The House Across the River
Andrew Reilly
The house on South Channel Drive—our house, our last house—was really nothing worth missing in its own right. A bedroom for mom and dad, another for me, one for my new baby sister. A crawlspace I wasn't allowed to play in. A fence that fell over in the slightest wind or lightest rain.
Down the street lived the Veesenmeyers, whose son and daughter were really good at video games; around the corner was this kid Brian whose leg sweeps and high kicks made him easily the dirtiest soccer player our neighborhood had ever seen. My bad foot coordination and low patience made their games all so incredibly lame, which is probably why I became such good friends with Cory from the next street over instead.
Cory wasn't just some kid though, she was actually a wonderful girl, or as wonderful as one eight-year-old can be to another. She was funny and she liked a lot of the same things I did, and she was really smart too. She helped me with all the things I had trouble with, like writing in cursive or tying my shoes the normal way.
More than that, she lived in this cool world I didn't really understand, almost like make-believe where people liked each other and everyone was just really nice, like something on TV or a Disney movie. She was a girl, yes, but anytime anyone laughed about us being friends she wouldn't hesitate to lay down the law.
"Hey Andrew," someone would say, "your girlfriend smells."
"Maybe," Cory would say, "but not as bad as your face smells."
A tiny river ran between Cory's house on North Channel Drive and our house on South Channel. She and I would walk to and from school together every day, bonding over our shared love of cartoons, and Legos, and Ghostbusters. Sometimes we would stand on the shoreline behind my house and throw things into the water, pretending whatever junk we found was a ghost we'd trapped and the river was the Ecto-Containment Unit we had to imprison it in. The garbage would inevitably wash up on the other side, and we would say "Oh no! It escaped!" and run as fast as our little legs would carry us down through the woods and across the bridge to trap it again.
Cory's mom delivered pizzas part-time, so her family got all the free pizza they wanted, which I thought was just about the coolest thing in the world. She worked afternoons and would bring pizza and breadsticks home almost every single day; this may have bordered on parental negligence, but to a certain eight-year-old boy who just happened to find himself at their house around six o'clock was still the greatest thing imaginable. Cory's mom would call from work and ask how much food to bring, and Cory would answer either "Enough for everyone" or "Enough for everyone minus one because Andrew has to go home."
And yes there was pizza, but besides that Cory's family was interesting, and civil, and just so weird. Weird like Cory's parents would put their arms around each other. Weird like her dad would kiss her mom on the hair when he came in from outside. Or her older brother, even though he was kind of a jerk, would still ask their parents if they needed help with the dishes. I mean, who were these people?
As it was, dinnertime wasn't exactly the best time to be around my house. Dad worked nights and mom worked days, so late afternoons were the only time they had to express their true feelings for each other anymore. I thought I was such a frequent guest because Cory's parents were just really nice, but eventually found out that was only half the story.
"We heard what your mom and dad were calling each other," Cory said.
"You did?" You have to remember, I hadn't yet grasped the physics of sound moving over water and through backyards. "What do you think it meant?"
"I don't know," she said. "I've never heard the word your dad used before. But one time my brother called this other kid what your mom called your dad and he almost got beat up for it."
A grassy lot sat vacant next to our house, and since our neighbors in that direction didn't have any kids it was pretty much Cory's and mine to conquer. The lot ran from my street in the front to the river in the back, and while the perimeter was covered by trees the rest was a wide open field, big enough for two. Through the afternoons and evenings she and I would play, one day hunting devils, the next putting out fires or solving crimes or maybe creating world-famous paintings. One time, we were chasing bad guys through the grass and into the trees. Cory took the lead and I ran flank, the two of us using our hands as guns and shooting invisible death rays.
"Cover me!" she yelled.
"Look out!" I shouted. "There's one over there!"
We opened fire on them, shooting randomly and mercilessly, two pint-size killing machines delivering imaginary justice. Pow! Pow! Pow! as bad guys fell dead all around us. Suddenly Cory stopped in her tracks, picked up a stick off the ground and held it up like a guitar.
"Look at me!" she commanded to no one in particular. "I'm Bruce Springsteen!"
I dropped my invisible gun immediately, picked up the first worthy stick . . . guitar . . . sticktar--yes, sticktar--I could find, struck my best grade-school music god pose, shouted "I'm Bruce Springsteen too!" and together we rocked out to the only two songs we both knew the words to: "Born in the U.S.A." and the theme from Ghostbusters.
We swayed out of time and tried our best to make our voices sound like guitars. She sounded terrible when she sang The Boss; I sounded even worse. As the sun began to set on the evening and on our concert, we bemoaned the impending break-up of Andrew and the Cor-E Street Band until a moment of genius.
"Why don't you just sleep over at my house tonight?" I asked her.
She pondered this for a moment, eyes following something along the ground I couldn't quite see. "Wouldn't that be weird?" she asked. "I'm a girl, you're a boy . . . is that normal to have those kind of sleepovers? Won't people talk?"
"Probably," I told her.
"That'd be awesome!" she said, and just like that we were off on our next adventure.
We ran into my house and asked my parents, who mumbled something to each other, then we ran over the bridge to ask hers. Her parents went into the other room, and we overheard her dad say something about "repeat of last weekend." Her parents called mine, Cory's mom turning away so we couldn't hear what she was saying into the phone. We ran back to my house to plead our case to my mom and dad, and once we broke their resolve they called Cory's parents back. We bounced around my driveway nervously until finally, my mom came outside to tell us it was okay.
"Why do you think that took so long?" I asked Cory, totally out of breath and totally unaware what it meant when a boy asked his parents if a girl could spend the night in his bedroom.
"My mom says to call her if I need anything," she said, "or if it gets too loud over here."
"Oh, don't worry," I told her, as though this were totally normal. "They don't usually yell when other people are around."
This was actually a complete and total lie, my parents not being the type of people to wait for the right time to rip each other apart—school functions, family parties, neighbor's houses, you name it—but I was willing to take my chances here. I had to. If she went home, I had to go home too, and going back to my house usually meant the good times were over.
Lucky for us—okay, lucky for me—they kept quiet through the evening, and she and I stayed up waaaaaay too late running around my living room and building a fort THIS TALL and telling dumb jokes and eating ice cream and watching cartoons and making fun of the other kids from school like this kid Chris who wore the dumbest shirts ever and here's what he talks like and Chris is probably short for Hey Look At Chris He's Stupid and it was, quite possibly, the greatest boy-girl sleepover of all time.
After the rush of fort-building and ice cream finally wore off, I slept in a sleeping bag on my bedroom floor and Cory took my bed. All had ended well until I awoke a few hours later to Cory sitting upright, blanket over her knees and crying.
Naturally, I assumed the worst.
They're screaming, I thought. That's got to be it. They're fighting again and of course it scared her and WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING and what is wrong with you people WHAT IS IT NOW is it the car or the groceries or the bills again and this is just like that time at Grandma's house and why did I sleep through this and oh wait, there's mom sitting up with Cory, calmly asking what was wrong because for once nothing actually was wrong.
"I need to go home," Cory kept saying. "I can't sleep. I miss my room."
I stayed on the floor, eyes mostly closed and trying not to move. Was she serious? Why would anyone ever want to go home? You mean some people actually like where they live? Like I said, Cory's family was really weird.
My mom helped her pack her things and called Cory's parents to say she'd drive her home, and she left without saying goodbye.
That Monday morning we walked to school together in silence, pretending nothing had happened. Did she think I was mad at her? I wasn't. Was she embarrassed about needing to go back to her house? Or even worse, was she embarrassed to have been at mine?
"Next time will be better," I finally told her. "I promise." I figured if my parents could keep quiet once, they could keep quiet twice, and as long as they could take an evening off we would watch even more cartoons, build even mightier forts and feast on all the Ghostbusters cereal in the world.
But there wasn't a next time, not after everyone except my dad moved out of our house later that spring. Cory asked why I didn't walk to school anymore, and the best I could explain was that I lived too far away to walk now, leaving out the part about our new house being three towns over. She wouldn't understand, and how could she? Her house had pizza; mine had swear words and names that got people in trouble.
"But can we still play after school?" Cory asked.
"No," I said, "my mom picks me up and we go home."
"What about Saturdays and Sundays?" she asked.
"No," I said, "those are at mom's house too."
"That's dumb," she said.
I know.
We very quickly figured out that ours was not a friendship built for distance, and that recess just wasn't enough time to keep what we had alive. As soon as we could cook up a trip into space or a huge ghost-busting mission, the bell would ring and bring our time to a horribly premature end. We used to count the minutes left until we were free; now we were just two kids on a playground who used to live near each other.
Spring turned into summer, and summer turned into fall, and fall brought with it a new school closer to mom's new house. Where there used to be Cory there were now people named Todd and Jen and Greg who were all nice in their own ways, but none of them could play the sticktar or throw a deflated basketball into a river the way Cory could. Not a one, and believe me when I say I tried my hardest to teach them.
They would go off to play their stupid games, and alone I would sit with the memory of our house on South Channel Drive, and of that big field that belonged to me and the most wonderful girl in the world. The ghosts and bad guys hid in the trees as Cory and I waited for the shouting to finally die down and for the sleepless nights to finally end, and where I once saw hallways and bedrooms, I now only saw myself, arms out, soaring forever along the banks of that tiny river. The world blurred behind me, and into the sunlight I disappeared.
Andrew Reilly lives in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Angler, No Touching, and The A.V. Club, among others, and he strongly believes Master is superior to both Ride and Justice.
This story appears courtesy of CellStories content partner, 2nd Story.
