The soles of our sneakers pounded years of sodden leaves. The rubber of Reeboks skidded on dew the sun never burned up deep in the shady woods. We heard them behind us laughing. The redhead the loudest, screeching and puffing. 

Margaret, Wendy, and I knew where to go. The woods were filled with abandoned tree forts, built by kids gone off to one of the old colleges in Boston or the paper mill downtown. We reached the tree before the pack of boys and Margaret went first, Wendy pushing her blue jean-ed bottom to get her up there faster. The boys arrived as soon as we were all standing on the plywood sheet some teenagers had nailed between two branches, a platform with no walls, no ceiling, no way down but to climb slowly and gingerly back the way you came. 

We stood at the edge and peered over. The boys gathered below, staring up. The redhead’s freckles glistened. His carrot-colored hair stuck up from his head like the yarn on a discarded Raggedy Anne. 

Some of the boys at the bottom of the tree rode our bus. Some were in the grade above us. All their bodies looked thick and sweaty. They radiated something from their skin that made me feel like I did when I was home from school sick, about to vomit into the bowl my mother also used for popcorn and Halloween candy. 

The boys could climb the tree. They could grab us, press their hot lips to ours, push us off onto the leafy ground studded with rocks. A short one who lived four houses down from me elbowed the redhead in the ribs, his eyes gleaming. The redhead kept his gaze fixed on us, his speckled face a sickening smile. 

We stood and they stood. As it had been, we knew, for generations. 

They’ll go away, Wendy whispered, if we wait. 

Margaret, Wendy, and I laid flat on the hard board, avoiding the layers of wood curled up from years rotting in the rain. Lying flat, the boys couldn’t see us—not Margaret’s pink sweater, Wendy’s corduroys wet on the cuffs, or the t-shirt I’d inherited from my cousin with an elf crouching under a mushroom on the front. They couldn’t see Margaret’s stepdad swirl the ice in his whiskey at the head of the table when we spent the night or my uncle, straddling a stepstool and feeding logs into the woodstove, eyeing me sideways, curls of menthol curses wisping from his lips that night I forgot my coat inside and ran back into his house alone to get it. They couldn’t see Wendy’s big sister after her date kicked her out of his car in the parking lot by the trailhead and we found her walking through the woods cold and sobbing, begging us not to tell, not to tell anyone ever.

We laid on our backs and waited, staring at the design the leaves made in the sky. Oak and elm and ash carving outlines against the blue. We saw our lives in the shapes above us, husbands and children and jobs to tend to. Men to run from. Men to run toward. Brown-haired ones, blond ones, ones with red hair. We pushed them up as far up as they would go, until they cleared the treetops and when our futures looked back down at us, the boys were gone and they saw only our sneakers touching in the middle of the damp plywood, our bodies stretching outward like the arms of a star. 

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Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and other literary magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net award and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram.