Page 11 of What Comes After

Having already had enough, I looked at Theo and asked, “What do you want to do today?”

He held up one of the bags in his hands and answered, “This.”

I looked inside and was so excited about what I saw. “You got a new set?”

Nodding, Theo revealed, “And it’s over two thousand pieces.”

“Wow.” My eyes almost fell out of my head. “We’ll be busy all day. Come on. Let’s go get started.”

After handing his mom the other bag he’d carried over to my house, Theo and I took off to get started on his brand-new Lego set. It might have been labeled for someone who was older than us, but the two of us had been building Lego sets together forever. The smaller sets took us almost no time at all.

Once we opened the box, dumped out the bags and instructions, and organized everything, I asked, “When did you get this?”

“I got it a couple weeks ago from my aunt who lives in Ohio. She didn’t get to visit us at Christmas, and she kept forgetting to ship it out to me,” he explained.

“And you didn’t build it right away?”

Theo shook his head.

“Why not?”

He smiled at me. “I wanted to wait to build it with you. I thought it would be much more fun to do together.”

Hearing that made me so happy. “You know you’re my best friend in the whole world, right?”

“I know. That’s why I waited. You’re my best friend, too.”

At that, the two of us dove in and built the new set. Just like always, we had the best time with each other.

* * *

Theo

Four months later

“One, two, three…”

I reached out for Devyn’s hand, and the two of us took off running in the opposite direction.

It was a few hours after dinner, late in the summer, and Devyn and I were outside playing hide and go seek with the other kids who lived in the neighborhood with us.

All of us did this a couple of times each week while a handful of our parents sat outside overseeing the game.

Devyn and I were some of the youngest to be playing, and there were kids who were as old as fifteen that were playing, too. Even though we were young, my best friend and I always did very well at the game.

While part of that might have been because we were smaller and could easily fit into hiding spots that others couldn’t, the bigger reason was that we looked out for each other.

The two of us didn’t always hide in the exact same spot. We usually would go to the same area, and then we’d find good hiding places that were close to one another.

That’s exactly what we did tonight.

Since the parents didn’t want us going all over the neighborhood, we had to stay within certain bounds to hide, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have a ton of spots to hide still. There were a lot.

We’d gone behind houses, up trees, in bushes, or inside sheds in someone’s backyard. Some of us hid inside the outdoor storage bins on a few of the decks in the neighborhood. Others used the parents watching over us as a safe place, assuming nobody would look near the adults.

Devyn and I were rarely ever it, because we always had good spots to hide, and we did what had to be done to protect the other from being found.

“Where do you want to go?” Devyn asked as I continued to hold on to her hand while we ran away from home base.

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