August 8 was supposed to be a normal day. It was supposed to start off with a sunrise, finish with a sunset, and have ultimately meaningless interactions in between. It was supposed to be another tick mark on the calendar counting down the precious remaining days separating me from my return to school.
It wasn’t.
I remember that summer more vividly than any time of my life. Most people’s clearest memories from youth are their glory days under the Friday night lights, or that final performance in the school musical. Needless to say it surprises many people when I say my most vivid memory is from the summer I turned 12. From that age people only remember (if anything at all) the bike they got for Christmas or winning a summer baseball tournament. But I’m not most people; Braydon saw to that.
When my father built the tree house in the canopy of the dense woods behind our house it was as if I was the first to behold the Eiffel Tower. There was nothing he could have done that would have made me “his little man” any faster – from that day forward Dad was my hero. The structure, forty feet in the air and colossal (from the viewpoint of an 11 year old), seemingly was an extension of the tangle of branches overhead, hidden within the blend of greens and reds and yellows. The only indication of something out of the ordinary to any passerby was the beautiful rope ladder suspended in mid air. To me the ladder was an invitation into another world, into a dream and a journey the likes of which I had never before imagined.
Better yet it was all mine. My father, unbeknownst to me, had spent the better part of the winter and the entirety of spring working on it with the intention of having it finished for my birthday. In his swell of pride for having finished it early, and having exceeded his own expectations of quality, he could not wait the extra month to show me on the twenty-second of July. When I told him it was the best present I’d ever gotten I was telling the truth.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I scaled the ladder for the first time, too giddy to fear the sway of the rope ladder as it counterbalanced the weight of my body. With every rung I thought of something else I would bring from my room to the fort to make it my haven, to put a little of myself inside it and truly make it my own: posters, magazines, Hot Wheels, my pellet gun, my pocketknife, baseball cards, and my wireless radio. When I added binoculars to my mental list, I got so excited my hand missed the next rung. A skipped heartbeat, an audible gasp from my dad – and I laughed and continued up the ladder.
When I reached the top and glanced for the first time the inside of the fort – no, my fort – I thought my heart would stop beating altogether. I clumsily crossed the threshold into the fifteen feet by fifteen feet cathedral, the ladder swaying as I pushed off my last foot to propel me through. Too thrilled to even stand, I sat at the entrance running my hands across the floor so painstakingly sanded smooth by my father, now forty feet below me craning his neck to admire his handiwork and judge how easily I made it to the top.
Somehow, I remembered my manners: sticking my head back out the door, I showed my father the smile that refused to leave my face, shouting down how much I loved his present. He flashed an acknowledging thumbs-up to the canopy and bid me a happy early birthday. Feeling I had fulfilled my appreciative duty, I ducked back inside and turned to face what I still was certain had to be a dream. He had already put a small chair and table in the corner for me, and had nailed half a dozen freestanding shelves on the wall to the left of the entrance. None of the interior wood, a fresh unweathered tan color, was painted – my father had truly left it up to me to make it my own, a fact that only excited me more.
Over the next two days I did just that. Quickly realizing that painting the interior was far too much work, I brought half the posters out of my room (much to my mother’s approval) and pasted them to the walls of the fort. The freestanding shelves were soon cluttered with bits and pieces of myself. The bottom two shelves – the larger of the six – were laden with books, magazines and baseball cards. The one above that I deemed my “explorer shelf”, and upon it sat my binoculars, Swiss army knife, pellet pistol, wireless radio, and compass. The remaining three shelves had scarcely anything on them and would remain so until I could think of something worthy of making a permanent addition to the fort.
With that and a few other minor tweaks, I was satisfied. Now it was not only mine, it was me. I wasn’t even excited for my approaching birthday, for what more could the world have that I needed? I had a haven, a castle in which I was King. When I was in my high in the treetop fort, no one on the ground could command me. The canopy was mine; the forty foot long ladder descending from it was the beanstalk to my kingdom.
Imagine my dismay the day I climbed my beanstalk to find it didn’t lead to the empty kingdom I’d left behind.
Braydon had always been the neighborhood kid no one really got along with. It’s not that he was mean, or that he acted better than you; it was nothing like that. Braydon was just awkward. If you saw him outside, it was from a distance, and he was just watching. If you went by his house (a run down and poorly kept number) it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see him sitting by a window, just looking outside, as if he was looking through a prison window and the outside air was something he would have to wait years for.
Homeless. That’s the way I used to describe him. Even though he was just like all the rest of us neighborhood kids, he felt different somehow. Like some twist of fate had decided he wouldn’t have the same life as the rest of us got to enjoy.
The only time I’d ever spoken to him was…well never, actually. One time, in a game of street hockey with some friends, Jim (who lived across the street from me) had missed the goal by a good ten feet and sent the street puck sailing down towards the next block. Sitting at the corner – just watching, of course – was Braydon. Much to our surprise, he moved into the street to stop the puck from continuing down its path. We all kind of froze - none of us wanted to go get the puck from him, despite his heroic action, and as we exchanged awkward glances with one another, his body sort of awkwardly jerked. He had tossed the puck back, and it slowly rolled back towards my feet. I bent to pick it up, and when I looked up he was gone.
The next time I rode my bike in front of his house, though, something happened. I saw him sitting in that window, as always, but something about him was different. He was looking at me. To this day I’m not sure what it was, but I’ve always wanted to think that he tried to smile. He tried to communicate, to break that barrier that had forever been between him and the rest of us. I’ll never know.
I bolted out the back, the screen door slamming against the wall of the house with the effort of my push into the fresh air. My backpack and its contents – sandwich, thermos of Kool-Aid, chips, GI Joes, and a few new magazines – bounced against my back as I sprinted into the fringe of the woods. Five minutes later I saw the ladder there, gently swaying despite the still air. Puzzled, I thought for a moment only to realize it was probably from an earlier breeze or a deer bumping into it. After a quick glance around to see if anyone was watching, up I went. After that first time I had scaled the ladder, I had grown a bit conscious to its dangers. One time I’d missed a rung with my hand about half way up, fallen only to catch a rung in the crook of my knee, and hang suspended twenty feet in the air until I got the courage to try for a rung with my hand. Of course I never told my mother about that – she already wasn’t too fond of the idea of the rope ladder. But after that episode I had gotten the hang of it and become as professional as one can when it comes to climbing rope ladders.
As I got to the top, I stepped inside and plopped down my bag. I began to survey the room to check it was in the same state I’d left it in. That was when I saw him.
There, in the corner with his head hung and his eyes searching my face from underneath those dirty bangs, was Braydon. My breath caught up in my throat and my stomach dropped. I had no idea how, of all people, I was facing Braydon in my tree house. I had never told any of my friends, and definitely not the misfit of the neighborhood, about this place and had never even hinted at its existence.
Yet there he was. Right in front of me.
“Er….hi. Braydon, right?” I had no idea what else to say. He nodded in response, and I tried my best to act as if random people climbing into my tree house was quite the norm. I picked my bag up where I’d dropped it and walked over to the little table, emptying out its contents and planning my next move.
“You’re Thomas.” Not a question. He said it as if it just were an observation. First he came into my tree house, then he just says my name like it’s some thing to be observed.
“Tom, yeah. Or Thomas, I guess. No one calls me that but my mom though.”
“Oh…sorry.”
The entire time he hadn’t moved. He refused to look up, but his eyes never left my face. I tried to look as busy as possible, moving over to the shelves and rearranging everything on them, something I had absolutely refused to do up until this very awkward moment.
“Don’t worry about it,” I started, “but…umm…what are you doing up here?” Finally, he lifted his face up to me, a glint of sadness in his eyes that were set in an otherwise emotionless face.
“I was walking around in the woods. That’s what I usually do to stay out of the house. My mom is always at work and my stepdad just yells at me. Sometimes he hits me. I was walking around the woods and saw the ladder, so I climbed up.” Just like that, he made me his confidant. I stood speechless for a second, then thought of the most comforting thing to say I could in that short second.
“Oh…I’m sorry man. That sounds tough.” Very poetic, Tom.
From there, Braydon went on to tell me everything he could. Apparently, by not immediately telling him to get the hell out of my tree house, I had become his best friend. Friend, because I had accepted him. Best, because…well I was the only friend he had.
After twenty minutes of him telling stories that I thought never happened to kids – he showed me a scar on his thigh that was a result of a thrown kitchen knife – he stopped talking. Then, as if it were his duty to ask…
“Hey Thomas, what are your parents like?”
“Well…my dad’s a lawyer. He used to work a lot, but now he doesn’t so much. I dunno why, but he said what he does now makes him more money and takes less time. My mom stays at home. She used to be a teacher, but she quit when my dad changed jobs. They’re nice I guess, they’re pretty strict though.” Right after I said that I felt like a fool. I’d always considered my parents strict because they made me do my homework right when I got home from school, made me take a bath every night before bed, and made me eat my vegetables. Yet right in front of me was a kid whose mom was never home, and whose stepdad just drank and terrorized him. My parents seemed like absolute angels next to the adults in his life.
He asked me some more questions, about my parents, about playing with the other neighborhood kids, about school, about the tree house, and then he stood up.
“I have to go. It’s getting dark and if I’m not back before dark my Derek (his stepdad) will lock me in a closet.” The way he said those things, so casually and calmly, made my stomach twist. And then he did something totally unexpected. Walking up to me, he hugged me. It must not be something he did very often, because it was the most awkward hug I’d ever been a part of.
“Thanks for letting me stay up here, Thomas,” he said as he started down the ladder.
“Yeah, Braydon, sure,” I replied. And then out of nowhere, “Hey Braydon! Wait!”
“Yeah?” He stopped his descent.
“Umm…I mean, if you’re not busy…you could come up tomorrow? Around the same time? I mean, only if you want…” I couldn’t believe what I was saying, but something about being around him felt right. He wasn’t like the rest of the kids. He seemed so real, like such a person. And the stories he told…
“If I can I will, for sure!” Again, that thing that I think was a smile.
“Okay, well…good night.”
And that was the day I met Braydon.
He didn’t show up the next day. Or the day after that. On the third day, he was waiting for me. He had a black eye and a cut lip, and explained to me that he’d been beaten when he tried to leave the day we were supposed to meet. His mom had overslept for work, and Derek was in a rage all day, drinking more than he usually did (which was saying something). When he caught Braydon in the late afternoon trying to leave out the back door, he’d grabbed him by his shirt collar and thrown him on the ground.
“Can we talk about something else? I just don’t really feel like it anymore,” Braydon mumbled, talking through a swollen and cut bottom lip, and also what I think was a swollen tongue – he sounded different.
“Yeah, sure. Here, look at these.” I passed him a couple of the comic books I’d brought up the day I’d met him, and took one for myself. He took them and started flipping through pages, only glancing over the pictures and feeling the pages between his fingers. It had never occurred to me that a kid couldn’t read, but then again I’d never heard of a kid who didn’t go to school, so it was a huge shock when he asked me if I could read them to him.
“Why? I mean I can, but why can’t you read them?”
“I can’t read good. I can read and write a little, but I ain’t gone to school since I was seven. It’s fine though, I can just look at the pictures.”
“No, no I will,” I reached over and grabbed the top one, “here, I’ll read this one today and a new one every day until you maybe start to pick up some of it yourself.”
And that was how it was. From that day on, I met Braydon in the tree house every day he could manage to escape to the woods. He told me his stories, asked questions about my life, and then I read to him. I always saw the other boys in the street, playing football, tag, hockey, wall ball, but I didn’t care. Braydon and I had a secret place, and I had someone relying on me. For the first time I had a friend who actually cared, who didn’t just want to play but who wanted to know about my life and who shamelessly told me about his.
The scars Braydon bore were many and varied. One day he showed up with a cut along his temple that never quite went away. Scraped knees and elbows were regular occurrences. The reign his stepfather had over him was a terrible and fearsome one, yet Braydon talked about it as if it were the weather. He told me he didn’t really know any differently, so he didn’t know what a dad should be like. He’d never known his real father. His mom had gotten pregnant on spring break in college when she’d gone to Panama, and never seen the man again.
In a weird way, that summer was shaping up to be the best I’d ever had. I had met someone I never thought I would, and he had ended up being my best friend. If only it would have lasted.
Day after day, we’d meet, and day after day, we grew closer. Something I never imagined would happen did. For my birthday, it was just Braydon and I going to dinner with my parents. I convinced my mom to talk to his mother, and with her permission (unbeknownst to Derek) he came to dinner. He even spent the night that night. Derek had passed out at noon on my birthday, which had allowed Braydon to come to dinner without sneaking out. I convinced him after dinner that Derek would be asleep all night and he would be fine staying over. After much effort he reluctantly agreed.
The next morning he was gone when I woke up. My dad, who was an early riser, said he’d left around seven. That morning and afternoon, I played with the XBOX my parents had bought me, until it came time to meet Braydon in the tree house. When I got there, he wasn’t there yet. I waited around for an hour, realized he wasn’t going to make it, and went back home.
The next day was the same story. And the next. And the next. It was like that for two weeks, and then I just stopped going into the woods. I figured when he could meet me he could just come to my house. I worried it had something to do with Braydon staying the night at my house, and felt like it was all my fault. But at the same time I knew Braydon had been through a lot, and as long as Derek didn’t kill him (which I ruled out as unreasonable) he would be okay.
On the morning of the third day I’d stopped going to the tree house, the doorbell rang. It was a Tuesday, and my dad had already left for work. I was watching television in the living room, and my mom called from the front door.
“Thomas! Thomas, please come here, Braydon’s father is here and needs to speak with you.” My heart nearly stopped beating when she said “father”. She didn’t know about Derek, and had naturally assumed it was his real father. I slowly walked to the door, my feet dragging, and looked up into the face of the man I had only heard about. He was short for a man, and what hair he had left was a thin mixture of brown and gray. He was unshaven, and had a scar from his left cheekbone to his chin. I assumed his expertise in child abuse was from experience. Either that or he had been in a few fights in his day. Either way, no surprises.
“Hey boy. Tom, yeah? You’re the one Bray’s always sneakin’ off with ain’t ya?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well maybe you can tell me where his ass run off to. The boy ain’t been home in four days, and – ”
“Braydon’s missing?” My heart sank. I had no idea where he could have gone, but I knew one place he may be.
“Yeah, he’s supposed to be grounded, stayin’ in his room. Me and the wife drove around the neighborhood, done called the cops, even put some posters up in town. This mornin’ before she left for work she finally told me where he been that night he never got home. The little ass never would tell me – hey where you goin’?”
I sprinted out the front door right past him, rounded the edge of the house straight through my mother’s tediously kept garden, and straight into the woods. If my hunch was right, he’d be in the tree house waiting for me.
The run had never taken so long in my life, nor had it been so exhausting. Finally, I spotted it: the rope ladder, eerily still floating there as if suspended from the heavens, not nearly as lively or inviting as I remembered it. The once bright rungs were faded and worn completely smooth by the immense amount of traffic of Braydon and I climbing up and down. As I finally reached the ladder, I extended my right arm to grab a rung, put my left foot in the bottom rung, looked up –
And fell flat on my back. One breath, two breaths – I could feel it rising in me – three breaths, and I leaned over and retched on the ground. I stared at that puddle of vomit for a moment, not daring to look up. Knowing he would still be there, but part of me wanted to believe if I never looked back up then it would never be true. No, it couldn’t be true. Not able to stop myself, I added to the pool of bile already on the ground. Wiping my mouth with my sleeve, I steadied my breathing and slowly turned back up towards the top of the ladder.
Suspended five feet below the entrance of the tree house was my best friend. Completely ashen and lifeless, he was naked from the waist up. Hanging there in mid air, the only thing keeping him from crashing to the ground was the shirt he had taken off, fastened a noose out of, and tied to one of the hand grips situated at the door of the tree house. His face was a pale blue, and the rest of his body was completely white and rigid. He spun in a circle, so slowly it was barely noticeable, despite the absolute stillness of the air.
Tears stung my eyes and streaked down my cheeks as I got back on my feet and started up to Braydon. No, to his body. “He is dead” kept bouncing around inside my head, but my heart was pounding its refusal to accept that inside my chest.
Ten feet up.
That smile. I think it was a smile. I still don’t know, and now I never will. Despite everything he told me, I could never get the courage to ask him if he was smiling at me, and ask him why he didn’t do it more often.
Twenty feet up.
The birthday dinner with my family. The way he kept staring at his plate in disbelief, not knowing if he should cut into the steak or just leave it alone so he could keep it forever.
Thirty feet up.
So close now. I could have reached out and almost touched his feet.
Then I was level with him. His eyes were still open, his mouth slightly ajar, and a faint line of dried blood from his nose stopped at his top lip. His hands were both open, as if he knew he was making the right choice and just took it. He slid off the edge of the opening knowing it would hurt, knowing every instinct in his body would tell him to pull the shirt from around his neck. But no, he relaxed and accepted it, because he knew what he wanted.
Then I noticed it. Protruding from his left jeans pocket was a flash of white. It was a piece of paper, and I knew it was for me. Not feeling revulsion, only anxiety for what I was about to find, I reached out and gently slid the scrap out of his pocket. With one more glance at his face, I climbed the last five feet to the entrance. Clambering inside, I slid over and put my back against the wall right next to the door, seated on the floor where I could still see his body right below me. I unraveled the slip of paper, wishing I could do the same with the knots in my stomach, took a deep breath and started reading.
tomis. you ar the onle frind I ever had and you ar my best frind. thank you for evrething. i will mis you but plees dont be sad. you hav an amayzing famlee and thay luv you so much. you showd me wut reel frinds and reel famly is suposd to be and i hope i can find that in hevin.
your frind braydon
As I read it over and over again the tears collected on the page. I knew that Braydon was aware he spelled nearly every word wrong, but he wasn’t ashamed because it was to me. I knew it had probably taken him an hour to write the letter, and I could see where he had erased and rewritten nearly everywhere on it, but he didn’t care, because it was for me. I knew that he loved me, loved what I had given him and what I had shown him, loved that I had accepted his intrusion into my tree house and into my life.
He didn’t know everything he had shown me. He didn’t know that the real reason I wanted him around was because I loved him back. He made me a better person by showing me what a real friend was. Not a friend who plays hockey in the street with you until his mom calls for dinner. Not a friend who brings his newest toy over to show you and brag about how it’s better than yours.
A true friend is Braydon. Someone who can meet you, and five minutes later tell you everything about his life with no shame. After you get to know each other better he can admit his suffering, tell you about his pain not for your pity but because he knows you will listen. Even if you can’t help, you will be there for him to tell you his story. Because at the end of the day, Braydon was to me was what he was looking for his entire life.
A true friend.
