Through the woods we marched, the sounds of plants being crushed under our feet harsh against the sunny quiet. I could also hear the jangling of a ball-chain Adam had hanging from one of his pockets. He never stopped trying to find new chains to wear. You'd have thought he was an escaped convict with some of the stupid metal necklaces and chains he draped from his pants or around his head. Right then, he just had the one attached to his pocket and then a silver chain-link choker hanging loose around his skinny neck. Sometimes I wondered how he held himself up with all the weight on him. It was lucky he'd never been on a plane anywhere; he'd hold up metal detectors for days.

"I don't want to go look at some lame tree house," I said, being a real grouch.

Adam didn't make any sort of response. I became kind of irritated, because the fact that he wasn't going to argue made me realize that he really must've seen something out-of-the-ordinary. I was mad at myself for not seeing it first, whatever it was. There was something funny in the way Adam was walking. He had a real determined path. It was like he knew where he was going, even though we'd never gone wandering far back in the beech woods.

"Come on, then. What was it you saw for real? If it was some little kids' tree house you wouldn't care so much about it."

"Maybe if you'd climbed the tree, you would've seen it," he said all sarcastic.

I rolled my eyes, but I didn't say anything back to him. If he was going to be an ass, I wasn't going to try and stop him. We both had our own ideas of how to be stubborn. We both hated when other people tried to make us do things we didn't feel like doing, or say things that we didn't want to say. But there were different reasons for our stubborn streaks. Mine was all-natural: both of my parents were like oxen. They couldn't be swayed on anything except what was for dinner. Believe me, trying to get money out of them was like trying to suck water from a rock. Adam hadn't come by his headstrong nature through blood, though. It was something that had been stuck inside him like someone tacks a poster onto a wall. I didn't know it then, but Adam had sort of been shaken out of order because of his situation. Things had been taken out of him that were originally supposed to be there. Or maybe they just never grew how they were supposed to. That happens to a lot of people for various reasons, but at the time, I hadn't any clue what Adam's problem was. I didn't even really know he had one.

The sun splashed in splotches across the ground. There were still dead leaves there, left over from a fall that had begun too late—a winter that hadn't been cold enough. I couldn't help but find something sickening about the lumps of soppy leaves lying across our path. Adam and I slogged through them without the least thought as to what the black mud was doing to our shoes.

I tried not to complain, but our walk was beginning to go on forever. I wondered whether Adam really knew where he was going or if he was just taking me in circles through the woods. Nothing came out of my mouth, though; we had all the time in the world, I kept telling myself. And we did, so it didn't matter if we became seriously lost in the deepest trenches of the woods for an entire five hours. We could fall off the planet for half a day and nobody would know. That's how it was.

"There! Up there!" remarked Adam all of a sudden. He pointed a skinny hand straight ahead, and I shifted my eyes to where his finger led. My gaze covered the ground, then shimmied up a thick, white-trunked tree, where I saw it. "It" was something I'd never expected to see in such a place.

First, let me describe what kind of area we were looking at.

Everywhere, all around, the copper beech trees bubbled out of the ground. And then they gave way to these massive, towering trunks with bark as white as a dead man's skin. Leaves were all over the place, like I said, and they were yellow and orange. A lot of them were still floating to cover the very few parts of ground that still happened to be showing. It was like we were in the middle of an autumnal wonderland, or something, and then, to top it all off, there was this thing Adam had seen from above—an actual tree house entirely circling up through the top of the biggest, whitest tree, right in the center of it all.

It wasn't just any tree house. Not something like little kids played in when they were five and their dads built them places to go so they could feel like they had some independence. My dad wasn't the constructive type; he'd never built me anything. (My mom made me a pair of pants once, but I never wore them. She never made me anything else.) But this tree house wasn't something that one kid's dad had built. Or even five kids' dads. It was enormous. Floor planks spiraled out around the massive trunk. There were at least three floors to it, and the walls were strong-looking. Windows were cut out of the sides and there were shutters on them. At least, I couldn't tell if they were actually shutters from my position on the ground. It looked like you could open the flaps of the windows. I found myself suddenly pushing them open in my mind's eye. I wanted to gaze down from the inside of that thing. There was more of an urge in the pit of my stomach than I'd thought there'd be.

"It's like the Robin Swiss Family thing," commented Adam quietly, just as much in awe as I was. His mouth was hanging halfway open and his dark brown eyes glittered with the down-pouring sky light permeating the forest cover above. I'd never seen him so taken in.

"You mean the Swiss Family Robinson," I couldn't help but say.

"Whatever."

I hadn't read that book since I was a kid. Adam thought reading was boring, so it was never something we talked about. Every once in a while, though, I couldn't keep myself from making a comment or two about books just to annoy him. We were great friends: we knew how to irritate each other. That's how you could tell we cared.

"I want to go up," said Adam decisively. He didn't have to say it. I already knew.

"How?" I asked.

"Climb," he said, oozing sarcasm.

I rolled my eyes but moved toward the tree. It felt like I was walking on gravestones as I kicked through the leaves. Like I was doing something that ghosts would be angry about. It made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I felt like a cat that had gotten scared and let its fur stand on end. But I was being braver than Adam. He didn't even want to go toward it.

"Hey!" I called to him. He still stood at the edge of the clearing, and I suddenly felt eerily alone in the wilderness. "Didn't you want to go up there?" I pointed off somewhere behind me.

Adam didn't answer at first. I was really kind of shocked to see him so nervous. "I . . . I'll come. You go first."

"I am going first!"

"I'll come!" he insisted. "Just . . . give me a minute."

The air got still. He realized how stupid he'd just sounded. I knew Adam Nyler. I knew that he wasn't the way he tried to make other people see him. He let his guard down sometimes around me, but he couldn't help feeling stupid, even then. I wondered if he knew I thought he was more stupid for thinking I cared if he looked stupid.

Without another excuse, Adam cocked his head to one side as if he held the world in his teeth, stuffed his hands into his pockets with his thumbs hanging out, set his mouth into an expressionless line, and sauntered forward into the sunny spookiness. He came up to my side, keeping his eyes on the thing in the tree. Then he said all careless like, "I guess we could look for a ladder, or something."

I agreed to that. The two of us laughed at our own susceptibility to creepy sensations. Neither one of us believed in ghosts or monsters, but for some reason, weird thoughts about them freaked us out all the same. There was something strange in the air that day, in that place, but both Adam and I decided to ignore it. Good thing we did, too.

We circled the tree several times, probably looking like a couple of idiot squirrels who'd been dropped on their heads too many times. I could hear Adam grunting in aggravation; he really wanted to climb that tree. The problem was, though, that no good climbing branches stuck out of the trunk until about fifteen feet up. Obviously, that was way too high for either of us to reach. Even if one of us stood on the other's shoulders, we couldn't grab onto the lowest limb. I realized quick that we weren't going to get anywhere, but when I tried to tell Adam that, he turned even more stubborn. Around and around he went, long after I'd decided to stand still. I was only being practical. What point was there in sloshing pathways through the leaves after it was clear we weren't going up any time soon?

Adam was wandering in circles, gazing at everything above. I got dizzy just watching him; he nearly lost his balance several times, almost tumbling backward into the leafy piles plumped up alongside the path he was creating.

"Come on," I eventually growled out of the sides of my mouth. I was way too hot and sweaty to be polite about it. "We can't get up right now."

He didn't answer me—wasn't ready to give up.

I watched him; he was a dark blot against the sunny whiteness everywhere else. There was a haze in the air, rising off the ground in waves of heat. The shade was in patches all around, so I stepped into a blotch and crossed my arms like I was getting annoyed. And I was getting annoyed, even as much as I wanted to get up into that treehouse. It wasn't as if he were wasting time—we had all day to lounge around. I was just irritated that Adam wasn't listening to me.

"We need to find a rope," he said after a while, finally stopping for a minute. He put a hand over his eyes, probably because his head was still spinning even though he wasn't. "Whoa," he mumbled, steadying himself.

"A ladder would be better," I commented, really wanting to contradict him all of a sudden.

"Yeah," he said, starting toward me but staring at the ground, "but it would be a pain to carry from a long way. A rope would at least be lighter."

"But how would we climb up it? Just swing it over a branch and pull ourselves up like in gym class, where there's knots in the rope?" I had never been able to do that activity.

"Duh," Adam sarcastically replied.

Looking at him, I almost laughed. He was the last person I would ever expect to see climbing a rope—even last compared to me. His baggy pants alone had to be half his weight; they'd drag him to the ground in a minute. I didn't say anything, though. He would've been mad if I'd laughed. Instead, I agreed to head back to his house and try to sneak a rope out of the backyard shed.

We went in silence most of the way through the woods and then across the high-grass fields. Bugs flew up and smacked us where our skin showed—crickets, dusty moths, grasshoppers. Cicadas buzzed deafeningly. Their droning sounds were background noise: always there. Eee-ooo, eee-ooo, eee-ooo.

I couldn't be certain about Adam, but I think we were both lost in thoughts about what we'd found anyway. That's why we weren't really talking. Not that we had to talk a lot. We were just as comfortable in each other's silence as we were in our talking. We'd suffered through loads of awful teachers and sweltering summers together. He knew more about me than I probably knew about myself. Both of us only liked foods that came in two syllables: hot-dogs, burgers, chicken, corn-dogs, meat-loaf. None of that fancy fettucini alfredo or veal parmesan. No filet-mignon or whatever-the-heck else fancy people liked to eat. Don't think we were simple, though. I might have been, I guess, but Adam was as complex as a bag of blown-glass marbles (about as fragile, too, as I later realized). Only I really saw through all the shows he tried to put on, and even I was fooled on occasion.

His backyard shed loomed against the heat-hazed sky, a splintering eyesore in its gray dilapidation. As we got closer, we sent brain-waves telling each other to lay low. We crouched down and sneaked toward the shed, keeping our peeled eyes on the porch windows in case Mrs. Nyler was home. She probably would have been angry to realize her son wasn't in school, and I don't think my parents would've been thrilled to discover my skipping out either.

Closer and closer. There were no trees in Adam's backyard. No fence squared out the perimeter either. It was just us, the open field, and the house windows. Oh, and the shed, obviously. No problem getting to the shed. We were there easy, suddenly swinging back the creaking door, staring into the musty gloom of its insides. Adam started in like he was wading through waist-high waters, moving kind of cautiously with his hands held up higher than usual. I watched him from behind with half-raised eyebrows, but when I followed him into the shed I got why he was walking weird. It was cool in there—cool with shade and shadows. Honestly, it must've been ten degrees colder. I felt the sweat on my bare arms and legs start to prickle as it evaporated. And there were spider webs—lots of them—all slung across the open space. My hands were quickly up high too, brushing the sticky strands away from my face.

Little slices of light cut through the cracked walls. I saw strings of cobwebs glowing between the beams. All sorts of junk was stuffed into that shed. Old lawn mowers and Adam's ancient bike from elementary school. Random car parts and a snake-like garden hose, coiled in gleaming, dirty rings, poised and ready to strike at our legs. I spotted a rusty pogo stick lying against a stack of boxes and fleetingly remembered a birthday of Adam's from a long time ago. Some part of me felt kind of sad, strangely, but before I could figure out why, Adam was talking.

"Here. I've found it," he said hurriedly, leaning into a box and pulling out a spool of thick, coarse rope.

I just looked at him. He noticed that I was staring funny.

"What?" he asked me. "Don't you think this will work ok?"

I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could blurt a word, the shed door swung outward and a block of light shattered the gloom. The two of us spun around. There stood Mrs. Nyler, a look of real irritation on her dark-eyed face.