The next day I made it to lunch before anybody asked me what was going on.
I decided to go with the healthy option—tofu yogurt stroganoff. I love it when Mom cooks beef stroganoff, but I don’t remember it being green. Getting locked up might not be so awful, if the food was better than this crap.
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Then I heard her voice from behind me. "Hey Jordan."
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At the first word, I knew it was franki. With all the trees in the cafeteria, I'd never be able to run away from her so I decided to be cool about it.
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"Hey franki."
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I turned and saw franki standing still with a shocked look on her face. Her tray was drooping, and her salad was about to slide off. I reached out and lifted the corner of the tray back up.
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"You talked to me," she said softly.
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"Yeah, I thought it was time. You want to sit down?"
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"Yeah . . . I better." After sitting down, she spent a little time moving things around on her tray. When everything had been moved three or four times, she asked, "What's going on?"
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"What do you mean?" I reached for my fork, trying to avoid answering her.
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"Why did you talk to me? Why today?"
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I stared at my tray. "I don't know—lonely, confused. I don't know."
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"I hear you walked into the girls’ locker room this morning."
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My eyes flashed up and for the first time in five years, I saw franki looking at me. "I didn't just walk into the locker room, I was following Janice McGovern." Her eyebrows lifted exactly the way I remembered.

​

I don’t think that came out right.
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"I mean, I wasn't paying attention to where I was going, and sort of followed the person ahead of me, and it was Janice. I wasn't stalking her or anything. I don’t even like her. I mean I like her, but not that way."
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"That’s all right Jordan, I get the idea. You don’t like her, but you like her enough to follow her into the girls’ locker room. But Janice will never go out with you after yesterday, no matter how much you follow her around. She had to go home and change her clothes so she didn't smell like vegetarian hamburger gravy all day."
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"Yeah, I heard," I said.
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"You know, everybody thinks I’m a little odd, but you make me feel normal," franki said cheerfully. "You want to talk about it?" She was stirring the dressing into her salad and not looking at me.
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I'd been pushing the food around my plate while we talked, wondering if I'd done the right thing, talking to franki and inviting her to eat with me. Then I realized that even with everything that was wrong in my life, I was happy.
While I thought about it, I pushed something to the side of my plate. I didn't know what it was, so no way was I going to eat it. "Um I don't know—maybe. You want to go outside and talk after we eat?"
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"Sure"
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Franki ate her salad and I choked down as much of my healthy lunch as I could. While we ate, neither of us said much. I kept glancing from our food to franki and saw her doing the same thing.
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Finally, I pushed my plate away. I was done even though there was quite a bit left.
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"That really sucked. I’m not sure if eating healthy makes you lose weight because it’s low-cal or because you can’t eat enough of it to get fat. You finished?"
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Franki was filling her fork with the last bite of her salad. "One sec."
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As we headed over to get rid of our trays, I was a step behind her.
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"Jordan, get up here next to me and stop staring at my butt."
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You’d think after knowing her for most of my life I would be immune to her teasing.
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"I wasn’t looking at your butt. I was thinking."
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"Wow, I’m hurt and shocked."

"Huh?"
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"Think about it."
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Oh.
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I was dodging obstacles, moving toward a nice shade tree on the school lawn. But when I stopped, franki didn't even slow down. She walked through my tree and kept going for another twenty feet. She sat down under a tree I would have sworn wasn't real.
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"Okay, what's going on? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you're talking to me, but why now? Why not five years ago?"
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"Well, I’m going through some stuff right now. I thought maybe you’d understand."
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"That's all? Does it have anything to do with you flinching all the time? Or the way you keep following people around, even if they are going into places you shouldn’t be, like the girl’s locker room? I even heard about the way you almost fell down during track practice. That’s why I came over today. I asked Billy to stay away because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to try one more time."
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"Why?" I asked.
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She paused a few seconds before saying, "I'm worried about you."
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Before we talked about anything else, I had to know the answer to the question that had been haunting me for a third of my life. "Why did you leave?" I asked.
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"Huh?"
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She had to understand what I meant. That was when everything changed. "That summer, why did you leave? What happened?"

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"God Jordan, that was so long ago. Who cares?"
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"I care. You were my best friend and then you were gone." Then I asked the question I dreaded asking. "What did I do wrong?"
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"Nothing. You didn't do anything," she said.
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"But you left. All our plans and you left." My voice was getting louder.
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"But it was only a couple of weeks. I was learning about my computer. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. I wanted to learn about it so I could show you and Billy," she said softly.
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"I missed you. I missed you so much it destroyed me. You were gone and it had to be my fault. I must have done something wrong," I said mostly to myself.
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"No, it wasn't you. I just took a time out. I was ten years old and didn't think about it. I'm sorry." Franki's voice was pleading, like she was trying to convince me that she was telling the truth.
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"Then when school started, and you wanted to be friends again, but I couldn't do it. I didn't trust you anymore. I watched you make new friends, but I couldn't do that either. I knew that if I did, someday they'd leave me like you did."
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"I'm sorry. I didn't know." The tears that had been pooling in her eyes overflowed and ran down her cheeks. I could barely hear her voice. Mine was getting louder to make up for it.
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"Since that day, I haven't made another friend. Steve and Billy were from before. So was my family. I was stuck with all of them."
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Franki was still saying something over and over. She was whispering so softly I couldn't hear it. There were tears in her eyes.
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I knew it was too much. I'd held the feelings in for so long, never telling anybody how I honestly felt. I used to lay in bed thinking about what I would tell her. I never thought I'd have a chance to say it out loud, but once I started I couldn't stop until I reached the end.
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"I practiced hating you franki, hating you for the way you destroyed me." I was yelling and releasing the anger I'd held in forever.
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Then she was on her feet. Her crying was louder, and when I reached out to her, she pushed me away and turned back towards the cafeteria as I finished the speech I'd practiced hundreds of times.
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"But how matter how much I tried, it didn't work." At the end, my voice was almost a whisper.
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She must have heard me because she stopped and I thought she was going to come back like she always did when I imagined it. But she just nodded her head and started walking again.
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My anger was gone, replaced by emptiness.
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​

​

By Saturday, I needed some time by myself.
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In less than two days I'd confused my best friend, freaked out Coach Winters, convinced the entire student body that I was some kind of pervert and after talking to franki for the first time in five years, hurt her as badly as she hurt me five years ago. I apologized the next day, but for all I knew, she was going to ignore me for the next five years. I didn't know what to do about any of it and was afraid of what I would do next.
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But in the forest, I could be me. If I flinched because of something that wasn’t real, it was okay. I was able to step right up to an imaginary little fawn without mama deer freaking out. Even my imagination was more relaxed.
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When I was little, I'd beg Dad to take me for a hike. When I got old enough to go out on my own, the wilderness became my hangout. The County Park and recreation area starts behind our house, and the park backs onto the forest. I can walk out the back door and in a couple hundred feet I’m in a different world. Deep in the woods, there are groves of old trees that have never been cut. When I'm walking through them, I feel like I’m the first person to find them and who knows, maybe I am. When I can get one of my friends to hike with me or if any of the family is along, we don’t go far enough to see them.
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While I walked, I tried to think of a new plan. Everybody at school knew about the locker room episode and my track problems. I did a better job of holding it together on Friday, and it's a good thing because a bunch of people showed up to watch me run. They were probably bummed out that I ran normally. I wasn't as fast as usual, but I think I did okay.
​

As I thought about school, I got to a part of the forest I'd never seen before. The trail I followed was mostly one of my hallucinations. There was a real path, but it was so faint that I would never have noticed it without the imaginary one. Until then, my delusions were completely separate from reality.

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How can I follow and imaginary trail and not walk off a cliff?
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I stopped in the middle of a grove of extremely old trees and noticed that for the first time in days, that I didn't see any phantoms. I didn't see any trees that weren’t there. The only brook I saw was real. I know it was real because I got on my knees and drank from it.
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I felt a breeze blow through the grove and branches started to sway in the wind. For a second, I also saw ghostly tree limbs that weren't moving. Then, a phantom wind must have started blowing as they merged back into the real trees.
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I didn't know what was happening. Maybe I was so comfortable that my mind was toning down the hallucinations. Maybe I was starting to get some control over whatever was happening