High-Falutin Story
It starts with a tiny grain of sand. The natural divots in the rock collect rain, and pieces of dirt, sand, sediment, and trash also collect there. Millions of years ago, as the water first rushed over the virgin rock, the sand began to swirl as though caught in the throes of Charybdis, furiously going round and round, unable to escape the downward push and pull of the vortex (metaphor for event to come later?). With enough time and force, the divot became a hole, and as more time passed, the hole got deeper but not wider.
The locals call them the pots, and the state has tried without much success to make this area of the woods its storage place for equipment. They even erected a fence, with warning signs and all, and now seemingly law-abiding teenagers and adults use the signs to gain purchase as they boost themselves over the fence. To get to the pots, you must walk a little ways, through briars and brambles. This is where Skye found herself on a hot July afternoon, trailing after her boyfriend Eric, who was in a hurry to get to the pots.
She called after him, “Slow down! You never walk slowly enough to appreciate the beauty around us!” He just threw an irritated glance over his shoulder as he barreled through the weeds and undergrowth. “Well you never walk fast enough to get us where we’re going in a decent amount of time!” he yelled back.
It was the summer after her senior year of high school, and Skye had big plans. She was going to study journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her friends who would be joining her simply called it Carolina or Chapel Hill, but she loved the way the whole name sounded on her tongue, the lyrical way it danced off into the air after she spoke those words.
“The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” she murmured. “What’d you say?” Eric shouted back. She hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud. “Nothing,” she called back. She looked at Eric, realizing she’d been following him around most of her life. He was just a few months older than her, and their families had been thick as thieves for as long as anyone could remember. He had learned to walk first, and everyone said she had furiously worked to teach herself to walk so she could join him on his journeys. They’d made this particular journey dozens of times throughout their lives, carrying cane fishing poles when they were young, and then later, carrying bottles of Boone’s Farm for a wild night in the country with their friends. She could hardly believe this would be the last time they made this journey.
She wasn’t really sad for herself. She knew with confidence that bigger and better things awaited her on the other side of the Buck Holler, that she could go far beyond Golden Valley and never look back. She was sad for Eric. He planned to go to college eventually, but for now, he would be staying behind to work in his dad’s garage, and he’d already talked about how he couldn’t wait to come visit her on the weekends, how it would be like a mini-vacation for both of them; for her, a break from her school work, for him, a break from the monotony of oil, grease, and the constant yelling of his dad.
But she knew, without even really thinking about it, that today was the day. She would be leaving in two weeks, and she had to tell him now before she lost her nerve. She knew it would wreck his world; that he would cry, beg, and plead for her to take it back. How do you tell your best friend, the half of your whole, that you don’t love him the way he loves you, that you don’t want to be committed to him forever?
She walked out of the trees and onto the rock formation that led to the creek where the pots are. Now she knew why Eric had been in such a hurry. The big, fluffy blanket, the candles, the wine glasses, her favorite guilty pleasure, potted meat on white sandwich bread, in a baggie. He looked up at her and grinned that sly, I-got-you-grin, the same one he had been wearing when they were 7 and he had managed to carry out a surprise water balloon attack as she walked out to find him in the woods behind his house. That day, eleven years ago, she had felt so betrayed, and even though he had apologized and told her he hadn’t meant to scare her, she still felt the sting of rejection. She knew why he was doing this.
Skye had grown up in a very religious family, with parents who believed if you disobeyed them, you were going to hell. It hadn’t been hard to please them because she was always determined to be perfect, and her determination to accomplish something had never let her down. Eric had pushed her to sleep with him, saying it would only bring them closer. Although part of her wanted to obey her parents, another, stronger part of her didn’t want her first time to be in the backseat of a car, or in a hay loft, or even here, on the creek bank, with the mood set. She didn’t want her first time to be with Eric. She imagined all the guys she would meet in college and beyond, imagined taking a romantic weekend trip to the beach or to the mountains or anywhere but here. She had already lost so much to this place.
