Tag: upper peninsula

by J. Bennett

This is a work of pure fiction, any names or descriptions of real people are purely coincidental. Though set in a real place, none of the events in this story truly happened. Empty Stations is written for entertainment only.

I’d make a bet that every kid gets scared of the dark in one way or another. On a callow night, their eyes fluttered out of dreaming to find themselves in an unfamiliar void. Lacking concept for such darkness, the blackness surrounding their crib was nonexistence, a new, surreal lack of being. Perception lapses into reality as their retinas slowly adjust to the familiar shapes of a room which begins to egress around them, although lifeless it appears. In the stillness of the small hours a baby knows not what’s there, but rather what is gone from them.

Their caregivers.

For the first time, the child realizes their separateness. That which gave them life and continues to uphold their existence is gone. As far as they know this waking darkness spells certain demise, so the baby does what babies do best. They break the silence with a hefty cry, wailing large enough to compensate for how small they are. Within moments, mom or dad rush to their side. They know just what to do; take the child into the light, clean them of their shit, and wait for them to fall back asleep. The parents conclude that a soiled diaper caused this fracas, oblivious to their child being acquainted with the root of all fear.

After years of therapy with Nicole, I came to realize it was more than the dark I feared. It was the silence, particularly what could be hiding inside of it. During elementary school, I developed a habit of plunging my fingers into my ears while lying in bed. Mom was jovial whenever she woke me up for school to see a pillow had found its way over my face during the night. She’d tease me out of bed, saying “it’s alive” with the inflection of Colin Clive’s Frankenstein. I couldn’t muster the admission that I placed the pillow over my head in a feeble attempt to drown the silence once my fingers became too fatigued to stay in my ears.

This behavior only transferred once my parents gave me my own TV with a built-in DVD player. Instead of fighting with pillows and fingertips, my new weapon against the quiescence would be The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. Night after night I’d concentrate on that shitty direct-to-video musical and pray I dozed off before the television’s sleep timer cast me into aching silence once again. Bedtime felt a whole lot easier; save for the biannual Precision Medical conference in Detroit where my dad would leave me to stay at Grandma’s house for the weekend. Not only would I be without my trusty DVD player, but Grandma also said this prayer while putting me to bed which always troubled me:

“Now I lay me down to sleep,

and pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I shall die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

My grandma was an impossibly sweet woman, but how she saw that prayer as anything other than terrifying is beyond me. I could never fall asleep in her musty old guest room surrounded by those beady-eyed Precious Moments figurines every grandma had back then. That rhyming devotion painted the night as something arduous, as though sleep were this damning spell which left its victim bare, allowing for God to snatch away their soul; taking back what was rightfully his and leaving behind the husk of scared child.

It goes without saying, I hated spending the night at Grandma’s house.

When taking inventory of my childhood, my therapist suggested this fear at bedtime sprang from somewhere else. “Now I lay me down to sleep” was a classic prayer in Protestant households, it wasn’t normal for a boy to be so disturbed by it. Her psychoanalytical viewpoint suggested that every neurosis was born from past trauma which the mind and body fight so hard to repress. I couldn’t recollect any molestation, and I doubted anyone in my family had that in them anyway. Racking my brain, one of the earliest memories I could possibly trace a subconscious thread back to would be in ‘98 when my family hiked Sugarloaf Mountain.

   It must have been late autumn because I remember the nagging feeling of the zipper from my oversized jacket poking my upper lip whenever I looked down. Snot dribbled from my nose and seeped into the fabric of the coat, making the sensation even more off-putting. If it were October, I may have been three- or had just recently turned four. My baby sister Katelyn was a year old, so Dad always had to carry her. We were in Marquette for some errand, and I suppose our parents wanted to give us the experience of a simple walk up the glorified hill that was Sugarloaf Mountain. It’d be a thirty-minute endeavor which led to an impressive view of Lake Superior to the east, Marquette to the south, and the eternal expanse of naked trees on all sides.

The forest was almost entirely dead, it seemed like I was constantly up to my ankles in wet, brown leaves. Aside from the present stimuli from the damp foliage and my mucus-soaked zipper, I remember enjoying myself. Mom let go of my hand to assist Dad with fixing Katelyn’s little pink boots; so I took the opportunity to kick some leaves into a pile. It was always fun to dive into freshly raked orange and red leaves that time of year, and I figured I hit the jackpot being amongst the fallen canopies of Sugarloaf. To my dismay, plummeting shoulder first into the trail’s soggy droppings was nowhere near as satisfying as the crisp assembly Dad made in our front yard a week prior.

As I stood from my embarrassing descent to the forest floor, I noticed how hollow my surroundings were. The graying trunks of collateral oak extended as far as my eyes could comprehend, each tree losing its individuality inside the continuous pattern of transient woods. Looking to my left, nothing changed. To my right, the forest reiterated itself endlessly. I turned back to find a horizon with the emptiness of Lake Superior yet filled with the inebriating confusion of growths and limbs. For the first time, I noticed that I could “hear” silence. The stillness became louder than anything I had ever heard before.

I don’t recall being afraid as the wilderness threatened to swallow me whole. If my memory serves me correctly, all I felt was curiosity. What interesting things existed beyond the threshold of where men dared to walk? Squirrels? Deer? It would be the shrill sound of my mother crying out my name which shot pins and needles across my tiny body, crawling through my dry mouth, and into my sinking heart and fallen stomach.

“JESSE!!”

In a moment I was ripped from the land of silent daydreams and thrust into the cold, ugly, and palpable earth below. My name reverberated time and time again, the trees shouting back at me in my mother’s voice for miles on end. I finally noticed the mud caked to my cold, numb face as warm tears brought back feeling and then some. I couldn’t see him past the waterworks, but the figure who I knew as my dad lifted me off the soil with the kind of intensity only a father could have.

“Jesse! Don’t you ever wander off like that again!” was his decree. “Hold Mommy’s hand,” was his sentencing.

The five-minute walk back to the car and the two-and-a-half-hour drive home weren’t eventful enough to commit to memory. In fact, the entire walk at Sugarloaf Mountain wouldn’t come back to me until an EMDR session with Nicole. It stands for “eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing.” It sounded like a crock of shit when she first told me about it.  The technique involves a therapist waving their hand back and forth in front of a patient’s face, supposedly to mimic the rapid eye movement we have while dreaming. Following their hand, the therapist would ask questions regarding a traumatic event and have the patient “restructure” the memory. I figured it was something Nicole heard about in undergrad and eagerly wanted to try it out on some poor basket case.

I expected the session to be all about what happened in high school. It was the primary reason I was seeing Nicole, after all – that, and the fact she was the only therapist in the Upper Peninsula who could talk with a guy like me. I was just as taken aback as she was when I began spouting the details of a random family outing in 1998.  I called Dad later to substantiate the memory, and he confirmed that I had wandered off once walking in the woods when Katelyn was a baby. Nicole landed at the conclusion that I had developed a core fear that day, which I repressed through behaviors like plugging my ears or covering my face with a pillow. She was pretty good for somebody crazy enough to work full time while double majoring in grad school. The uncovered memory of Sugarloaf, and my mother screaming my name, actually revealed many threads tying into what would happen eleven years later, as well as how it began centuries before.

Silence could be harvested in bulk where we lived in the Upper Peninsula. Quiet nights and pitch-black skies are Chippewa County’s biggest exports; second only to wood and whitefish, of course. Paradise was hardly a town back in 2009, mostly a collection of old houses and tourist traps lining the western shore of Whitefish Bay. Plenty of tourists came by during the warmer months, but it was primarily old folks looking for a place to crash after a long day at Tahquamenon Falls or gazing out where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. Spend seventeen years in Paradise, and you’ll be glad to never hear Gordon Lightfoot’s voice ever again.

It always baffled me how families of guys like Luke Murso or Trevor Harwood seemed to live in Paradise for centuries. Going through the yearbooks at Whitefish Township you’ll see the same last names of people who never dared to escape that humdrum town decade after decade. Sadly, it was the most destitute kids, such as Luke and Trevor, who saw their names in those books more than anyone. Those kinds of families simply couldn’t afford to get out, even with generations of hard labor. I’d be poised to say their ancestors brought upon a curse that never allowed them to leave Paradise, MI.  

When Trevor went missing, a lot of people just assumed he discovered a way out. He was the star quarterback, had good grades, and was fine by most people; nothing like his white-trash parents. With a full ride to university coming up, nobody would question if he forsook an explanation before zipping down to Ann Arbor. His folks hardly noticed he was gone; his disappearance was only remarked upon when he failed to show up for two consecutive shifts at Dollar Tree. His girlfriend, Sydney, was weary; saying that he was excited for his summer job, and looking to save up some before school started. Chippewa County police noted that he purchased gas in town the night prior to his missed shift, and that was about as far as they were willing to look. Two boys reported seeing Trevor carrying a big duffel bag and getting into his old blue and white Dodge Dakota on the outskirts of town. He raised his index finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, then sped off down towards the state park, never to be seen in Paradise again.

The last bit is what got talked about the most in school that fall. Where adults thought of a recent graduate ditching his shitty parents and boring girlfriend for bigger-and-better things, us incoming freshmen filled in the gaps with a troubled jock who got in too deep with the wrong crowd. I heard one of my classmates say Trevor Harwood got a gig on a crime boat, smuggling hard drugs to Ontario. My friend Dylan said supposedly the duffel bag those kids saw was stained with blood. These ridiculous claims only held merit because Trevor did have a record. In spring he had been caught in possession of a catalytic converter that happened to belong to Ms. Eloise who lived near Sunrise Trailer Park. The old lady chose not to press charges, sparing his scholarship, but costing him prom king. That whole situation was usually an anecdote for gossiping underclassmen who resented the popular kids.

Luke Murso knew Trevor more extensively than I did, being that they were neighbors. He was a common thread in most of Luke’s stories. I’d ride my bike out to Luke’s place at Sunrise Park just about every other day in the summer, where he’d always show me some cool trick Trevor taught him.

Once, while I watched him toy with an old stereo his uncle gave him, Luke asked, “Have you ever listened to pirate radio?”

“I think so.” I guessed, unsure of what he meant. “That’s like old sailor music with accordions and crap, right?”

Luke giggled at my unserious answer, “No, it’s something Trevor told me about.” He looked up from the tangled mess of speaker wire and pushed his black bangs away from his eyes. “There’s supposedly guys – like drug dealers – who go out on Lake Superior with radios and broadcast off them.”

“Why would a drug dealer wanna play accordion on the radio?”

“They play hidden messages. It’s a code only other drug dealers know that tells them where to pick up bags of drugs without the cops finding them.” My interest was piqued. 

“So, it’s like a pirate’s treasure map…” I said, “that’s dope.” Luke nodded in agreement as he went back to stuffing a thin bundle of copper into the stereo’s speaker port. “Is that why you’re trying to get that stereo to work?”

“Kind of,” Luke answered, “Uncle Lewy gave it to me a couple days ago, said he couldn’t figure it out. I went over to Trevor’s to ask him, that’s when he told me about pirate radio.”

“What if we found a drug dealer’s pirate station?” I mused, “We could solve the code and tell the cops where they’re hiding crack! We’d be legends!”

“That would be sick. If I could get this thing to work.” Luke sighed as he set down the length of cable. “I don’t even know if it will pick up radio yet. Its super old, like from the 80’s.”

“I just remembered something,” I chimed in, “My mom was wondering if you wanted to come over for dinner later.” Luke’s dark eyes shifted downward.

He replied, “I would, but I think I’m gonna go over to Lewy’s and keep working on this.”

My parents always wanted Luke to come over for dinner since his mom and dad died in 2007. He was already my best friend, but my folks still pressed me to go see him frequently. It was their way of checking in on him by making sure he always had a friend. I think his uncle Lewy had guardianship over him, but Luke still lived by himself in his family’s mobile home. It was an absurd arrangement, but Uncle Lewy lived in the park and stopped by to see Luke every day. Mom did a bad job of hiding her concern over a fourteen-year-old living on his own for two years, but Luke didn’t seem to mind it. I just felt lucky we had a place to hang out with no adults snooping around. Visiting the trailer park felt like I was getting access to a world I wasn’t supposed to see, and Luke was my ticket inside.

After saying bye, I hopped on my fixed-gear and trucked my way up Shoreline Dr. back home. Mom was let down at another refusal from Luke, but deep down I knew he wouldn’t be missing the hamburger steaks we’d be having that night. That summer was full of similar occurrences, but my mom never gave up on asking. When August rolled around, she breathed a sigh of relief that Luke would at least be getting assisted school lunch every day.

Harwood-mania infected the cafeteria on the first day of class. My friends and I inhabited the lunch table for “guys who were likeable, but too geeky to be popular.” Class clowns. When our resident redhead, Dylan Ruffalo, espoused the theory that Trevor went away on a drug boat, I was reminded of his role in learning about pirate radio. It would be absurd, but what if Trevor Harwood had actually found one of those stations and followed it? My gaze sought input from Luke, but he was nowhere to be found amongst our regular lunchtime crew. In fact, I didn’t see him anywhere in the cafeteria. Only the ginger Dylan, scrawny Will Christiansen, and Star Trek nerd Logan Behrens sat beside me.

“Whatcha lookin’ for, Jesse?” Will asked, noticing my wandering eyes.

“Luke,” I said, “Did he not come to lunch?”

Logan replied, “I don’t know where he’s at, but I just had class with him third period.”

Dylan snickered. “I bet he’s in Mr. Keel’s shop jerking off a birdhouse.”

Despite that lame and nonsensical comment, Dylan was onto something. Luke handled every home economics project the same way he messed with that old stereo. He was known to hyper fixate on getting things done. Back in second grade, Luke would periodically stay inside during recess to finish his times table assignments, that way he didn’t have to take anything home with him. It was an endearing quality at times, but a terribly annoying habit in my eyes.                    

“How would you jack off a birdhouse?” Logan asked in nasal earnest.

“With both hands probably,” Will chuckled.

I decided to hop into the fray, “Bet you know a lot about jerking off, huh Will?”

“C’mon guys, it’s the first week of school.” Will groaned, his hands covering his pimple-laden face.

“I heard Willy accidentally gave himself Indian burn this summer!” Dylan howled, letting his square teeth show.

Will slammed his hands on the table, rattling the cheap surplus silverware against our rectangular lunch trays. “At least I’m not dating an eighth grader!” he fired back.

“We’re only one grade apart!” The whole table erupted into pubescent giggling, it was nice seeing Dylan take the piss for once. He and Rebecca Sterling started dating in middle school, but their age difference didn’t bode well for him now that we were big-time freshmen. Being the ‘girlfriend-guy’ had already painted a target on his back, and it was only a matter of time before somebody poked the metaphorical hornet’s nest that was her eighth-grade status.

            “Have you kissed her yet?” I teased, “Or are you two saving yourselves for marriage?”

            Dylan swiftly gave me the one-finger salute. Mrs. Brackness happened to be passing by with her lunch just in time to witness the gesture.

            “Ruffalo!” shouted the English teacher. Dylan shoved his hand back under the table, garnering hearty laughs from all of us.

            Once Brackness was out of hearing range, Dylan leaned in over his tray and spoke in a hushed tone wrapped in urgency. “Did you guys hear about Whitney Martin and that junior?”

            Will nodded, “I think so, someone said she- “

            “She gave Alec Johnson a blow job in the back of his truck this summer.” Dylan stated, thinly veiling his excitement.

“Apparently he paid her for it!” Will added.

            In any other case I would have loved to joke “is that why you’ve been saving up cash, Will?” Internally I was too devastated to come up with such a quip. I always got butterflies in my stomach when I heard the name Whitney Martin. After hearing what Dylan said it was like he blasted those butterflies with a shotgun and converted them into a bright blue paste which threatened to crawl back up my throat if I dared speak.

            “Alec Johnson’s truck has bench seats…” Logan sniffled, “Why would they have to get in the back? They could just take off their seatbelts.”

            Dylan snapped his fingers in front of Logan’s face, “Focus buddy, you’re gettin’ lost in the details again.”

Nobody knew I had a crush on Whitney Martin since sixth grade, nor the countless hours I spent imagining myself asking her out when I finally mustered the courage to do so. I stayed quiet for the rest of lunch, involuntarily listening to rumors which tarnished my image of her as the tall, bleach-blonde girl next door with glasses who liked to read Harry Potter. My secret daydreams of taking her to the fair, winning her prizes, and holding her hand on the Ferris wheel were dwarfed by Alec Johnson’s smug face counting dollars in the backseat of a big loud pickup truck.

After that grueling lunch period, I was able to spot Luke in the hallway with some black box tucked under his arm. Before I could even get my new padlock open, my raven-haired best friend had made his way over to my locker. “Skipped lunch?” I asked.

Both ignoring and indirectly answering my question, Luke spoke, “Mr. Keel said we need an RCA output, like the red and white jacks on the back of a TV.” I was befuddled until I looked down to see that he held that dusty stereo box by his waist. “Uncle Lewy thought it took old school speaker wire, that’s why we weren’t getting anything.”

“Hello to you, too” I muttered as I pulled the padlock to no avail. “Still on about that old stereo? Have you heard anything abou-“

“Come to my place tonight,” Luke interrupted.

I let the padlock dangle from my locker and faced Luke. “You skipped lunch.” I retorted. “I think you should come to my place instead, my mom has been begging you to come to dinner.”

“It’s about Trevor.”

In the mere span of minutes my cognitive priorities shifted entirely past Trevor Harwood and over to Whitney Martin and that stupid padlock. There was a grave seriousness in Luke’s tone. “Okay, but if I help you get that thing to make noise you have to come to dinner next time.”

Luke smiled, “Deal. Once this baby purrs, I’ll eat Susan’s cooking whenever she asks.” With that, my peculiar best friend patted me on the back as he barreled past and down the hall with stereo in tow. I didn’t even get the chance to chastise him for using my mom’s first name. Before I knew it, the bell rang in fourth period, and I still hadn’t figured out how to get back into my locker.

Dammit.

---

“Why don’t you just play all that music I paid for on your iTouch?” Dad clamored as I dug behind the living room TV.

“Geez, don’t call it that. Makes you sound super old.”

Katelyn’s little-sister-senses flared up with a swift proposal, “If you’re not gonna use it can I have it?”

I emerged from behind the console with the two-headed cord that seemed impossible to find under decades of Dad’s do-it-yourself installations. “No Katie, we still need something to plug into the stereo to test whether or not we’re getting sound.”

“Have you kids ever listened to The Cars?”

“What?”

“Aww you know who I loved when I was your age?” Mom chimed in from a room away, “Michael Jackson.”

Katie’s face twisted in preteen disgust. “Gross, Mom.”

“Shush!” Dad commanded through a whisper, “She’s still not over it.”

Mom, hearing every word, rounded the corner wielding the spatula as if it were an extension of her own speech. “I’m certain it was murder. That doctor knew what he was doing.”

“Good.” I sneered as my foot crept halfway out the door. 

“Jesse Michael.”

“Oops, loveyoubye.” The door flew shut just as fast as the words fled my lips. Only a few paces toward my bike, a damning thought struck me. Did I get my middle name from the guy who sang Thriller?

It was a five-minute ride downhill from the homes of opportunistic career folk who landed at Lake Superior to cash in on its resources down to the hovel of poor souls bound to never get too far from its shores. I’ll admit, Old Gitchee Gumee looked a lot prettier down by Sunrise Park than it did up in the cabins. Luke’s ancestors likely gazed out upon those black waters reaching eternity and figured that was the perfect spot to end their journey. 

Luke’s trailer sat in the north center of the single driveway splitting eight mobile homes on both sides. Sunrise Park was a rather incorporated neighborhood for a town whose homes hardly ever sat within two-hundred feet of one another. My pessimistic view of Paradise gave way to a unique brand of jealousy over the closeness these double-wide domiciles had. Luke could step out onto his front stoop and find a friend like Trevor Harwood, whereas I would have to trudge through a thick tree line if ever wanted to greet the Martins’ next door (which my family never attempted, anyway). Only now, recalling the finer details of Sunset Park, do I realize how harsh I have been to the place where I held so many memories in my earlier writings.

I trudged up the two short steps to Luke’s screen door and knocked. This was customary, as Luke was wise to keep his door shut tight at all times. I’d be met through the mesh barrier by Uncle Lewy, a slender man whose white beard suggest him to be decades above my parents, but still not enough to consider an elderly fellow. He wore his trademark navy-blue boonie-hat, the kind that hinted toward Lewy being an avid fisherman; though I never saw him anywhere other than Luke’s trailer or his own on the southwest end of the park.

“J.B.!” spoke his classic greeting. Nobody else ever called me by my initials, but the laidback way Lewy did always felt welcoming. “Come on in buddy!” He pulled open the screen door and let out a breeze that let me know he must’ve just finished an American Spirit. “Luke said you’ve got the missing piece to the puzzle, huh?”

I held up the red and white RCA cable I had embezzled from Dad’s surround sound, “Yes sir, fingers crossed this is the right thing.”

“You’re a good man, J.B.” Lewy smiled, flashing his multicolored canines. I followed him past the rarely utilized kitchenette and into Luke’s living room. Cross-legged before the particle-board TV stand sat my friend, ready for business. Clearly, I couldn’t have arrived soon enough as Luke’s hand was already raised to receive the cable before I could say hello.

“Perfect,” Luke mused as he examined the jacks. He dutifully plugged them into place, a breath of relief escaping him as the two ports easily allowed for entry. “I found out we actually did need the speaker wire, so we don’t need to sell Lewy’s old cables. They go into the clamps here, and send the signal into the cabinets themselves.” His finger traced the connections made between the stereo’s center over to the oblong Logitech monitors resting in front of the television. “Your cable goes to the source, so we’ll run it back to the turntable here.”

I noticed a square device on the floor which I could only assume was one of the old players for vinyl LPs that had devolved into decorations well before I walked the earth. “Where’d that come from?”

“It’s mine,” Lewy claimed, “I figured you boys could use it tonight. Not sure why you don’t just play tunes off Jesse’s iTouch.”

“Dad had a bunch of records I’ve never heard before.” Luke explained, “If were using something from back then, may as well listen to some oldies.”

Lewy nodded as he popped a cigarette between his lips, “I like how you think, kid. I’ve got some stuff you ought to listen to at my place. You’ll never be the same once you hear the Scorpions.”

Luke pivoted to pick up a square sleeve with the black and white image of two men with perms and sweaters posed oddly close to each other. “This is what Dad had.”

“Checks out,” Lewy said, “That’s some lovey-dovey British stuff more your mom’s speed.” He chuckled, recalling his old friends. “Tears for Fears.”

“Is it gay?” I asked, taking closer notice of the taller man on the cover’s two earrings.

“Nah, nah,” Lewy replied, “They’re good, it’s just not like the heavy stuff I’ve got. It’ll be good for christening the new system.”

“I just wanna check out what my parents had,” Luke said with determination.

            Uncle Lewy put a thumbs up toward us, “All good dude, I’m gonna head back and leave you two to your discoveries. Enjoy the soft rock.” With that, we bid the man farewell, and Luke pulled the black disc from its sleeve, carefully placing it onto the platter. A soft crackle whispered from the little speakers above us, indicating that our experiments with electronics were about to pay off. After a few tense seconds of silence- the clanging of what sounded like pots and pans began to chime from the system- eventually gracing us with the ranged voice of Roland Orzabal.

            “Shout, shout, let it all out; these are the things I can do without.”

            “Kinda funky.” Luke said as his head bobbed, trying to catch the rhythm.

            Giving the 1984 hit-song zero space, I spoke up. “Alright man, what’s the thing with Trevor Harwood?”

            Luke paused, clearly expecting the question. “Guys in school think he skipped town but didn’t go to school downstate.”

            “I know that, but Dylan was saying he joined some drug gang.”

            “C’mon, I know Trevor…” Luke muttered. I never understood it, but through indirect conversations I got the sense that Luke really looked up to Trevor. Sunrise Park was small, and everyone there seemed close. “It isn’t like him to just skip town…”

            “But he isn’t here though?” I pressed.

            “No…” Luke sighed. After a second of thought, Luke turned around and walked to the dark entry of his bedroom. He hastily returned with a piece of paper in hand. Putting the parchment before me, he asked, “Remember pirate radio?”

            Written upon the page in blue ink were a few brief words, penned with scrawling yet intentional handwriting: “Murso, I have to leave, can’t say where. I’m sorry. Hope I showed you well, you’re a good kid. My last favor is on 6760. You’ll get it. Use it when you need. – Trev”

            “Holy balls” I gasped, “He left a note? For you?”

            “It was right under the door last Wednesday.” Luke added. “Everyone says he vanished Monday. Even his folks. That’s two days.”

            I grabbed the sheet from Luke, examining it further as if new meaning would come to me if I just held it closer. “You tell anyone?”

            “You’re the first,” Luke said, “You know what sixty-seven sixty is?”

            “His address?”

            “Kilohertz. It’s a radio frequency; it’d be 6.76 K-H-Z.”

            “We gotta show somebody, my dad or-“

            Luke cut me off, “No Jesse, why would Trevor leave me the note if he wanted anyone else to find it?”

            “Well what would make him wanna leave town without saying anything? It’s probably some bad shit.” I was valid in my concern as a teenager. Even through my protests, I still wish I would have been more cautious.   

            “He wrote this for me,” Luke was adamant in his speech, “He told me about pirate radio, right when I got this stereo, then he left me a clue to something.”

            Use it when you need. “That really does sound like some treasure hunt.” I pondered, “Like he’s leaving you a pot of gold.”

            Luke nodded with all sincerity, “The only problem is that my stereo only starts tuning at 9k.” I examined at the foggy screen housing a tiny red needle pointing along a half circle. The far left was obfuscated with whatever dust must’ve accumulated over the years, but I saw numbers like 92.0, and 110.5 at the rightmost extreme.

            “My mom always has 93.9 on in the car” I blurted, a testament to the knowledge of radio I had yet to receive. “Maybe sixty-seven sixty is his girlfriend’s address and he’s tossing you a layup shot.”

            Luke’s face scrunched tight in a way I hadn’t really seen before. It was as if he’d lost both hope for an answer and his patience for me at the same time, and his mouth didn’t know what to do with that emotion. “Well I showed you this letter in confidence. You can’t tell anybody.”

            “Okay.”

            “You gotta help me find it, or Trevor. Whatever it is.” Luke pleaded, “You’re my best friend.” In my head, I heard doubt. With the wishes Luke had for me, I could’ve sworn Trevor was his best friend.

            “Okay.”

            “Scout’s honor.”

            “Neither of us are Scouts.”

            Luke spat into his right hand and extended it to me. “Scout’s honor.”

            “Yuck, dude.”

            “You’re right.” Luke wiped his hand thoroughly onto his jeans, then I graciously shook it. More like honor among thieves. 

            In the wake of our newfound trajectory, there was silence. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” faded out as we spoke, and the needle of the automatic arm on Uncle Lewy’s turntable had returned to its roost. The album which acted as the score for the mystery unfolding and our commitment to solving it had reached the conclusion of its first side.

            “I think you’ve gotta flip it over.” I spoke. Luke precariously did just that, dropping in on side “B” of “Songs from the Big Chair”. As the second half of Tears for Fears’ sophomore album began, I took a seat on the dark brown sofa that sat in the Murso home for as long as I could remember.

            There was something I wanted to tell Luke, but being fourteen I just couldn’t find the grace to be authentic. “Do you have any classes with Will or Dylan this year?” I asked, carefully treading around the true direction my mind headed.

            “I’ve got home ec’ with Dylan in the morning.”

            “Oh yeah, dickweed said you were probably jerking off a birdhouse when you didn’t show for lunch today.”

            “I don’t even think we do birdhouses this year. All the stuff with wood is for juniors.” Luke weaved around Dylan’s silly taunt. I was always fascinated with the way Luke bypassed whatever bullshit people had to say. His feelings were always equal, like nothing bothered him. I used to really resent that about him. The way he never fired back whenever the lunch table guys spewed some sort of jock-talk almost upset me. Back then, I thought maybe he was skipping lunch because he was too good for it, or maybe he was completely over Will n’ Dyl’s brand of friendship entirely. When I was that age, I was capable of believing in the Enlightened Fourteen-Year-Old, and even more capable of having envy for him.

            “Wanna know what else those guys said today?”

            “If I have to.”

            “Whitney Martin did stuff with one of the juniors in his truck this summer.”

            “Who?”

            “Alec Johnson, football guy.” I croaked, “Like sex for money stuff…”

            Luke spoke with utmost comprehension, “Alec Johnson’s full of shit.”

            “You think?” I hoped.

            “Whitney stays with her dad in Dearborn for the summer.” my friend revealed. “Unless Alec’s parents let him take the truck all the way across the lake, I think he’s just trying to get someone to think he’s active.”

            I could have been relived at this news. The lovestruck teenage mind is a far more complicated thing than a future psychiatrist like Nicole could wrap their head around. She could figure out why I couldn’t sleep unless I had the TV on, but I don’t think she could understand why Luke pissed me off just then. The self-hate I conjured when realizing I didn’t even know my crush’s parents were split up- or that the guy next to her mom at the book fair was her only her stepdad- it made me feel in over my head. Worst of all, why did Luke have this information, and I didn’t? He very well could have been going over to Mrs. “Martin’s” house right next door to chat with Whitney every time he rejected Mom’s offers to feed his boney face for once.

            “Why would she wanna spend all year up here when her dad is in the city?” I asked, feigning my true outrage for the more socially acceptable hometown despair.

            Luke said something that brought me right back to earth. “The kids don’t really get to pick in a custody case.” His tone was different than typical Enlightened Luke. There was tragedy beneath it.

            The song “Broken” masterfully transitioned through the tiny speakers into the angelic keys of the intro for “Head Over Heels”. My mind was brought back to the liminal months of fall two years prior; the slow days when my best friend missed many weeks of 7^th grade to stay in the Sault St. Marie hospital where his father succumbed to a long cancer. Nobody cared that the boy was missing his introduction to middle school; nobody was going to keep the boy whose mother died so suddenly away from his dad whose death was already fated. Luke’s countdown to fatherlessness tragically became the drawn out wait to become an orphan.  I wasn’t even too sure Uncle Lewy was a relative of his. God bless that old man for doing what he could.

            “Traditions I can trace against the child in your face,” Roland Orzabal sang for us, “it won’t escape my attention.”

            “But yeah,” Luke said, “Whitney Martin probably didn’t do anything with that guy.”

            “I figured.” laughing through the discomfort, “Dylan’s a retard.”

            “Hey man, I wasn’t arguing.”

            “Didn’t say you were” we chuckled at the expense of the lunchtime jester. “I don’t think Whitney is that type of girl, anyway. She reads for fun.”

            “That aint a bad thing.” Luke assured me. I smiled, imagining the girl my age with her blonde hair up in a ponytail, sitting along her fence, attention glued to the newest Artemis Fowl novel.

“No, it’s not. I think it’s really cute.”

            Luke was as amazed at the confession as I was giving it. With his fist lightly tapping my shoulder, we both broke into laughter which I so terribly yearn to hear again. If I could hear Tears for Fears, I’m sure Luke and I’s adolescent giggling would be etched somewhere into the grooves of that last track.

“Summer’s over, huh?” he asked, the real implications of his question still remain hidden to me all these years later. It was only August, and the buzz of cicadas still carried me home on that bike. The lights of Whitney’s house could still warm my heart as I made my way up to my own. Even the school bus that’d pick me up hours later couldn’t take me out of that endless summer I saw before me at Sunrise Park.

---

I’d love to say Luke and I got right to work, spending hours each evening reading books about broadcast communications at the library. The prudent librarian, Ms. Arnold, would notice our dedication and inquire about our search. She’d know just the book; “How to Build a Radio That Picks Up 6.76 kHz” hidden underneath some old textbooks. Luke and I would hitch a ride with Uncle Lewy to the local junkyard behind Zephyr’s Tap, where we’d piece together a contraption out of a car antenna, two juice boxes, and a couple D-batteries. We would never tell him why we built a radio from scraps, he was just happy we weren’t chasing that purple dragon.

What really happened that fall was regular school attendance, a lame homecoming, and a decent 11-to-7 football season. Rebecca Sterling would tragically break things off with Dylan Ruffalo, citing irreconcilable differences and a desire to see different people- probably other 8^th graders. Things got quieter at lunch, but Will did his best to hit a certain insult quota. His ball-busters just didn’t live up to Dylan’s though. Hell, even Logan was getting more wisecracks-per-meal than most guys; and they were scientifically sound, too. Luke only skipped a few times, even making his way to Casa del Bennett for Mom’s cooking once or twice.

I have fond memories of September and October of 2009, many of which had to do with the fact that I had physical science with Whitney Martin seventh period. I had the pleasure of being seated behind her, and I would sometimes get a good look at her side profile when she turned to chat with Samantha Nelson. It appeared that Whitney found herself a spot amongst the trendy popular girls that year, even ditching the glasses for contacts and really showing off her chocolate-colored irises. I would memorize every detail on the back of her shirt, even becoming well versed in a pimple that appeared on the nape of her neck around spirit week.

            My big break would come when Mrs. Padilla assigned groups for our kinetic energy project using vertical rows instead of horizontal seats- meaning I’d be partnered with Whitney and Logan. It was ideal, I’d get extra time to schmooze with the lady while Logan geeked at the laws of physics. All I had to do was eclipse any notion that the space captain and I were actually friends, and I’d be good.

            “I have a plan,” Logan began with a cadence just shy of Shatner himself, “to showcase the properties of both potential and kinetic energy, we can drop a marble down a heightened railway to demonstrate gravity, then observe the transference of force when it collides with another resting marble.”

            “I think we should build a little roller coaster out of pipes.” I offered.

            Whitney’s pupils dilated at my proposal, “Oh I like that idea!” she cheered with a breathy gasp. “My stepdad probably has a bunch of little PVC pipes left over from our pool.”

            “I could probably steal some marbles from my dad’s collection.” I said, “Y’know, for science.” Whitney let out a giggle at my adlib. I was so in. “Think you can crunch some numbers, Dr. McCoy?”

            “Leonard McCoy was a physician, not a physicist.” Logan corrected. “The Enterprise crew would probably rely on a synthetic droid like Data to get nu- “

            I snapped my fingers in Logan’s face, “Focus buddy, we just need at least a B minus.” I looked forward to confirm that my dominance over Logan was being noticed, only to see that Whitney sat with her palms inward on my desk, her elbows fully locked in an awkward gait as if she were waiting for something. “Actually an A, we need at least an A on this.” I demanded, raising the stakes.

            “Sweet,” Whitney said with a determinant clap, “Do we just wanna bring the stuff to class tomorrow?”

            I desperately needed to extend the conversation, yet all the nerves in my body focused on making that as gruesome as possible. “Do you have a phone, Whitney?”

            “Yeah. I got an En-V when school started.” Damn… a pool and a touch screen? I was beginning to understand why she stayed at her mom’s all year.

            “Could I get your number?” I asked through the mightiest strain I had ever faced. “Just to make sure my marbles aren’t too big for your pipe- er, my dad’s marbles fit in your stepdad’s pipes… before we bring them to school.”

            “Oh yeah,” Whitney replied, completely bypassing the verbal carpet bomb I just dropped on myself. “Nine-zero-six-“ I hastily shoved my hands into the pocket of my cargo shorts to retrieve my iPod touch. Whitney continued stating numbers, and I quickly jotted what I could with the notes app.

            “Can you text on that?” Logan asked like the literal menace he was.

            “Yeah,” I said, holding up a screen displaying limited conversations with relatives, “I have the version of TextFree without ads on it. I just can’t do calls.” Thank God for the app store. “My number might look weird, but that’s because it’s from California or something.”

            “I’ll need your number, too” Logan just had to say as he pulled out his BlackBerry Bold. “Once I get your sizes I can start to do some calculations.”

            “Awesome sauce” Whitney spoke through a smile, her braces glittering under the incandescent light of Mrs. Padilla’s science classroom. “Talk to you tonight!” She tossed a purple strap over her shoulder, flashing a Whitefish Township logo and a “Go Rockets!” patch etched into the front pocket of her bag. I couldn’t get myself packed fast enough to follow her into the hall, leaving me alone with Logan as the bell rang. 

            My head spun with anxious plotting the entire bus ride home. Was this real life? What am I gonna text Whitney first? Would we make good parents? What if our kids meet bad influences? One realization stopped me dead in my tracks, put our made-up family in front of the firing squad, and burned our imaginary house to the ground. Whitney lives next door, but she never rides the same bus. She’s probably catching a ride from Alec Johnson. Thoughts raced between starting a family with her and agonizing over the image of her moving his seatbelt to the side for easy access. Logan’s impish voice rang in my mind: “Alec Johnson’s truck has bench seats.”

            Once the bus passed by the business sector, into my neighborhood, and onto my driveway; I raced inside for stable Wi-Fi connection. Flying past a home screen loaded with iBeer, Tap Tap Revenge, and an app that makes you sound like T-Pain; I dove into the free messaging app I feverishly hoped my parents never knew I had. Fingers crossed Dad would give me a real phone once I showed him the A+ we were about to get.

I didn’t need to use a ruler or even look at my vintage marble collection to know I had a range from 10-millimeter itty bitty’s all the way to 2-inch non-regulation toebreakers. For this case, I figured I’d play it safe and pull some regular ol’ 16mm shooters – one constellation purple to match Whitney’s backpack and another glow-in-the-dark green to match the orthodontic bands in her braces. I’d tell her they were half an inch in diameter as not to scare her off with the metric system.

            “kewl :)” Whitney replied. “Brad has some xtra pvc from da pool”

            “whose brad?”

            “My stepdad :p”

            “O cool”

            “he said he can cut some goin home from skewl”

            Oh thank God. Brad took her home.

            “u never ride the bus :/”

            “ikr :p my mom dosent want me to”

            “that sounds nice”

            “Brad is so annoyingggg”

            “u shold ride the bus tmorrw”

            This riveting text-message-tango danced until around 6pm. I paced my room and reevaluated my marble selections all throughout. Katelyn practically had to force her way into my room to inform me dinner was ready. I hardly slept a wink that night, not even two screenings of Napoleon Dynamite could calm my nerves. They never tell you that once your crush gives you her number, you actually have to talk with them.

---

            In those salad days of building a rollercoaster for class and experiencing a rollercoaster with my hormones; Luke would remain devoted to a project of his own. I was unaware that he was indeed scouring the library for manuscripts on broadcast technology. He would find that the name on the checkout sheet inside the cover of the 1983 edition “ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook” was Trevor Harwood. Within this book, he would learn that 6,000 to 7,000 Hz were popular frequencies in the realm of pirate broadcasting; but this method was usually done by hobbyists that had a penchant for free speech and indie music. He even got a hold of a radio with a low frequency receiver from Mr. Keel, tuning into a vacant 6.76 FM. Still, he would listen to the whirling static of that empty station every night. He would immerse himself in silence, praying that something would break it.

This routine slowly discouraged Luke, but it also comforted him with the notion that maybe Trevor’s message had nothing to do with pirate radio in the first place. He hoped perhaps “6760” was part of a phone number. Maybe he could call Trevor and find out that he’s okay living in a new town. Luke would flip through all the yellow pages for Ann Arbor, Detroit, Grand Rapids, and even the Upper Peninsula; looking into every number containing the consecutive digits 6-7-6-0. None came up with a match. Not even a call to the Dean of Student’s office at the University of Michigan produced any results. There were no athletic scholarships claimed by “Trevor Harwood”. It was already mid-October, and the school had seen nothing of the boy from Sunrise Park.

Luke never expected my fixation towards Whitney Martin to bring his investigation closer to an answer. Even after receiving a 97% grade on our project, we kept having vernal conversations through text. I became well acquainted with the subtleties of Brad Darden and his abilities as a stepfather. Whitney’s oldest stepbrother Nick was a year older than my little sister Katie. She had a half-brother, Sean, who was born two years after her mom remarried. Both variations of sibling were “total jerkz” according to my crush. It must have come from Brad’s side.

I was both elated and utterly mortified when Whitney would ask me if I wanted to sneak out with her one night when Brad was on a particularly rotten spree. I was incapable of rational thought and agreed to meet her outside the roadhouse half a mile up Whitefish Point Road. I told my mom I was going to see Luke and even ditched my bike a couple hundred feet downhill so it would look like I was heading south toward Sunrise Park. This maneuver added six minutes to the laborious walk, but I was willing to do anything.

As the giant glowing trout that served as the sign for Angler’s Roadhouse came into view, I scanned everywhere for a bespeckled, out-of-place teenage girl. I’d eventually spot a tall figure leaning one leg up a tree with her platinum hair flowing down her shoulders like a spout of champagne pouring from her head (Nicole said that was awfully descriptive for a 14-year-old). Before Whitney could notice me approaching her, I auditioned every possible greeting with the idea of her in my mind. She’d take me by surprise through being the first one to speak.

“Jess!” she called out, starting her way toward me on the side of the road. Before I could think, Whitney flung her arms around me with a tight hug lasting a million seconds too short. I remember smelling the honeyed aroma of fresh washed hair over a cosmetic talc while her head was under my nose. “You walked here?” she asked as she fixed a false eyelash that came loose in contact with my chest.

“Yeah, my parents are still home.” I replied, “You didn’t?”

“The guys picked me up,” Whitney said as she began walking towards the bar’s parking lot. Directly ahead of us was a rusted white Dodge super duty whose headlights reflected off the rhinestones in Whitney’s True Religion jeans. As my eyes adapted to the beams, I made out two figures: a Native dude with a five-panel hat and pencil mustache in passenger and a white boy with uneven bangs at the helm. Alec Johnson.

The boy in shotgun reached his arm out the window, dropping a cigarette butt onto the asphalt before pulling the lever of his door from the outside. Whitney meandered to that side of the truck as the lanky teenager stepped out. “Sup bro,” he said, putting out a hand “Dazi.” My palm met him in a handshake that was reciprocated with a pullback.

“Daisy? I’m Jess.” I introduced myself with the name nobody had ever called me until ten seconds prior.

He corrected, “D-A-Z-I. Dap me up, bro.” He put his hand back toward me. I tried again, this time sliding my fingers across his and ending with a closed fist. Instead of “pounding it” like I expected, he turned to pull open the back door of the vehicle. Whitney climbed into the spot beside Alec which Dazi had emerged from. For once I took a social cue and ambled into the back seat, Dazi climbing in behind me.

I hardly had time to think about how quickly I went from being in the embrace of my crush to sitting beside a 17-year-old boy lighting himself a cigarette before Alec shifted into first gear. “You smoke, bro?” he asked while pressing the gas, injecting diesel into the roaring pistons of the Cummins.

“Yeah, but it’s been a few months” my ass said with my mouth, “My tolerance is super low.” The concrete sent waves into the bench seat and shook my body like a limp dog as Alec accelerated onto Whitefish Point Road. We were headed northwest toward a setting sun whose intentions I was unsure of.

“They’re Camel Crush’s,” Dazi declared, “I’ve only got like two left.”

Whitney leaned around the front bench to look at me directly, “There’s a bubble in the filter that turns it into a menthol when you crush it!” she explained with excitement. “You got to let him do the next one Dazi!”

A sound broke through the dash of Alec’s truck that saved me from any more attention from Dazi. “Breaker, breaker. Anybody got their ears on?” came a pitchy male’s voice.

Alec snagged a black square from a holster on the console which connected to his stereo via curly black wire. “Yeah, come on back.” he spoke with an exaggerated accent from somewhere between Texas and Wisconsin, punctuated by a loud beep from the factory sound system. Whitney broke into laughter caught by a sharp snort while Dazi patted his knee in hysterics.

  “Howdy, what’s your handle.” the voice returned.

“Who is that?” I asked, halfway understanding the trucker talk.

Alec smirked as he raised the rectangular microphone up his mouth, “My dad’s HAM radio, we’re fucking with lumber trucks.” He depressed the button and resumed accent, “Uh… Blackhawk.”

“Whatcha driving, Blackhawk?” the radio inquired.

“Peterbilt.” Alec answered before being struck with divine inspiration. “How’s your load?” Dazi and Whitney became overwhelmed with muted laughter. Even I developed a little smile on my face.

“Loads riding fine,” replied the disembodied voice.

“Ten-four”

“What?”

“Ten-four” Alec slammed the radio back into its place and nearly swerved off the highway as everyone became moved to tears by the nonsense.

Once some composure returned to the cab of the old truck, I decided to speak. “You guys ever heard of pirate radio?” The silence that followed held me like a diving cage above shark-infested waters, but rather than sharks it was older boys I desperately wanted to impress.

“Nah man,” Alec broke through, “What’s that.”

“Gangs use the radio to send hidden messages from the lake.” I paraphrased, “It’s how they move drugs to Canada without being traced back.”

“No shit?” Dazi asked with a startling amount of emotional investment.

“Yeah, Trevor Harwood told me about it.” The truck slowed from the joyride pace Alec had it in. I saw the junior’s eyes widen to show their dingey whites through the rearview mirror.

“You fucking talked to Trevor?” Alec gnawed. I had to be careful with my stretches on the truth, remembering that he likely knew Trevor more intimately through football.

“A long time ago, last summer. He helped me fix a stereo my uncle gave me.”

“What was he saying about gangs and shit?”

“N-nothing. He just knew about the thing with the radio.” I prayed my knowledge of Luke Murso’s Trevor Harwood could get me out of this one. “He did talk about a certain station though. How far does that radio tune?”

“Shit man, its got FM, AM, shortwave” Alec spouted.

“Can you do 6.76?” I requested. Scouts honor wasn’t shit in the back of that pickup truck. Whitney leaned toward the dash, placing her fingers atop a black dial underneath a glowing screen.

The heartland twang of Conway Twitty careened into a rapid kaleidoscope of different buzzing pitches, sometimes taking the shape of human language for fractions of a second before vigorously gliding across more harsh noise. The tones became deeper, until Whitney’s hand froze over the sound of waves crashing in a barren landscape. Every juvenile mouth fastened shut as eminence hummed within the cab, each shot of diesel from the pilot’s toes piercing the static and shaking the road beneath our feet. It was only in that silence that I noticed the sun had disappeared into the forest, the yellow headlights being our only sign of existence on that empty road.

“That’s sixty-seven six” Whitney ascribed the pulsating emptiness.

Just then, a voice both deep and shrill spoke with a nebulous accord: “Seven.”

Dazi came undone, “Bro that’s scary as fuck, man.”

“Hold on-“ Alec held his hand up to pause his friend.

“Six.” continued the monotonous voice from the radio, “Alpha. Four. Six. Six. Six.”

“Jesse what the hell is this?” Whitney cried. Caution seemed to poison Alec as he swerved down a corner with no signal onto a dirt path.

“Fuck bro change that shit.” Dazi demanded.

“One-“ the voice said just as Alec’s hand flung the dial. The Cummins veered upon his sudden reach for the dash. From my position in the back, I watched a pair of headlights fly dangerously close as the screeching tires accompanied a cacophony of static from the radio. My body flew into Dazi’s; and a symphony of red and blue lights played across the surface of the cab.

“Shit dude that cop almost hit us.” Alec groaned without a shred of irony. Conway Twitty played us out as he brought the truck to the highway’s western shoulder. Whitney and I were silent as Dazi frantically tried to determine out how he could dispose of two Camel Crush cigarettes in the next twenty seconds.

A flashlight shone into the pane as Alec manually rolled down the driver’s side window. “License and registration.”

The jock reached just above Whitney’s knees and popped open the glove box, producing the requested documents. I told myself every comforting thought I could congregate in my mind as the state trooper retreated to his cruiser for what felt like a decade. After the agonizing minutes of Alec muttering about how “everything was gonna be okay,” the officer returned to open window.

“Do any of you kids have cell phones?”

“No sir,” I said, trying out my role for the most embarrassing teenager alive.

“I do.” Whitney’s voice was soothing.

The trooper explained, “Well, sir, you’re driving with a learner’s permit after curfew. You can’t be driving at this hour. So, we’re gonna need the person this vehicle is registered under to claim it.”

“That’d be my father, sir.” Alec whimpered, bro’ and ‘dude’ suddenly removed from his vocabulary.

Whitney leaned her head to make eye contact with the officer, pointing her thumb back toward me. “We’re neighbors, can I just have my stepdad pick us up?” The officer nodded and proceeded to invite Alec back to his car. Whitney dialed her phone and softly spoke with the recipient of her call. The voice on the other end of the line – who I could only assume was Brad Darden- sounded furious as I watched the girl who got me here plea for a ride home.

Brad would end up driving the twelve miles outside Paradise that we had ventured to, and we would depart from Alec and Dazi who awaited their own fates with the state trooper. I was met with a stepdad’s fury that probably should have been reserved for the juniors, but I couldn’t deny my own intuition had gotten me into that truck and spooked the driver so bad he cut off a patrol car. The dumbest thing I did was ask Brad if he could just drop me off where I left my bike, which prompted him to just cuss me out further once I was brought before my half-asleep parents. On a brighter day, even my mom and dad would agree that Brad Darden was an unpleasant man.

On that October night, one thing pervaded my restless thoughts about being screamed at by a grown man in front of a girl I was obsessed with, being grounded just before Halloween, and having my heart drag me into a car with two boys smoking Camel Crushes. That voice on the radio. The empty quiet of my room did its best to replicate the droning inflection that spoke through dismembered numerals on Alec Johnson’s speakers that night. It was almost inhuman how it recited coldly a cipher I feared I wasn’t supposed to hear. How badly I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to know what chaos Trevor Harwood indirectly pulled me into when he left Paradise. Even worse, I wanted to know what drove him out in the first place.  

---

Luke would unfortunately receive the news that 6.76 kHz was indeed broadcasting from Will Christiansen. Under the terms of my recent grounding I was without an iPod Touch, my bicycle was stranded somewhere on Whitefish Point Road, and I was to report to my bedroom every day after school for the next week. I had no point of contact to apologize to him for sharing his secret; but in my adolescence I probably wouldn’t have wanted to own up to it anyways. Through perhaps a stroke of sheer luck, Luke wasn’t too upset that I broke ‘scouts honor’ when I saw him in school on Monday.

The speeds at which a story spreads are alarmingly quick at a school boasting ninety total students. Rumors of a spooky radio station that says numbers were almost completely drowned out by the gossip about why Whitney Martin and Jesse Bennett got pulled over in a car with Alec Johnson and Dazi Waasnodae last Friday. Nobody cared about the numbers or what they had to do with Trevor Harwood; but everybody had something to say about the latest development in the lore of Alec and Whitney’s relationship. Our needless run-in with the state trooper reignited suspicions about what kind of things were happening in the bench seats of that truck.

Even then, silence haunted me. I was wrapped up in the hottest story Whitefish Township had seen all school year, yet nobody wanted to talk to me about it. It was never brought up at lunch, not even Dylan Ruffalo had anything to say. Logan could hardly even look at me. There were no inquiries as to how I ended up in that truck. I was never implicated in any relations with Whiney Martin. Nobody accused me of getting my rocks off that October. It made being grounded feel like a massive waste of punishment. If I wasn’t allowed to have my iPod, I should at least have gotten a kiss on the cheek, right?

Luke Murso, on the other hand, had plenty of questions for me that Monday. “J.B., you’re a genius!” he would greet me, sounding much like his uncle.

Assuming I was finally getting props for my inclusion in such an affair, I shrugged, “I hardly did anything, it was Whitney’s idea.”

“I’ve been listening to sixty-seven-sixty every night for the past month and got nothing,” Luke said, cancelling any notion he was talking about sneaking out. “So, what did you guys do? Antenna boost? Monophonic output?”

I sighed, realizing the conversation was leaning in a nerdier direction than I had hoped. “We just tuned in after Alec prank called some truckers. I didn’t catch what the numbers meant at all.”

“Where were you at? What kind of radio did the truck have?”

“Alec was driving, I don’t know. It was dark.” Just as I said that I noticed Whitney approaching from behind Luke. She donned the glasses she had been without all semester, her hair was in a loose bun, and she clutched a book tightly to her torso. It looked as if she was actively avoiding eye contact with us.

Luke replied, “Well could you ask him later? I don’t know Alec Johnson like you do.” Just as he said that, Whitney passed by us with no little as a glace our way.

“Shit…” I muttered under my breath, looking back to see Whitney had walked a great distance in mere seconds.

“I can ask him if you don’t want to?”

“No, no-“ I replied, turning back to face Luke, “I can ask him after next period.”

“Epic, I’ll see you after school, then.”

A knot in my stomach tied itself with the thought that maybe my chances with Whitney were shot after getting into trouble together. “Hey, you think you can come to my place tonight?” I asked, “I’m not allowed to leave the house, but maybe you help spare me from the awkwardness of dinner with Katie and my parents.”

Though I was grounded, my mom wouldn’t turn down a chance to dote over her favorite orphan. Plus, it sounded nice spending time with a real friend after so much time focusing on other things. At that point I didn’t know the reason why, but Luke had been distant that autumn. I had been so wrapped up in the trappings of high school that I had hardly noticed that my best friend was going through changes, too. It became hard to recall the kids we were only two months prior, sitting on Luke’s brown sofa listening to his late father’s records.

Once class got out and I took the bus home, Mom was thrilled at the idea of Luke coming over, Dad even made it home early to welcome him. Katelyn would be bouncing off the walls awaiting my best friend’s arrival; a symptom of something I recognize now as an innocent crush for her older brother’s pal. (I should probably assess myself with the same grace I’m offering my sister- but it’s hard not to criticize your own thoughts when putting them to paper.)

Our visit from Luke was typical for the first half; he would compliment Mom’s cooking, my dad would insist of just being called “Scott” instead of “Mr. Bennett”, and Katie would exhaust Luke with ceaseless questions. Mom would change the course of this average dinner by motioning Dad to grab something, then speaking when he returned with two small rectangular packages wrapped in gift paper.

“This is a bit earlier than I thought, but we’d like to give you boys something.” Mom announced.

“Since you guys are in high school now,” Dad would lead off as he handed both Luke and I each a box. Tearing into the paper, I was taken by surprise; it was a cell phone. It was a nice one, too. Luke was hesitant but proceeded to unwrap his own HTC Touch phone.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bennett… I-“ Luke stuttered.

“Jesse, you’re still grounded,” Dad spoke, “but we couldn’t help to think maybe none of that last weekend would have happened if you had a way to call us.”

Mom added, “We just worry about you boys getting so grown up all of a sudden.”

Luke placed his box onto the dining table and slid it back towards my dad. “I can’t take this.”

“Please, Lucas,” Dad persisted, “We want you to feel safe reaching out if you need anything.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing, sweetie,” Mom assured, “There’s plenty of space on our family plan.”

Katelyn found her chance to slide in, “Then why didn’t I get one?”

“If I had to wait fifteen years, you do too.” I shot back.

Dad rubbed his temple, reiterating, “That’s not how I’d put it Jesse, but yes- when you’re in high school, Katie.”

Luke was still dumbfounded, “I have to ask Uncle Lewy first-“

“I’m sure your uncle will be fine with it,” Mom chided, “we’re doing him a favor, anyway.”

Luke and I spent the next hour in my room getting our new devices configured. It was odd having a real phone yet still no access to my iPod; I would transfer Whitney’s number from it a week later when I got it back. Once we felt comfortable with all the specs, I got down to business.

“I talked to Alec after sixth period when I caught him in the hall.” I stated. “I got in the truck around 9:30 when the sun started to go down.”

“Where were you when you heard the numbers?” Luke asked.

I took a second to recall, “It was twelve miles from Angler’s headed north.”

“Toward the lighthouse? The bar with the big plastic fish out front?”

“Yup,” I confirmed, “right after we tuned in, Alec pulled a U-turn on some service road and swerved trying to change the station.”

“Damn…” Luke looked down, “So you only heard it for a few seconds. I should’ve guessed my problem was distance. They wouldn’t be broadcasting from town, so of course I wasn’t getting anything at my place.”

Luke’s use of the word ‘they’ reminded me of what we were supposedly getting into. If this station was what we thought, we were looking at getting involved with something dangerous. Even if it weren’t a drug cartel or smugglers from Canada; we were still following the trail of a person who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. To be honest, it was exhilarating to think about. Having consumed so many DVDs on sleepless nights evading the quiet, it felt as though I was entering the world of a film. These discoveries, twists, and conflicts felt like I was vulture flying low, surveying the environment for any way to get my fill. It beat being in school, where everyone ate the same thing as everybody else.

“We need to get back on that service road,” I said. “If only I wasn’t grounded.”

Luke nodded, “We’re gonna need Alec one more time. His truck is the key.” After agreeing to persuade Alec Johnson to go back to where he was pulled over to collect numbers, Luke and I postulated on what it all could possibly mean. Mom would soon call us into the living room, announcing that Uncle Lewy had arrived to pick up Luke. We walked out to find that Lewy was in the dining room, catching a conversation the adults already began.

            “I’m not a doctor per say,” Dad said, “Precision Medical manufactures instruments for hospitals.”

            Uncle Lewy nodded his head, “Oh, I gotcha, you’re in the copper and steel industry then.”

            “Manufacturing, yes.”

            My mom, standing over the two seated men, asked, “Where are you working these days, Llewyn?”

            “Oh ya’ know, between jobs,” Uncle Lewy replied, “Keeping an eye on Luke n’ J.B., makin’ sure they’re keeping their noses clean.”

            “Uh huh,” Mom exhaled. Up until then, I don’t think I had ever seen Uncle Lewy and my parents in the same place. When observing an interaction between them, I noticed that they were almost like two completely different forms of adults. The residual odor of Lewy’s cigarette breath became much more pronounced outside of Sunrise Park.

            “There he is!” Lewy smiled as he noticed Luke and I entering. He stood and extended his hand to shake Dad’s, cupping the other hand around them to show extra gratitude. The gesture looked almost like something I saw a homeless man in Detroit do when given a dollar. “Scott, Sue, I can’t thank you two enough.” He shook Mom’s hand the same way, her showing a visible aversion to touching him. “Well Lukie, let’s see it!”

            Luke held out his new smartphone, “Its pretty cool, I can text Jesse from home now. We can play music on it, too.” After ogling at the device for a minute, Luke and Uncle Lewy said thanks once again and bid farewell to us. Immediately upon their departure, Katelyn would remark on Lewy’s odor; to which our parents informed her is not a nice thing to say. About fifteen minutes later, I received a text from Luke stating they made it back to Sunrise Park, and we reiterated the plan we had for Alec Johnson.

---

            Alec sounded terribly disinterested when Luke and I approached him for a second time to discuss the night, we were pulled over. He would ask, “What do you want, Freshie?” as if to remind me that us that we were beneath him.

            “I just need you to take Luke to the spot so he can hear that station too.” I requested.

            Luke nodded, “We think it’s a code left by Trevor.” Out of the large pocket on his grey hoodie, Luke produced the letter that started this whole search.

            He looked Luke up and down, as though his physique would determine the answer for him. Snatching the letter, Alec replied, “You better not be fucking with me.”

            The rest of the day felt agonizing as I worried that I had just sent my best friend to get into a similar type of trouble that had me currently grounded. Not only did I anticipate the results of their country drive later that night, but I also couldn’t shake the guilt I felt whenever I saw Whitney in school. Her facial expressions were bleak, and she hardly acknowledged my presence when I sat behind her for physical science class. My instincts told me that our first out-of-school hangout had completely shattered her view of me. Like poking a bear, I feared that any attempt at communicating would only upset her. “At least Luke was getting what *he* wanted,” I thought to myself.

            At night, I feverishly played Temple Run on my new phone, hoping to make the time fly. As I awaited word from Luke, I ended up receiving a knock on my door. My dad entered, approaching me slowly “Jesse, you wanna talk?” Dad said. Uh oh.

            “Sure,” I nodded, figuring I had no choice. To my surprise, Dad extended his hand out with a shiny silver iPod touch in hand.

            “I figured it was kind of silly to give you a phone and keep hanging onto your iTouch.” Dad grimaced.

            I sat up, smiling as I accepted the offer. “Does this mean I’m not grounded anymore?”

            Dad held back the iPod, signaling that he had something to say before relinquishing the technology. “I just wanted to say- Your mom and I have talked with Brad, Whitney’s stepfather. He certainly thinks you should be punished longer… but we can’t fight it. You’re at that age… just know, if you ever feel like getting into trouble for a girl, you can talk to me. Or your mom.”

            “I understand, thank you.” After handing me the device, he awkwardly looked at me as if gauging my own teenage angst, then slowly let himself out. Immediately upon being alone, I scoured through my TextFree app to retrieve Whitney’s cell phone number and transferred it onto my contacts.

            “hey” I tactfully sent, after a minute of no response, I realized she wouldn’t have my real number, adding, “its jesse. how r u?”

            I waited for what felt like forever. Eventually I got two good rounds of Temple Run in, still nothing. Maybe her stepdad took away her phone? I thought to comfort myself.

            *Ding!*

            To my slight disappointment, it was Luke: “46.68…” It was a set of numbers, almost three lines long on my screen.

            *Ding!*

            A rapid fire of messages came in before I could even think to respond:

            “The station is looping.

            Seventeen digits

            Coordinates.

            Shelldrake.

            Tomorrow after school”

            Before I could tell Luke I was ungrounded, I put the coordinates he texted into the phone’s GPS app. The map zoomed out from Paradise, showing a red pin over a green spot, no roads in sight. I pinched the screen to zoom out, revealing that the pin was closer to Lake Shelldrake than any inhabited structure.

            “That’s the middle of nowhere” I texted back.

            “My place” Luke responded. “Lewy will give us a ride.”

            I rolled my eyes, less annoyed with Luke’s dismissal of me and more upset that Whitney still hadn’t said anything. Maybe Napoleon Dynamite will relax me, I thought as I flipped on my small TV and got under my covers.

            I had slight fears about saying I was going over to Luke’s the day after being taken off of punishment, but my parents seemed to always accept that as a plan. “Just be sure to use that phone if you need to. Call us if anything happens.” Mom said as I made my way out the door.

            Being without my bike, I began the long walk down Whitefish Point Road. About three hundred feet away, I was met with my orange bike laying sideways where I ditched it a week prior. Never change, Paradise. I laughed at the lack of danger my two-wheeled transport had been in. Propping up my orange steed, I made my way to Sunrise Park with impeccable timing.

            Luke met me at the door of his trailer already wearing a thick black coat, the kind of attire appropriate for a late night in October. “Do you think we should go trick-or-treating this year?” I asked, “I was thinking maybe we could try ding-dong-ditch. My dad has this ghillie suit- “

            “You’re early.” Luke interrupted, leading me to the living room. In the floor in front of the brown couch sat two different types of flashlights, a small 4’x’4 canvas tarp, and a handheld radio which I assumed to be the one borrowed from the home economics teacher. “Lewy always goes to bed at 9pm.”

            “Wouldn’t that make me late if he’s gonna drive us?”

            Luke shook his head no. “Sorry. I lied. He isn’t driving.”

            “What?”

            “I’m driving.” Luke stared back at me with the dead seriousness only he could produce at such a young age.

            “Luke, bro-“ I protested, evoking the response he must’ve had locked-and-loaded well before I arrived:

            “Jesse,” Luke stated, “I can’t do this alone. But if you aren’t going, I might have to.”

            I flopped onto the couch and muttered, “Why can’t Alec Johnson take you?”

            “Because he isn’t my best friend.” Luke replied, knowing just what to say to quell me. “We’re a team, Jesse. You’re a brother to me.” He offered his hand for a spitless ‘scouts honor’ shake.

            “You don’t know how to drive.”

            “I’ve driven Lewy’s car plenty of times.”

            “When?”

            “Getting groceries. Picking him up at Angler’s”

            “He makes you pick him up at the bar?”

            “It’s the least I can do.” Luke said in earnest.

            I peeled myself up from the couch and shook his hand. “I do want to see what that radio station is leading to.” I admitted, “It’s been on my mind a lot, actually.”

            Luke chuckled, “What, you think about it when you’re not daydreaming about Whitney Martin?”

            “Don’t even joke about that right now, man.” I sighed.

            “Uh oh,” Luke spoke, “Trouble in paradise?”

            “Good one.” I gave an unimpressed giggle at his pun. “I’m starting to believe Paradise is nothing but trouble. She won’t text me back and won’t even look at me in school.”

            “Sheesh,” Luke replied, “Alec had nothing to say about her last night.”

            “You talked to Alec about Whitney?”

            “No, dildo, I said he had nothing to say.” Luke shot back, surprising me with a taunt worthy of the lunchtime gauntlet. “Alec barely said a word last night. He was totally spazzing about how creeped out the station made him, though.”

            “Now that you’ve heard it, you have to agree, though?” I responded, “The voice on the broadcast is pretty creepy.”

            Luke nodded in agreement, “Yeah, talk about a creep-cast.” He then pulled out his phone, which he seemed rather fluent in after just a few days. “Look at this video on YouTube, it’s a similar number station.”

            Turning his phone to me, he showed a video clip of an old radio taken on a fuzzy camera lens. “Seven, five, two, nine, nine, five, six…” the video chattered on in a voice identical to the one I had heard in Alec’s truck.

            “That’s an old black-box signal from a trolling boat in the seventies.” Luke explained, “Fishermen would broadcast their coordinates to other boats on the same frequency. Sometimes they’d talk to each other with it.”

            “It would make sense that Trevor would get his hands on something like that.”

            “They don’t all broadcast the same frequency, either. The fishers would have to know what band to look for.” Luke continued. “That means Trevor was definitely trying to lead me- lead us to something.”

            “Those coordinates were like three miles into nowhere by Lake Sheldrake.” I argued.

             Luke looked back at his phone, “Not nowhere, its right by Betsy River.”

            “Betsy River?”

            “It’s a tributary that drains Sheldrake into Superior.” Luke elaborated, “Which means you can catch tons of whitefish.”

            “So Trevor is leading us to a good fishing spot.”

            “Maybe, but I’m willing to take my chances finding out.” Luke said determinately. From the inside of his coat, he pulled out the bent wire of what must have once been a coat hanger. “It’s almost ten. We should get ready.”

            In the next few minutes, we gathered Luke’s flashlights, bundled the tarp, and stuffed our pockets before stepping out into the cold October air. It was finally that interstitial season when we could see our breath emitting from our mouths as we spoke. Sunrise Park was dead quiet, only the lights of Luke’s doorway illuminated our path. Deeper into the holler shined the threshold of whatever blankets covered the Harwood residence. In a moment of considering Trevor’s junky parents laying awake, unaware that we may have their son’s whereabouts; I thought of my own parents.

            “Is it cool if I sleep over at Luke’s?” I began to type in a message to my father.

            Luke spoke in a hushed command, “Stay quiet, just let me do the work.” I pressed send on the text, then held the wake button on my smartphone, putting it to sleep. We crept slowly to a silver Oldsmobile Cutlass parked askew before Lewy’s slumbering mobile home. As Luke plunged the narrow hanger wire into the cavity between the window and the rusted door frame, I realized there was much to my orphaned companion that I may not know. It looked like he had done this before.

            After a few tense moments, Luke gently lifted the door’s handle. A satisfactory pop signaled a successful break-in. Luke knelt down, reaching into the cab and pulling the lock on the sedan’s passenger door. I ever so carefully unlatched the handle, an incriminating creak moaned from the hitching entryway. Every motion into the cigarette-stained fabric seat felt like another inch towards accusation. Waiting in dire pause, I watched as Luke used the same busted coat hanger to crack open the console below the car’s ignition. Performing a maneuver I only had seen on the small screen of my bedroom TV, Luke pressed a set of wires together and the vehicle roared to life.

            Luke carefully sat in the driver’s position and careened the door as if the ignition of lights and engine weren’t enough to give away the theft that had occurred. Now enclosed within the car, a whimper of amaze escaped me. “What the hell, Luke… where did you learn that?”

            “Trevor taught me.” Luke said as he cranked the transmission and laid on the gas, taking us out of Sunrise Park and onto asphalt.

            I held Luke’s phone as the glowing map informed us of five miles until our next turn. The homes and cabins lining Whitefish Point Road looked different from the window of a stolen Oldsmobile. Each darkened family room gazed back at us in rejection while the yellowed shine of restless bedrooms shyly affirmed complacency the unsanctioned breaking of the night’s law. Every headlight approaching was a co-conspirator, and each beam in the rearview was a critic. Up ahead, a trout-shaped moon exposed the vehicles gathered outside of the roadhouse, whose parking spaces had been commandeered by a Friday-night crowd.

            My eyes were drawn to an ivory shimmer that sat beneath the bar’s sigil. It was a girl, wandering the shoulder with no latent purpose shown besides a nose pointed indomitably ahead. “Luke. Pull over.” I said, my gaze fixed to the roadside.

            “What? No. Why?” Luke stammered.

            “Pull over.” I repeated. “That’s Whitney.” Upon his own realization, Luke understandably cruised to the edge of his lane, braking to a halt on the shoulder. Without hesitation, I pushed the creaking passenger door open and hopped onto the black top. “Whitney!” I called.

            The girl ahead pressed her face forward, squinting as if to see what man interrupted her emboldened walk. “Jess?” she called back. Whitney’s eyes widened as her sight made confirmation and began picking up pace towards the car. I made out only a few details of her expression in the moonlight, detecting some sense of relief. To my surprise, she made no refrain in motion as she wrapped her arms around me, burying her face into my chest. “What the hell Jess, what are you doing here?” she spoke, muffled by my coat against her lips. I instinctively returned her hug, more shocked than I would have expected by her contact gesture.

            “What the hell are you doing here, Whitney?” I replied, “You haven’t texted me back.”

            “I don’t have my phone,” she said, gazing up at me with blue eyes encased in crimson. “Its Brad. I- I’m done – I” She struggled, but I understood what she meant to say.

            “Do you need a ride?” I asked. Whitney nodded, planting her face harder into my torso. After a moment of latching, Whitney looked into the car.

            “Luke Murso?” she said, as if surprised to see me out with my best friend since kindergarten. “Is this your car?” Whitney asked, pushing her straw-like bangs away from her teary eyes.

            “It’s my uncle’s” Luke replied from the driver’s seat. I reached beside the passenger seat in search of a lever. Finding my target, the seat collapsed, allowing entry to the back row of the two-door sedan. Whitney crawled in without question, making the awkward four-limb climb into the seat. “Where are you headed?” Luke continued to ask as I returned the seat to an upward position and sat down.

            “I haven’t really thought that far…” Whitney said, confused and desperate emotion cloying her words. “Where are you guys headed?”

            Picking up Luke’s phone again, I consulted the map, “Lake Sheldrake.”

            Without second thought, Whitney nodded. “Okay… cool.” I looked back to see her taking on a slight smile. “Let’s go.”

            For the next dozen miles, Luke and I caught Whitney up to speed on Trevor, the letter, and the radio station. As we filled her in, our audience of headlights and homes faded into an ever-reaching blackness. Through the windshield, every shadow beyond the road became the same. Whether we headed towards the silent woods or the expanse of Lake Superior was indistinguishable. Only the GPS knew our path, and we were inching closer to our next transition.

            “It’s gonna be left on Vermillion Road.” I directed, “Next intersection.” Luke guided the car off of the familiar highway and onto the narrow street which led into the unfathomable depths of the Upper Peninsula’s landscape. “Left in half a mile.” On the third turn, our trajectory skewed upwards toward the night sky as we moved farther from the horizon of the Great Lakes. This road turned indiscriminately, every listing further misleading my internal sense of direction. The umbra cast around the vehicle offered no guidance as I tried to understand our surroundings.

            After successfully becoming disoriented by the winding path, our GPS ordered a stop along an unnamed road. “We walk from here.” Luke stated as the dingy headlights failed to illuminate the entirety of the tree-shrouded path ahead.

            “W-walk?” Whitney stuttered.

            Taking back his phone, Luke observed the map. “It’s a five-minute walk down to the river. That’s the exact point Trevor gave us.” Much like Luke, I too believed that it was still Trevor calling us into those woods. Our driver opened his door, stepping out onto the faded dirt trail. “We only brought two flashlights; I wasn’t expecting Whitney to join us.” Luke said, “Looks like you’ll have to stay close to Jesse. I’ll take the front.”

            Whitney nodded at Luke’s strategy as she climbed from the back onto the ground beside me. I smiled at Luke’s clever move as Whitney sidled up close to me, her shoulder brushing against my bicep. Thanks, Murso.

            As our leader made progress down the unkempt path, the hum of Lewy’s car slowly faded, alongside its luminescence. Our flashlights only gave a few feet of respite, and the reality of our mission began to settle in my chest. Dread nearly kept me from noticing that Whitney’s delicate fingers took their firmest grasp onto the lower part of my sleeve. No purr from the engine, and no vibrance of insects made themselves present in the air. We had crossed over a boundary where only silence remained beneath the beating of hearts.

            Luke paused, aiming the beam of his torch to the earth below. “Guys…” he said in a needless whisper, “Look.” I pointed my own light at his. An unmistakable print lay etched into the dirt; the impression of a shoe led our path.

            “Seems pretty recent.” I spoke. “I’m really starting to dislike this.” Whitney’s quiet notice of the footprints engaged something in me. I can’t show her my fear.

            We kept along, evenly paced marks lining our way. Soon enough, the droning signs of life indicated we were closer to the riverbed. Croaking frogs and the rap of cicadas were a comforting change from emptiness, although unnerving in their own right. I let the friction of Whitney’s soft contact be my anchor to confidence. “Shit… we lost the tracks” Luke said. Beneath us, the steps engraved below simply vanished ahead. “We’re only a couple dozen feet from the radio signal.”

            I wondered how a set of prints could simply end. Trevor, or whoever left them, had to have taken off into the thicker brush surrounding us. They could still be there, looming over the hardening tracks they laid. My eyes desired explanation from Luke up ahead, and I saw that he had come to a complete stop. In the round spotlight of our lights was a wooden structure. Just ahead, a cabin arose from the shadows in the distance. “That wasn’t on the map.” I noted.

            Luke trudged along without a word. With each foot we marched forward, the infernal details of the run-down shack became visible through lunar exposure. Despite the deadness of its material, the building was covered in mossy green life. As the path opened to reveal the entirety of the structure, it became apparent that it rested along the riverbed foretold by the aching soundscape.

            “Looks like a fishing shack” Luke evaluated.

            My adrenaline spiked from the realization that a doorway laid open on the face of the old cabin. Past the entryway was a pure blackness, untainted by the stars above and the lights in our hands. Luke, now only mere yards from the lifeless construction, fixed his light on the ajar door. Once my eyes adjusted, I noticed a dark engraving on the frame of the entrance. It read, “PRIVÉE – ACCÈS INTERDIT » 

            “Can you read that?” I asked without much expectation. “It looks like Spanish.”

            Luke paused, yielding no answer. I tried to sound out the words in my head, but my concentration was cut by the motion of my friend silently crossing into the void beyond the door.

            “I don’t think you should go in there!” Whitney cried out, breaking the unspoken decorum of our whispering. A moment passed before Luke’s voice emanated from the darkness.

            “Guys!” He said with unforeseen excitement. “It’s in here!”

            I swallowed hard, as if directing the worry in my mind back down to my chest, hoping it became courage along the way. Stepping forward with Whitney in tow, I entered the desolate lodge. Luke stood along a wall; its shape only egressed withing the beam of his flashlight. He aimed at a shelf, atop of which sat a dark box unbefitting for its archaic surroundings. Piecing together what Luke meant as “it”, I understood that the object was a radio similar to the one Luke borrowed.

            “Damn…” I mused, “The broadcast has to be coming from that.” Luke raised the device, and I noticed that it indeed had a red light shining besides a power switch, and a long silver antenna protruding from it. I scanned my flashlight around the interior, noticing several things indicating activity. A round wooden table sat in the center of the room with a red-and-black plaid cloth hanging halfway atop of it. Four chairs sat beside it, two tucked close and two pulled out as if they were recently vacated. On the opposite wall were a shattered mirror looking out onto the moonlit river flowing outside. Turning to my left, I noticed Luke pulling a book from a case across from me.

            “These books look ancient.” Luke commented, “It’s all in a different language.” I made my way over, noticing another book on the central table. It wasn’t a regularly bound book, but a spiral notepad. Its modern quality stood out strongly amongst the other relics within the cabin. Picking up the notebook, I spotted a piece of penmanship on the front:

Trevor H.

Class of 2009

Senior English

“Shit dude,” I gasped, “Get a look at this.” Luke moseyed over, his stature shifting from calm to panic once he understood what he looked at. He quickly snatched the book from me, flipping through dozens of ink-filled pages. Landing on an empty page with its top half torn, Luke dug into his coat pocked and pulled out a familiar folded sheet. Placing the pad and the sheet together, I realized Luke held the letter left under his door which started this chase. The letter’s bottom matched snug against the book’s torn page.

Immediately taking steam from the discovery, a dull metallic clang startled us. Flashlights flew around the room, unable to catch the source of the alarming noise. Feeling devoid of comfort, I noticed that Whitney no longer stood beside me. I called her name, to a fast response back. “We need to leave; I don’t want to be here.” I pivoted to find Whitney had made her way back to the doorway which we came from. Looking at Luke, I saw that he halfway fit the notebook into his coat pocked and started towards her.

            “This is insane,” I said, following them, “This has to be some kind of-“

            Luke’s voice cut me off as he looked back at me. My friends stood before me in the open air, their backs facing the trail we previously navigated. “Trevor?” he spoke with a softness I had never heard before. Upon breaking the silence, I realized that Luke was not looking at me, but rather behind me.

            In lingering instance, I turned back to look into the cabin. I hadn’t instinctually raised my flashlight, never getting a clear look through the darkness to find an even darker form casting shadow ahead of me. The pitch black contained a form recognizably human. A few paces ahead, only silhouetted by the moonlight which bled from the river facing window, a voice ruptured from the shadow. “Luke?” it spoke, managing two voices at once.

            I could easily detect the soft tenor of a young man, something like I would expect from a boy only slightly older than us. Underneath that tenor was a low, harsh, animalic gnarl. I shakily raised my flashlight, but the figure ducked down so fast that my light couldn’t catch it. I dropped the beam toward the floor, only catching the briefest glimpse of the figure taking a four-legged posture, all limbs bracing the ground below. In that glimpse, I did not see Trevor Harwood, nor did I see anything capable of producing such a soft rendition of Luke’s name.

            Before I could recall any sort of detail- the silhouette flew forward with the exertion of all its limbs. I could not comprehend the speed at which it arrived, only the force with which it barreled into me. My legs were useless to hold me as my head slammed against the cold ground. A warm, wet sensation pooled in the back of my head, and my sight flashed a white strobe as I saw the last thing I would see that night.

            A pointed snout colored like cracked cerulean hovered above me. Catlike green eyes pierced into my throbbing vision while knife-like yellow canines protruded from their maw. I was helpless to move as two sounds clashed around me. The first would be a hellish scream coming from the blue beast pinning me, like a lynx taunting me in all directions. The second was the heartbreaking cry of Whitney screaming my name.

            “JESSE!” would be the last sound I ever heard before my eardrums perforated, the final blow to my head rupturing the cochlea entirely.

            To this day, I can only recall sound by using common descriptors that only slightly match my memories. The only things that my mind can replicate within the everlasting silence are the screams of my name. Sometimes it sounds like Whitney, and sometimes it sounds like my mother.

END PART 1