THERE WAS AN OLD COAL MINE halfway up to the top of Mount Tom, about a hundred yards off the trail we had made. You could only get there by crawling on your hands and knees through a dark green and mysterious tunnel of rhododendrons, which made for a perfect hidden entrance. Ashley and I had discovered it when I threw her shoe into the tangled mass after she had told me for the hundredth time how much bigger her boobs were than mine.
The mine was exactly one of those sketchy places that parents continually warned us kids to stay away from. Scary stories at sleepovers or Halloween nights always had the witch or the vampire or the zombie or the death-eater or whoever was the latest and greatest evil-doer sneak out of an abandoned coal mine just like the one we had discovered. It was there that they dragged pathetic, kicking-and-screaming little girls and boys and roasted them alive and sucked out their brains and picked their bones clean with their nasty, crooked teeth.
True story:
In third grade this kid named Gabby Glonski had been fooling around in an old abandoned mine down near the Green River, and the wooden support structures suddenly collapsed and trapped her inside. Totally trapped! Can you imagine? No food, no water, completely dark—a kid’s worst nightmare!
Fortunately, her little brother was playing nearby and saw the whole thing go down. He skedaddled out of there and got help, and it took half the town six hours to dig her out, but they did it. To this very day Gabby still can’t go into a dark room, and she sleeps with a light on and stays away from any tight places like elevators and closets and even basements.
But Ashley and I loved our mine. It had that sweet mixture of taboo and danger and secrecy. It wasn’t very big, with a horizontal shaft that extended only about fifteen feet, with rotting timbers that propped up the ancient roof, and with roots of the trees above sending tangled shoots down into the dark. We figured it was one of those classic family mines that some old-timer, maybe even ol’ Tom himself, had dug out ages ago, using the coal to heat his house and cook his food. A thick black seam of coal still glistened from the walls.
We made up endless stories about Tom creeping in here with his pigs and making moonshine in his mine. Maybe he had had a nip or two too many and that was why he plummeted off the cliff and broke his neck. Or maybe his pigs had gotten into the sweet stuff and pushed him over. Maybe the mine was even haunted!
Ashley and I had scavenged a couple of raggedy old cushions and a cloudy mirror from the town dump and had schlepped them all the way up there to decorate our “living room.” We’d light candles in the corners of the mine and we’d talk and talk and talk. It was there that we had made our pact to be best friends forever, Lord willing and the Green River don’t rise, and pricked our fingers to seal the promise with our very own blood on the wall of coal. It was there where we swore to keep our mine secret from everybody. It would be our mine, just ours, forever and ever. And it was there where we kept our “ridiculous jar,” a beat-up old cookie tin stuffed with scraps of paper documenting every lame thing we had done that year. Every year on New Year’s Eve, we opened the jar and read all our antics out loud and laughed our fool heads off.
I had just put in a new ridiculousness summarizing the peg leg escapade.
“You sure he said ‘hot’?” Ashley asked for the five zillionth time. “Rather than ‘cute skirt, by the way. NOT!’”
“Ashley. For the love of Tom, this is the most important thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire life. You better believe I’d remember it. Word for word!”
Ashley and I had been pouring over the Incident at the Haunted Lunatic Asylum for over two hours. Candlelight flickered on the coal walls, illuminating the blood on my cuticles that I had bitten to bleeding trying to decipher the true meaning behind what Kevin had said to me.
“I mean, you were hot, right? It was, like, 5,000 degrees that day. And that hoop thingy would have kept you warm even at 20 below. You sure that’s not what he meant?”
“Sorry. It’s just that nothing like this has ever happened to us before. We’re in uncharted territory here!”
It gave me great comfort to hear Ashley use the words us and we. If I had to figure this out alone I’d be totally effed.
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “He was probably just playing with me.”
“Maybe not. You had just saved his life, for crying out loud. Even if it did mean permanent facial disfigurement and probable brain damage!”
“Thanks, Ash.”
“Any time. So . . . he was really lying on top of you?”
“Right on top. It seems as though the only way I’m ever going to get anything is either by falling on a guy or having him fall on me. First Sean McKenzie in gym and now Kevin Malloy on the battlefield.”
“Well, look on the bright side. You’re lucky. You had an actual guy on top of you. I’ve never gotten anything.”
I laughed.
“But, you know, he’s right,” Ashley said.
“What do you mean?”
“You really are hot!”
“Humph!”
“Girl, don’t humph me! You are! You really are. If I was a guy I would totally date you!”
I snuggled up closer to her, feeling her warmth in the coolness of the mine, and put my arms around her.
“I’d date you, too!”
“Too bad we aren’t lesbians,” Ashley sighed.
“It would be so much easier,” I sighed back.