Bursting into a sprint in the middle of a casual conversation with Sara and Jason Funderberker had not been one of Wirt's better moves. Yet here he was, slipping and scrambling through the wet football field willing the universe to unsee him.
He teetered, but caught himself.
What does it matter? he lamented internally, pushing himself to run faster. Sara will catch me anyway.
She was a wrestler, a dancer, and the sort of person who could step into a suit of superheated felt with no ventilation but for the holes for her eyes and still jog without her heavy breaths fouling the air. At that moment, that was about the opposite of what Wirt's breathing was doing; he was assaulting the air with his incompetence.
Sometimes he felt like people could see the grotesque images that flashed before his eyes when he spoke to them. When he saw Sara's lips part, when he hit the ground running; he felt like she knew.
The robin's egg blue sky was pressing in on his weary soul. Sara would catch him and she would smile and laugh, like she couldn't see what he saw.
But then again, were not his eyes downcast like the downward dripping water pellets that scattered from their celestial homes down to mingle with stray dirt and leaf litter?
Wirt decided that that was not a particularly good line and tried to focus more on moving his dumb spaghetti legs to avoid the fierce pursuing sting of Sara the Bee.
He skirted the edge of the woods, considered them with a somewhat wary eye, checked behind him and saw Sara fast approaching, her powerful leg muscles propelling her through the wet thin early spring turf like a leaping lion in a field of golden grass, then double-considered the woods, and dipped in.
Wirt looked seven ways at once and took the path where the new leaves had grown in the most. He dragged himself up a North American elm with low hanging branches. Wet wood dug under his unclipped nails as he heaved himself into the meeting space of two higher boughs.
The ground, made up partially of autumn's remains and winter's fast-melting mantel, squelched under Sara's mighty off-brand high-tops.
Wirt trembled as he always did, like a marcescent leaf stuck between a falling death and a useless half-life. He let out a shaky breath and ground his head against the bark of the tree, willing his hair to knot into the spaces in between and wrap its way in quiet circuits into the earth.
"Wirt," Sara said, much too quiet for someone who was looking for someone, "what are you doing in that tree?"
"Fie! Fie! Away with thee!" Wirt's voice was thin, but he tried to find rhythm despite his labored breathing. "There be but Nobody up in this tree!"
"Yeah…" Sara sighed, looking up at him from the base of the elm. "Turns out trees aren't known to recite poetry in these parts so you've given yourself away. What's going on? Something got you down—or up I guess?"
"Ha ha! It's all very funny, isn't it, Sara? Wirt's up a tree, Wirt says weird stuff all the time, Wirt thinks weird terrible stuff and ruins everything. Just great. Typical Wirt." Wirt was gaining and losing steam at the same time and he really wasn't sure how he was managing it.
"Hey man, I didn't mean to get you all buzzled up but do you wanna talk?"
"Talk? About It ?" He swallowed thickly and thought about how that night by the fireside where the air had smelled like the river and possibility and he had considered telling Beatrice. "No, I can't. I can't ever talk about it because you and everyone else will hate me once—once you know."
"Know what, Wirt? I know you're a big dork." Sara paused and patted the tree trunk. "Is it something worse than that?"
"Way worse. The worst. The worst possible thing and I can never talk about it. So let me be a tree." Wirt strung the words without thinking and when the meaning reached his brain panic burst from his chest. He couldn't shake that his slip in word choice meant something deeper, like those pictures he couldn't get out of his head. "No! Oh no no no. I'm just… I'm just in a tree. I'm—oh gosh, what if? Why why why?
"You wanna come down? You might fall if you keep freaking out like that." Sara started to climb up as she spoke, reaching out a hand for him.
"Sara, please leave me alone," he started and then continued, because he couldn't stop everything from rushing through him like the water in the river when the ice broke and—"I just want to be alone. Can't a guy just do that—be alone? Can't he just be far far away from everybody he's ever cared about so they stay safe and sound? And don't smile at him all the time and think he's great when—when that's not true."
"… Hey, hey. Take a couple breaths, Wirt. Take some breaks if you're gonna keep talking, okay?"
"Sara," Wirt said, trying to slow down like Sara had told him to but finding his head filled with words that he was frightened of thinking and saying. "Do you think there's something wrong with me?"
"You, Wirt? Pssh, you get all crazy worried but you're a good kid deep down." Sara had settled back on the ground by then and he could see her flapping her hands around animatedly as she spoke.
"Oh, deep down?" Wirt asked, feeling something like bitter oleander growing in his throat. "There's nothing deep down in here that's good. Just the… gray of the sky on a late autumn day, just sour notes, just mismatch shoes and faulty clocks and the woods the woods all dark. I suppose those are deep. Can you hear it out there? Past your sleep? The woods, the crying, the slow, slow dying. And no one can or should open the gates the doors that lead in. There's no safety net for them no first aid kit under the bathroom sink. No sink even. Just these… visions? Or whatever they are."
"Clocks? Visions? What's really up, Wirt?"
"I don't know. I—I…" Wirt's lungs were on fire and it was entirely possible he was having an asthma attack, but he didn't know how to tell Sara.
"Can you explain one of the vision things?"
"Sara, Sara—they're all too terrible to commit to speech to pollute this fair air and suffocate this hallowed tree."
"Like nightmares?" Sara frowned.
"I—I think it's me, honestly." He was struggling to speak like a normal person but he kind of hoped Sara could reach him, in the bottom of this dusty well, even if he was afraid for her to see that there was no water at the bottom.
"Just give me one tiny example. Something to go by. What was the most recent thing like this?
"Well, I—I—"
"Spit it out!" He could hear real anger in her voice and he tightened his grip on the bark as he shouted back, refusing to look at her.
"I just thought about punching you in the face!"
"Wait what?"
Wirt imagined Sara was blinking.
"I'm I'm sorry I'm sorry that's not even the worst thing I'm so sorry I…"
"Punch me," Sara said, stopping every fidgeting movement of his heart in an instant, "Right now, Wirt. Get outta that tree and punch me, if you wanna!"
"No! No, Sara I—I don't want to punch you I just—" Wirt nearly fell from the tree twisting around to look at her. He looked down at her, chewing on his lip a bit and she smiled up at him and gave him a thumbs up.
"You just thought about it? Yeah, people think a lot of crazy stuff. And like so much of it is like 'What? I don't want to do that.' I thought about pushing over all the tables in class once."
"Well, I thought about pushing Taylor off the bleachers one time."
"I thought about eating the weird plush stuff in my mascot suit!"
"Whoa! I, uh, I sometimes think there's going to be like a needle or something in other people's lunch and I—I can't tell them about it but if it's really there then it's my fault if they get hurt."
"Oh man. That sucks dude. I thought about cutting my leg off with my dad's saw once."
"I, uh, I…." Wirt started hesitantly, worried he would say something too weird, but it seemed like Sara could understand it, so maybe… "I think about how I'm going to hurt Greg a lot. I'm making him hot chocolate—whoops! I put bleach in instead of the syrup! Holding scissors—well, I'm probably going to stab him!
"And I just I just—oh my gosh oh my god…" Wirt trailed off, clutching his chest and breaking eye contact with Sara. "I'm so messed up. I'm—I'm so sorry Sara. That's so… I'm so—I—I don't want to hurt him, Sara. I don't. But I know I still am! I've been avoiding him and he understands that and—and he wants to know why and I—I can't do it. I can't tell him… can't do that to him."
"Gee, that's pretty terrible, Wirt. I'm real sorry. But you know, everybody has freaky thoughts, Wirt," she explained stepping around the tree so she could make eye contact with him again. "We just don't talk about them… because we're really scared they're true. It was hard to say the stuff I said to you. It freaks me out that my brain is all weird. And it's worse for some people. And I think it sounds like it's way worse for you. Can you talk to someone more… adult shaped? They might be able to help more. I—uh, I talk to therapists a lot. The one I have right now, she's really cool and maybe she could talk to you?"
"You—Sara—you have a therapist?" Wirt met her gaze, eyes wide.
"Since sixth grade!"
"That long?" He felt the world opening up in a little way, like it had when Beatrice had first told him he wasn't weird.
"Yep!" Sara replied easily, beating her chest and smiling.
"And... you don't think I'm terrible?" Wirt looked back at the branch he was sitting on instead of Sara.
There was a moment of silence where Wirt wished he was dead, which made it a lot like many other moments of silence he had experienced.
"Not at all. I think you might just need some help to feel less terrible."
"I… I should do something?" He felt like was already doing so much work running away from everything. He was dreaming about the inhaler he knew had fallen out of his coat when he'd started running.
"Has avoiding stuff ever worked before?"
"Yes," he answered immediately, thinking of the anxious moments of relief spent avoiding things that would make him feel even more anxious. "No. Not really."
"Then don't avoid things!" She pumped her fist up toward him as she said this, waving it a few inches from his leg. "Or try not to."
He tried to reach her fist, to tap it with hers, but he was up a bit too high.
"So… you're saying I should get out of this tree?"
"I've been saying that from the start, dude!"
"Right now?" Wirt tried to lower himself down to the branch below his little hollow, nervous that he might gain purchase on the wet bark now that he didn't have the super strength that seemed to be a byproduct of extreme anxiety.
"If you can. Like also your butt must be so numb by now," Sara said, not without sympathy.
"Well, you're not wrong."
"About the butt thing or about all the other stuff?" she asked with that little laugh that he wanted to write poetry about. Sure, their relationship had shifted from red to yellow roses but they still smelled like roses and he loved her in the only way that an anxious teenager can love someone he's known most his life who is cool when he's on fire, steady when he shakes.
"Both. I guess." Wirt shrugged, deciding to jump from the branch he was on. He reached out his hand for some kind of high five or fist bump, but it was just half-opened and awkward.
"Yeah, I thought so. I'm right, like, all the time." Sara laughed again, reaching into her pocket and laying his inhaler in his outstretched palm.