?”?

“I went to see my aunt.”??

“Why would you ditch to go see her?”I couldn’t imagine ditching just to be around an adult. I had ditched to go on adventures with Jon, though. We would do dumb shit like drive around and get drunk somewhere. Go bowling and sneak fifths in, but I didn’t want to tell Wren about that.

“I just. . .hadn’t seen her in a long time.” She shrugged, and for some reason I felt like she wasn’t telling the whole truth.We got to an area of the fence where it changed, meeting with a chain link fence, and I could barely see beyond it.

“This is me.” She stopped.

I looked over the fence, and something seemed familiar about it, the tree line beyond and everything.

“Wait, do you live in a house?”I looked back where we had come from at the roof peaks that we could see over the fence. The line of small houses where I thought one of them could be hers.

“No. We live in an apartment building.”She nodded in the direction of the trees.

I turn and look down at her, “I live in the Cherry Woods complex.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Really?”She showed me how she slipped through the small gap between the woods and the chain link fence. I had to jump the fence, the gap being too small for me.

“Yeah, I’ve lived here my whole life.”

“My mom and dad moved in when I was about ten.”

“That’s so weird. Why haven’t I seen you around?” We crossed the train tracks, and I pointed out the gap where I cut through. “I cut through down there and go up the alleyway.”

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