They had been a gang of four until Darcey Jacobs blasted into their life, knocking their socks off. New to the neighborhood, she saw them walking by one night and made herself a part of their lives, so engaging and lively that they couldn’t then envisage a walk or an excursion or an adventure without her.
“Darcey,” she greeted them that night.
She shook their hands with a small, floppy appendage that was warmer than Bodie might have imagined and soft to the touch. She asked where they were going and they responded as proud young boys on a mission so often do.
“The old Killer Slide. They roped it off today,” Jim had piped up.
“Yeah, we’re down that mother like bread and butter,” Scott had said with a whistle.
“Have you been down it before?” Darcey asked.
“Umm, well… no.”
“Why now?”
“’Cause it’s fuckin’ there!” Brian growled, eyes laughing. Brian was always the ringleader, a trait that would years later remind Bodie of Cassidy Coleman.
They all chortled at the curse word, and at the shiver of fear that coursed through them with its use. Darcey pushed between them, shoving even the adventurous Brian aside and maneuvering Scott backward until she came face-to-face with Bodie.
“And you?”
“I know first aid.” It was the only thing that came to him, but it set them off laughing so hard they fell to the ground. Darcey was all in, and she was first to push herself down the Killer Slide, then egg Scott and Brian, Jim and Bodie on after. She was the sunrise in their days of pure light, and as sweet as a honey bear.
Bodie rarely revisited this part of his past. It had been locked away in a dusty compartment of his mind simply because it evoked such a sense of loss to his emotional state that it often brought him to tears.
The Forever Gang spent a lot of time in Hyde Park, taking hold of the bright, sunny days, making them their own. They held picnics on the wide lawns under sprawling trees, played football and hockey and cricket, but always finished with hide-and-seek, which saw the shadows grow long and end yet another glorious, full day. Bodie found himself mostly sharing the experiences with Scott, who had been just as steadfast, careful, and reserved as Cross was now. His similarity to Scott was probably the main reason Bodie preferred Cross’s company to any of the others.
It lasted forever. It felt like it lasted forever. They talked of nothing, they did dares, and walked until they ached. Sublime days and an endless summer stretched ahead. These are our moments of immortality, when everything we hold in our heart and in our head is good and beautiful and infinitely perfect. Bodie imagined parents might get a similar feeling witnessing their children experience the innocence of youth, but that wasn’t knowledge he could draw upon. The long-dead past was all he had, and the long-gone friends he used to share it with.
Bodie had dwelled long enough on memories and returned now to thoughts of his current family, intrigued by the parallels he found between them and the Forever Gang. It was no coincidence, but it wasn’t something he wanted to get into right now. He gave himself five minutes before daring to open his eyes and look around the plane.
The first person he laid eyes on was Cassidy Coleman. Perhaps because of his nostalgic mood and the memories of lost hopes, and perhaps because she reminded him of Brian, he mulled over the emotions that ate her up. All her life, Cassidy had been trying to organize disparate feelings and finding it was akin to scything her way through a jungle with a penknife. She gave up constantly… but never gave in, and those times when she couldn’t detangle at least a few of those feelings, she ended up in a nightclub, or a fight.
Cassidy was as lost as he was, but in an entirely different way. She felt his eyes upon her then and looked over, smiling.
“What are you thinking?”
“How alike we are now,” he admitted. “And how I always chose friends with the same qualities. We arrived here with totally different backgrounds… and yet it feels like we’ve known each other forever.”
Cassidy grew serious. “The shit I’ve gone through would fill a book. I never lost my parents; I lived with them till I was seventeen. It didn’t drop to the level of abuse, but I never knew love until years later.”
“Still find it hard to accept?”
“You know it. It’s like right now — I’m having to physically sit on my hands to keep from opening that hatch and running the hell away.”
Bodie glanced at her hands pinned beneath her legs and the airplane’s exit. “You mean falling away.”
“Whatever. You started this, Bodie. As usual I’m just telling it straight.”
“I had something really good,” he said, “before my parents died. Good friends, not unlike you guys. It was… the best time. If life hadn’t taken a tragic curve, I would have become a totally different person.”
“Fate,” Cassidy said with a shrug. “They say it always finds a way. I had someone too, at seventeen, but I was already conditioned, hardened to the world. It took my man every moment he had left to start helping me.”
“I remember the story,” Bodie said. “Brad, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, and I remember yours. The kids, right? I don’t remember their names.”
“Brian, Scott, Jim, and little Darcey,” Bodie said, and try as he might, he couldn’t keep the rasp from his voice. “Scott was a ringer for Cross; you remind me of Brian.”
“Ever look them up?”
“Why would I? Everything ended the day my parents died. Strangers turned up and took me away.” He swallowed drily. “Planted me in an orphanage. From that day on, my energies were consumed by survival.”
“Maybe your friends would remember you.”
Bodie shrugged. “Not in the same way. People move on, Cass. They change. My life with them, I remember it like yesterday because it was the only time in my life that I was happy, content, and befriended. To most normal people, it is a rite of childhood. To them, I’m a misty memory of youth and they’d think it weird if I showed up at their door.”
“Still, they could recall something.”
“I remember everything,” he said. “The individual sounds of their laughter. The touch of the night and day on my skin. The way they reacted to each situation. The games we played on given days. Cass,” he sighed. “I remember everything.”
“Brad saved me,” she said. “And, at nineteen, I had to hold his hand and watch him die. That was after a year of trying. Where the hell the time has gone since then, I don’t know, but I do know that I’m still trying.”
Bodie clammed up as Heidi came to sit on the end of the opposite aisle. Her face was open and honest as she leaned toward them.
“Since we’re sharing,” she said, “and since this is a long-ass flight, I’m just about to put a call in to the husband who left me and the daughter who wants nothing to do with me. Any suggestions?”
“What did you do to them?” Cassidy asked bluntly.
“Oh, I went to work for the CIA, I guess.”
“Then no, Frizzbomb, sorry. You’re on your own there.”
Bodie leaned across Cassidy toward Heidi. “Never give up,” he said. “If you think it’s worth it — never, ever give up.”