Chapter Eleven – The Definition of Innocence and Beauty (Bobby is eleven, Alex is nine)

"Remind me why exactly we're reading a book about witchcraft in the Middle Ages?" Alex asked. It had been Bobby's turn to choose a book for them to read, and he had chosen another eccentric topic.

"It's actually quite an interesting subject," Bobby replied.

"Do you want to know about an interesting subject?" she asked, suddenly animated. "Ricky Hanson asked me to marry him today."

"Who's Ricky Hanson?" Bobby demanded, frowning.

"He's a boy in my class at school," Alex replied. "His best friend asked Janine Watson to marry him yesterday, and so Ricky thought he should ask someone and he asked me."

"You're only nine – you can't get married!"

"Not real married," Alex said disdainfully. "It's the newest thing to get married on the playground at recess. Personally, I think we're all a bit too old for getting pretend married, but whatever."

"What did you say?" Bobby asked.

"I said no, of course," Alex replied. "I'm not marrying someone just because he wants to copy his best friend!"

"And you can't marry anyone but me," Bobby added.

Alex smirked. "Are you jealous?"

"No," Bobby said quickly. "I just don't think you should go back on a promise is all."

"I didn't promise you anything," Alex replied, still smirking.

"Did too!"

"Did not."

"Did too!"

"Not, not, not!"

"You did – you said we should get married about a month after we first met," Bobby argued.

"Then technically," Alex replied, "You made the promise. I just suggested the idea. Besides," she added, "I was only four back then. You can't trust what a four-year-old says."

"You were supposed to marry me," Bobby muttered sullenly.

"Maybe I will," she said seriously. "I'll just have to divorce Ricky first." She cast a wicked grin in his direction.

"You said you weren't going to marry Ricky!" Bobby exclaimed.

Alex burst out laughing at the affronted look on his face. She attempted to straighten her face into a solemn expression. "I won't," she said.

"Promise?"

"I promise."

"Good," Bobby said. "Now promise to marry me."

Alex started laughing again, and rolled her eyes.

"I'm serious," Bobby replied. "Promise."

"No way!" Alex replied. "I'm not making a promise like that any-" she broke if in a squeal as Bobby launched himself at her, wrapping his arms around her and pinning her own arms down.

"Promise!" he repeated, giggling. "Promise me, or I'm never gonna let you go!"

"Bobby!" she yelled, laughing too. "Let me go!"

"Never!"

She pulled against his arms, causing them to both move around in an awkward dance. "Let me go," she laughed.

"Not until you promise!"

"Okay," she agreed. "Okay, I'll marry you!"

He released his grip, and the two of them tumbled onto the grass, still laughing.

"I knew you were jealous," she told him.

"Maybe," he conceded. "But may I also remind you that just last year I asked if you'd still marry me when we grow up, and you said 'of course!'."

"Oh right," Alex agreed, remembering.

They sat in silence for a few seconds. "What if we do grow up and marry someone else though?" Alex asked. "What if we're not even friends anymore when we're grown-ups?"

Bobby frowned. "Of course we'll still be friends."

"My parents aren't friends with anyone they knew when they were kids," Alex argued.

"I can't imagine not being friends with you," Bobby replied slowly.

"Me neither."

"Alex?"

"Uh-huh?"

"What I'd like is for you to be happy," Bobby said seriously. He rolled onto his side to look at her. She was gazing at the sky with an unreadable expression. "So," Bobby continued, "If marrying someone else someday would make you happy, that would be okay. I was just kidding around you know. You don't have to marry me."

"I know," Alex replied.

"But I am serious when I say that I want you to be happy," Bobby clarified. He flopped back over into his back and looked up at the sky too. "Marry someone who makes you happy." He thought bitterly of his own parents, who barley even spoke anymore. Stealing a glance at Alex, who was still looking up at the sky, he tried to imagine her grown up. He thought of his own mother, terrified – and terrifying.

"Don't marry someone you don't love," he said, still thinking of his own parents. He thought of the old photographs of his mother: smiling, happy, beautiful. How he didn't see any of that in her anymore. "Marry someone," Bobby instructed, "who makes you smile. Someone who lets you stay beautiful."

Alex snorted and turned towards him. "I'm not beautiful," she huffed.

"Of course you are," Bobby replied.

"I thought friends were supposed to be honest?" she snapped. "Have you ever looked at my mother or sister? That's beauty. Not me."

"I'm not lying," Bobby insisted.

"Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder," Alex quipped. She turned away from him.

Bobby rolled towards her, so that his side was pressed against hers. What was the definition of beauty anyway? How can one person be described as being beautiful, and another person who looked nothing like the first be beautiful also? How could someone be described as beautiful by one person, and not another?

She turned back towards him, slipping one of her hands into his. "You should marry someone like that too, Bobby," she replied, addressing his earlier statement. "Someone who really makes you happy."

"You make me happy," he ventured. "And," he added mischievously, "you did promise to marry me."

"I said that because you had me trapped," Alex argued, though she was smiling. "My Dad says things said under distress can't be used in court. He lost a case to it once. I heard him talking to his partner about it."

"Really?" Bobby asked. "They make exceptions when people are distressed? I would think that would be a lot of the time when they've been arrested."

"I think that's what Dad said," Alex replied.

"Sure he did," Bobby replied, smirking. "You wouldn't be trying to get out of marrying me, would you?"

"I thought you said I could marry whoever makes me happy?" she countered.

"Yes," Bobby said, suddenly serious. "I did."

"And you should too," Alex added.

"The only person I'd want to marry is you."

Alex tried to determine if he was serious or not, then decided it didn't matter. Sometimes he was too serious – especially for being only eleven. "We're too young to marry anyone now anyway," she said. "Pretend marriage is one thing; I don't even want to think about the real thing!"

Bobby crawled back over to where the book they had been reading together lay abandoned. "Well, let's read again then," he suggested.

"Okay," Alex agreed, also crawling over. They settled with their backs against the large tree, and Bobby opened the book. It was still their habit to read together, even now. Every so often they would break off to discuss some part of the book, or end up talking about something else completely. They sat together without paying any attention to the other people in the park, until an older couple had stopped in front of them.

"So nice to see young people reading rather than causing a ruckus," the man commented.

Bobby and Alex looked up and smiled politely.

"What is it you're reading, dears?" the woman asked.

Bobby held up the book for them to read the title.

"Witchcraft, huh?" the man asked. He smiled down at the two children. "Well, we'll let you continue to read then."

"Thank you sir," Bobby replied.

As the couple turned to leave, the man exchanged a glance with his wife. "That young lady certainly doesn't need witchcraft does she?" he asked lightly. "She's got him under a spell without even trying." His wife smiled back, nodding in agreement.

Alex turned to Bobby, her eyebrows raised. He shrugged his shoulders in response, as though he had no better an idea of what the man meant than she did.

William Goren pulled his suitcase from the house and towards the car where his latest fling was waiting. He'd had it with Frances. Sure the doctors said she was sick. What did they know? He suspected that it was all just a ploy – for attention or sympathy. Or maybe trying to get some kind of power over him. It was absolutely unacceptable.

If she was really sick anyway, the drugs should have helped. Then again, he didn't make sure she took them. It wasn't his responsibility. In fact, he planned to divorce her, at some point. She wasn't his responsibility.

He thought fleetingly of his sons just as he went to get in the car. But children were the responsibility of their mothers. The boys were Frances's problem. They weren't his responsibility.

Unknown to him, the younger of the boys he had abandoned without even a simple goodbye stood at his window and watched the car pull away.

Alex woke to a tapping sound on her window. She pulled the blankets up to her eyes and peered around her room. No one was in it. Then she heard the tapping again. She slipped out of her bed and tip-toed over to the window just in time to see a couple of tiny pebbles hitting the glass.

Alex pushed her window open, feeling as though she was in some silly movie as she stuck her head out and looked down. "Bobby?" she asked.

He was standing outside her house in his pajamas, where he had apparently been throwing pebbles at her window to try and wake her. That was something that he had never done before.

He signaled wildly for her to come down. She frowned, about to ask why when the moonlight caught the tear tracks down his cheeks.

Holding a hand up to tell him to wait, she then turned and grabbed a sweater. Pulling it on ever her nightgown, she went down the stairs as quietly as she could manage and slipped into her sandals before slowly pushing open the back door. Shutting the door silently, she turned and jogged over to where Bobby had settled on the ground near the cedar trees.

"What's wrong?" she asked. The question hardly seemed worthy of the state he was in. Bobby was sitting hunched on the ground, sobbing hysterically. He was gasping for breath, while tears streamed down in such quick succession there was no hope in stemming the flow.

"I-" he tried, breaking off in a body-wracking sob. He looked up to meet her gaze for the first time, his eyes wide. She felt her own stomach clench at the grief in his eyes. "S-sorry… sorry I woke you," he amended, pulling air into his lungs only to start sobbing again.

"Don't worry about that at all," she assured him. "I'm glad you did." She thought of how he had seemed nearly carefree yesterday, only to have his world crash down today. She didn't yet know what was causing his heart to break, but she did know that no matter how he acted, he was always carrying a burden. He was just a little bit too serious all the time. She suspected that he had lost his innocence a long time ago. What really defined innocence anyway?

She pulled him close to her and held on tight, trying to remember all the soothing words her mother had ever whispered. His tears soaked through her sweatshirt. He wrapped his own arms around her, thinking that he might just have broken into a thousand tiny pieces if he hadn't had someone to cling to.

"He's g-gone," Bobby managed.

"Who's gone?" Alex asked. She was still holding him, rocking slightly. She gazed, frowning, at one of the cedar trees in the yard.

"My… Dad," he answered. He took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to calm himself down. "He's left us."

Alex was certainly used to having a father who disappeared all the time. She was proud of her father and the work that he did, but it still hurt when he had to be away all of the time. "When's he coming back?" she asked sympathetically.

"He's not." At this admission, the tears started to well up in Bobby's eyes again. "He's not coming back this time."

Alex released her hold on her friend in order to look at him. "What?" she asked. "How do you know?"

"I just know," Bobby replied. "It was different this time. He packed up all his stuff and he's not coming back – I know it; I'm sure."

Alex shuffled closer to him, placing one arm over his shoulders so that he could lean into her. "You know, there are other kids whose parents get divorced, and their Dads still see them. I know it's not the same, but-"

"No!" Bobby shouted, startling Alex. She looked quickly to her house, crossing her fingers that her parent's bedroom light wouldn't turn on.

"Shh," she hissed.

"It's not like that," Bobby confessed miserably. "He's not coming back ever. He didn't even say goodbye to us. He was just going to disappear. He's really gone, Alex. He's really gone and he isn't ever coming back."

Alex didn't bother to ask him how he could be so sure. Sometimes, you just know things. Instead she pulled him close to her again, whispering, "I'm sorry, Bobby."

"How could he leave us?" Bobby wailed. Then again, angrier. "How could he leave us?"

He was still crying, but now he swiped furiously at his tears, anger seeming to course through him. "I hate her," he whispered furiously.

"It's okay to be angry at your dad right now," Alex assured him. "I would be too."

"I hate her."

Alex blinked in confusion. She would have expected him to be furious with his father. But Bobby wasn't talking about him.

"I hate her," he repeated. "I hate her, I hate her, I hate her, I HATE HER!"

Filled with a righteous rage, he stood up and began pacing Alex's backyard while she simply watched in confusion.

"She did it!" Bobby raged. "She made him leave! I hate her! I want my Dad! I don't want to be responsible; I don't want to look after her. I want my Dad! I hate her!"

His face crumpled and he seemed to curl in on himself as his knees buckled. Alex was at his side again, crouched right next to him on the ground. "What did your mom do?" she asked.

"She says I'm the responsible one," Bobby whispered, sniffling. "Now she's chased him away. I want my Dad back, Alex. I want him to come back. Please?" He looked up at her with the last request.

"I'm sorry," was all Alex could think of to say.

He flipped onto his back, squeezing his eyes shut tight. Hoping that maybe he could forget what he had seen; hoping to put off responsibility for one more day. Alex lay next to him, offering comfort in her presence. She thought of what the man at the park had said, about witchcraft. If she really could cast a spell on him, she would use it right now to somehow make things better for her friend. But she was only nine. She couldn't even think of something that she could say to comfort him let alone fix what had gone wrong.

His family had caused him so much pain. And he felt such a huge responsibility towards them. She wished he could stay with her instead of going back to his family.

"I wish you were my brother," she whispered.

He took a breath, forced a smile on his face, and replied, "Then we couldn't get married."

They both laughed shakily, their seemingly lifelong joke clearing some of the tension. "I wouldn't give up that tree house for the world," she whispered back.

He felt as though he should say something in response, but he was so tired. They both fell asleep in the backyard, dreaming of Hawaii and a friend who never left their side.