Chapter Text
“Please don’t go; you’ll drown,” Bertholdt says this at the exact same time as Annie’s look says ‘You think I don’t know that?' They are both eight years old but he remains in a cloud of naivety and he knows she’s so, so smart, logically there could not be any way she wouldn’t have factored in the bad weather and the impressive distance from the mainland to the lighthouse. But then there’s this part of his brain that refuses to believe that somebody so dedicated could exist that they would row across the bay in a storm because their father wants them to, because they have their orders, and because they haven’t learned to value their own life yet.
She keeps walking as the rain discolors her book bag. He tramps through the mud behind her. His father passed down to him a hefty set of rain-boots, and now Bertholdt wears them. They swallow up his skinny legs. The bright yellow raincoat fits him like a dress. Annie has nothing but her apathy toward the weather.
“Please?”
As the classroom filled up that morning, students crowded the windows to watch the rain come down, the clouds roll in, the air take on the color of a bruise. Throughout their lessons they heard the wind tug at the schoolhouse roof. During recess they were made to stay inside. A tree might fall on you, the teacher quipped; it’s dangerous out there. Trash was blown through the streets as they were turned to cold slush under the storm. The forest around the edge of town swayed side to side and at one point a tremendous crack was heard. There goes that tree, the teacher assured them.
They sat under that weather-beaten roof together for hours, feeling the storm intensify, and nobody had to look at the harbor to know it had become a frenetic, roiling deathtrap. But as the clock ticked down the minutes, and the students grew more restless, nobody bothered to pull little Annie Leonhardt aside and tell her that she’d have to stay in town for the night, that the storm was too much for her to row through back to her father’s lighthouse island. The teacher opened the door and let the students out into the flooded street and Annie passed right by their knees and they said nothing.
Ever observant, Bertholdt watched the dismissal in vague fear. If he was able to recognize the unsafe conditions, then there was no way the teacher would be able to miss it. And yet they did. He leaves the schoolhouse after Annie and watches her make her way down the street, mud splashing up the backs of her legs and with nobody stopping her, telling her ‘you can’t do that.’
He knows that the Leonhardts are scary people, that nobody in town likes them, he remembers his parent’s nervous titters when Mr. Leonhardt packed up his belongings and little girl to live in the lighthouse after the old tender died. Nobody likes them and he knows he isn’t supposed to like them either but letting Annie go doesn’t feel okay. So he burrows his head deep under his nearly luminescent hood and stomps off after her.
“Bertholdt! Your house is that way!”
The teacher recognizes that he isn’t headed the way he should be and he feels weird. The teacher is a careful person. He’s too young to know what word to use for the situation, but the idea he gets from the interaction is one of negligence. Nobody would ever suggest that a girl like Annie needed saving but he doesn’t see the harm in a little friendly warning.
Naturally she ignores him. When he catches up to her he reaches out his hand to grab her shoulder, only to let it fall back just short of making contact. His hand hovers in space and rain slides off the tips of his fingers. Slowly, she deigns to turn around.
That’s when he warns her to not go rowing home because she’ll drown. That’s when she disregards him and trudges onward to the harbor.
It is an obvious and immediate defeat and Bertholdt is used to it. He’s accustomed to not being good enough for someone and then retreating and letting somebody more adept take over. But here, in the lonely wet street with the girl that people don’t want to think too hard about, there is nobody to relieve him of duty. It’s all on him this time and the knotting of his throat tells him he can’t just let her go on to the water, he really just can’t. He yanks one foot out of the deepening mud, then the other, and knows that she can hear him following her by the viscous noises of the sludge around his feet. She doesn’t look at him.
He tails her all the way down to the piers not knowing what to say but that he’ll have to come up with something. Down the length of a dock with his eyes set on the back of her head, her eyes set at the rowboat bobbing at the end of their walk.
“Please, no, this is a bad idea. Please,” this time he coughs up the courage to snatch at her wrist. She easily twitches out from his shaking fingers and they arrive at the end of the dock. “I…this isn’t…” he gulps several times as she crouches down above her boat. Waves have already swamped it, several inches of water sloshing around in the bottom, and spray from the ocean keeps flying into both their eyes.
It is very cold there at the end of the dock, and Bertholdt is very scared (of the ocean and of Annie and of what he’s about to do), but he offers up a tiny “I’m very sorry” before looping his arm at her waist and rolling her onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He turns right around and starts back toward town, trying to figure out how to explain this to his parents before noticing that she isn’t protesting.
Nobody bothers being outside as they walk home, so the only sound to hear is the storm and Annie’s occasional huffs of breath when Bertholdt steps too heavily and pushes his knobby shoulder hard into her stomach. He slips and stutters through town and eventually ends up on his doorstep.
“If I put you down, will you run away?” He asks timidly as they both drip on the doormat.
“No.”
He figures it isn’t a promise, not really, but it’s all he’s got for the moment. As lightly as he can manage, he settles her down onto her own feet again, making sure to place her between him and the door. Annie doesn’t make a break for it; instead she stands there, her hair slicked to her temples, rubbing at the shoulder-shaped bruise doubtlessly forming across her hips. Bertholdt wants to apologize but isn’t sure how to.
When he lets himself into the house, his mother is immediately upon him, worrying over why he was so late. She quickly takes notice of Annie and slows like a wasp nest at nightfall. She turns to Bertholdt, her mouth slipping open to question him, but he speaks up before she can begin.
“This is Annie; she lives in the lighthouse.”
The look on his mother’s face says that her suspicions have been confirmed. Everybody in town knows the Leonhardt nose.
“The weather’s bad and she can’t row back so I was thinking maybe she should stay here? Just until the storm blows over.”
For a moment, he’s scared that she’ll refuse, and then there will be no keeping Annie from rowing herself across the bay. He knows his parents don’t like the Leonhardts, he knows that really nobody in town does, and from the stories he’s heard about Mr. Leonhardt, he supposes that there’s a very good reason for that. But it doesn’t seem right that sins should be hereditary; maybe Annie’s father is a little…eccentric, but that doesn’t mean she is.
“Why…of course she can,” Mrs. Hoover concedes at last. She looks nervous but she welcomes both children fully into the house nonetheless.
Annie keeps herself by the door and Bertholdt figures that she won’t move unless told to. It’s something that he’s noticed in their shared classroom; she’s smart, and she’s driven, but she only knows how to follow direct orders.
So first he prompts her to follow him up the stairs to get her a dry change of clothes and a blanket to warm up in. He gives her one of his mother’s old nightgowns and it swallow Annie whole, the excess skirts wallowing around her feet and the neckline almost floating down her arms. After a quick tour of the house so that she’ll know where everything is he stands awkwardly in front of her at the top of the staircase. It feels awful, her eyes on his long nervous hands. Eventually she goes down the stairs and sits on the couch in front of their living room’s big bay window. And there she stays for a long time, looking out over the town from the slight hill his house is on and watching the harbor, trying to see the lighthouse through the slanted rain.
Bertholdt feels that he’s used up his bravery for the day and so does not approach her until dinner is on the table. He shuffles into the living room with a bowl of soup slowly burning his hands and hears his parents devolve into whispers around the dinner table – there’s no need to wonder about whom. The light in the room is dim and gray and the color leeches from everything and he stands a few feet away from her.
“I could have made it,” she assures him, turning her head toward him a little. The action gives him a perfect profile with her eyes hooded and heavy, just the way he imagines the eyes of the creatures that live along the silted harbor floor must look like. He walks forward with the bowl of soup but she waves him away.
“You can’t just not eat,” he says very timidly, trying to approach her again.
“I don’t know what’s in the soup.”
“Oh. Uh, chicken stock and uhm, potatoes…I think there’s carrots…yeah there’s carrots.”
“No. I mean I don’t know where the ingredients came from. Did you buy any from the store?”
“I think so? Yes?”
Annie tsks low in her throat and turns herself back toward the window. “My dad’s told me all about your stores. People will change the labels on the can; he’s seen it himself. So you can’t trust anything you get out of there because you can’t really know what’s in it.”
“I’ve…never seen them change the labels.”
“Of course not,” she says it like it’s the most obvious thing and he feels like she would have rolled her eyes too if she could care that much, “they do it secretly. If everybody knew then they’d be out of business. My dad’s the only one who’s figured them out and see? They made him go live on that island.”
There really isn’t a lot to say to that. Bertholdt fidgets and meekly point out that “well, I’m sure your dad is very smart but I think he might be wrong.”
The air goes dense and Annie stays quiet for a long time. Eventually she says, “I could have made it,” and that’s that. There is no more conversation to be had. Bertholdt makes his way out of the room, the burns on his hands beginning to go numb, but when he stands in the doorway he looks at her again. She’s tucked into herself and too pale and however small she naturally is she’s finding ways to be smaller; her hair is still wet and her eyes look weighted like lead marbles and she muffles her breathing by pulling the blanket up over her mouth. Something about that whole picture strikes him as being very sad and he knows that it is a useless thought to have but he thinks he wants to be friends with her regardless.
Making friends with anybody in such a cold, gray town is hard, especially for a person as warm and inquisitive as Bertholdt. He would watch his neighbors distantly greet each other on the street and sometimes other families got invited into his home, or vice versa, and everybody would have dinner and smile tightly. A little sea town like this one was deeply impersonal and the remnants of the people who washed up there like were never brave enough to know one another fully (they wash up like dregs, he’s always thought, like the dregs in the bottom of his mother’s tea mug). Up there, people are as cold as their ocean and pull apart from one another by the tidal schedule and Bertholdt reads about love in storybooks and he realizes that it isn’t something that happens where he lives.
Without any examples it’s hard to figure out how to love someone. Especially somebody like Annie. But he has this thick feeling in his chest that it’s for the better that he try to, because she’s the only person he’s met so far that he really wants to know. When he gets older he thinks that if they’d lived somewhere else, where people knew how to be closer, then maybe she wouldn’t have been so distant and he wouldn’t have had to have been so nervous about the world. The hand he’s been dealt is nothing but a chilling ocean in front and soft dark pine trees on every other side, though, and he has to figure out how to make it work.
He sits with her at lunch and learns that, true to her word, she never eats anything that wasn’t grown on her father’s island. Mostly it’s a messy bundle of vegetables, woody potatoes and ugly little turnips. The carrots are unusually sweet, however, and she occasionally will let him have a bite. She rolls her eyes at his sandwiches and crackers and the cookies that his mom sometimes bakes. They’re all probably poisoned, she scoffs. Or radioactive. Annie is deadly serious about radioactivity; her dad’s told her all about it.
“It’s probably why you’re so tall,” she tells him solemnly one day. Bertholdt wishes his hair was longer so he could use it to hide his red face.
In the early evenings after school lets out, he walks her down to the pier and always wishes her a safe trip. This is met with a sneer and a sigh; “I don’t need your luck; luck’s bogus anyways.” Day after day, he wishes her luck regardless because he feels that it is the most he can do. A person like her could probably use some extra luck. At least that’s how he figures it.
He learns how to fasten the little rowboat to the dock from her, how to tie the right knot. He complains once about how rough the rope is, and only once. Annie makes no room for complaints. As a result, her hands have knuckles almost as rough as the rope, and her fingers are hard like crystals. Each morning as she comes into the schoolhouse he takes note of how her hands are rubbed pink from the sea breeze and the oars of her boat, how the thick cuffs of her sweaters hold residual dampness from her trip. She walks in with a smell of the outside on her and unlike other students it never really dissipates.
From day one, however, it is made dangerously obvious that Annie doesn’t want a friend. She doesn’t want a companion or confidant, she doesn’t need a partner in crime, she feels herself above human contact, she thinks he’s wasting his time. It would be a lie to say that her bluntness on the subject doesn’t deter him a little, and an even bigger lie to say that it doesn’t hurt him to hear her talk like that, but Bertholdt carries on.
“Like the lost puppy I never wanted,” she admonishes one day in a rare fit of humor.
(As they grow up, Bertholdt starts to notice how ‘it’s a waste of your time’ isn’t so much her way of telling him to screw off as it’s a more socially acceptable way for her to say ‘I’m not worth it so please don’t bother’ and making that realization is all he really needs for proof that he’s made the right decision).
They only see each other in school, and when summer break rolls around Bertholdt tries to imagine not seeing her at all for almost three months. As the classroom gets wilder and days get warmer, neither of them mention it and just keep to their somewhat-comfortable shared quiet, which Annie will fervently deny is a friendship. On the last day of school she tells him that she comes into town every Saturday morning to get fresh water for herself and her dad. Nine o’clock, by the public well, she’ll only be there for an hour at most but it would help to have an extra pair of hands hauling the water up.
“Thanks,” he says.
She doesn’t get it.
Most of their time together that summer is Bertholdt anxiously trying to convince her to stay in town with him longer. He entices her with stories of how a fisherman’s dog just had puppies and how all seven of them roll around on the front porch all day, playing in the sun; or how he found a really pretty little meadow high up in the hills with flowers that he hasn’t seen anywhere else before; or how a week is a long time, and he’s sorry for being weak but he gets a little lonely, so would staying in town an extra hour really do all that much damage?
Each Saturday that passes brings one more invitation, one more excuse. Finally, one day Annie arrives at the well to see Bertholdt sitting on its lip, surrounded by buckets of water that he filled all on his own. Her eyes narrow as he gestures at his handiwork.
“I did it all already for you,” he feels like he should say something more, perhaps apologize for being so clingy, or for how she means more to him than he means to her. But that’s as far as he can get before her look stills his throat and he ends up pushing his short fingernails into the bumps of his knuckles; it’s a bad habit he’s been picking up, and it’s starting to leave marks.
She sits next to him on the well, in a heavy way that makes a puff of breath push out of her nose, and she turns to give him a very exasperated but not necessarily angry look. “I wouldn’t mind staying in town longer. I really wouldn’t. But dad doesn’t want me to have friends.”
“Oh,” again, he feels the need to say more, but he’s so unused to voicing anger at anybody that he isn’t sure how it would come out. He knows she loves her dad, or is at least voraciously devoted to him, which isn’t quite love he supposes, and he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. He gets very close to saying that her dad is awful to keep her from other people like that. That wouldn’t help anything, however. It wouldn’t help their tedious Saturday morning friendship, or what he’s convinced is her courteously stifled contempt for him, or how she already thinks that he’s weird and probably brainwashed for living in town. Instead of speaking he scratches the chalky granite that they sit on to dust under his fingernails, stopping only when one of them breaks down the middle. He doesn’t do anything about it, just thinks about her father’s rule.
If she isn’t allowed to have friends then he doesn’t want to think on what that makes him.
They spend their hour sitting on the well and talking gradually, nervously, and Bertholdt can’t keep his hands from shaking and Annie blinks too slowly. After that he makes sure to get up very early each Saturday and fill the buckets and wait for her as the air is warmed by the heightened sun. Sometimes they walk around the town, or he will get her to go all the way to the forest with him so they can look at cool plants that he’s found. In August, he lets her know about the book that he presses flowers in, and they sit on his bedroom floor as she looks through the pages with intent. The following Saturday, she brings a fistful of tiny pink flowers that grow on her island.
Summer treats them both much better than the school year could, but the days shorten and the store is sold out of pencils and the first day back is upon them. Spending easy warm days avoiding people if he wanted to was nice to Bertholdt’s anxiety and now he just feels sick with worry. He’s never liked school, the way he would sit at a desk for hours and listen to the living ticks of thirty other human beings, hearing their tongues push around their mouths and their fingers tap against the desks and each heaved sigh at a particularly tricky problem. Being reminded that other people are so incredibly existent has never been something he’s dealt with easily, but then the added pressure of being expected to do his work perfectly, both by his teacher and his parents, that’s what makes him claw up his hands under his desk because if he doesn’t he’ll explode.
Each consecutive year has been harder to handle, and as he starts fifth grade he can’t even get through the first week of class before having to take impromptu ‘bathroom’ breaks in order to hide himself away and try to remember how to breathe. But this year, he now has somebody to follow him.
It’s the third week of school and Bertholdt has folded himself into the cover of the small cluster of trees in the far corner of the schoolyard. He’d only lasted an hour and a half before having to take a break and he digs his nails into the backs of his hands in a combination of nerves and disgust. It’s frustrating, getting so bad this early on, and especially after he’d started getting a little better the spring before. He sits with his back to a fir’s trunk and closes his eyes against the reality of having to return to class in a few minutes.
“So this is where you hide.”
He jolts back, hitting his head against the tree, as Annie sits down beside him. “I’ve been trying to find where you go for a week. This is a good hiding place.” He nods vaguely, only gradually beginning to worry. Annie never has words of praise. The closest thing she has to showing approval is a certain low grunt and no clear dismay at someone’s lack of skill. She’s doesn’t give compliments and yet here she is, with a soft voice and her tiny hand settling on the back of his so he can’t scratch it up any more.
“Is that okay?” she asks as she runs her tough thumb over his metacarpals. Later he’ll think back and realize the hesitancy in her voice, but at the moment he supposes she only sounds weird because she’s getting a cold or something. Annie doesn’t know anything less than utter conviction.
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
They sit together under the trees as a slight drizzle starts up. Bertholdt keeps his eyes on the pine needles and old beetle carapaces before him, occasionally glancing down at his covered hand (her hand is cool and feels nice on the raw scratches). Annie has her eyes upward, looking to the abalone sky and the tree branches meshing above them. Tiny little raindrops hit her face.
Normally Bertholdt will ferociously try to pull himself together enough so that he can return to class without any suspicion. But today…he slowly relaxes his shoulders, breathing easier and loosening his back. He stretches his legs out instead of keeping them cinched into his chest and damp pine needles make their way into the cuffs of his pants. Slowly he leans toward Annie so that their arms press together and she lets him, though he can feel her tense through their jackets. They stay under the trees until the back doors of the school are pushed open and their fellow students run out for recess.
“You want to leave?” she suggests, “we can go quick before the teachers come out.”
“I’ve never skipped school before…it wouldn’t be right…”
Annie turns to him, sliding onto her knees and looking severe. “It isn’t right that they do this to you. They won’t let you have a good day so you’ll have to take one,” she grabs his hand and holds it up so they can both see the furrows he’s started sewing to his skin, “they shouldn’t do this to you.”
He doesn’t say anything but lets her haul him to his feet and shepherd him from the trees and out of the schoolyard. She marches him toward the back of town, where the forest meets up with some of the newer houses, and where there won’t be any upstanding members of society to usher two kids back to school.
“The meadow you told me about this summer, the one with the flowers. Show it to me.”
High up in the hills, out of breath but with a good view of the town and harbor, they find the meadow and settle in the center of it. The rain has staid light and feels almost like mist against their skin.
“The flowers are all dead by now, but here’s the plant. The leaves are pretty interesting too, really, but not as nice. We’ll have to come back in summer,” Bertholdt crouches down and pushes some grass away, showing the plant. Annie nods and stretches out on her back beside him with her feet pointing away from each other and her hands deep in her pockets. He pokes around in the grass a little while longer before laying down at her side to watch the slowly rolling clouds.
Of course he’s still nervous. What will happen to the books and the backpack he left in the schoolhouse? When will his teacher notice that he’s missing? How long will his parents yell at him for this? This awful stone of anxiety keeps itself in his gut like a long, slow punch but up here the air is clear and light, and he can feel wind on his face, and Annie is so spectacularly quiet that he can close his eyes and he can’t even hear her breathing. It’s almost like sleeping but better since he knows there won’t be nightmares.
At some point, he isn’t sure when, he actually does fall asleep and he only realizes when Annie shakes his shoulder.
“Mmm?”
“School will be out in an hour; we should start back now.”
He pushes himself up and makes it to the meadow’s treeline before he stops. Annie is already halfway into the forest, notices he’s still when she’s in the middle of stepping over a fern. She slowly puts her foot down in the spongy earth.
“I don’t want to go back,” he hopes he doesn’t sound as petulant as he thinks he does.
Her hands are once again cool on his, her fingers pushing down the scratches smoothly, and she gently tugs him into the forest. “It’ll be okay,” she vows, “I’ll make it okay.”