Short Story - Beth&Johnny
This one was a lot better before I had to edit it from 12 pages down to 8...buuuut, whatever.
Roo Bosco
Creative Writing
Per. 2
The red orange leaves crunched under Beth’s bare feet as she walked through the woods. The memories flooded back to her. She heard John’s light laughter echo through the trees, and looked around hoping it was really him. As the laughter faded off, she could have sworn she saw him running past her - back when he was still Johnny, not this sophisticated “Jonathan” that they had made him. Beth sat down and leaned against the trunk of an oak tree. This had been their woods - all theirs when they were younger. Now Beth sat alone and watched as the wind carried off the last of Johnny’s ghostly voice. The cruel wind rustled the leaves around, trying to knock them from their branches. A single red leaf fell from the tree Beth was sitting under and floated slowly until it landed gently on a fold of her dress. Tears started welling up in Beth’s eyes, but she told herself that it was because of the cold air, and nothing else. She wouldn’t cry over Johnny. The relentless wind came back to taunt her once more and blew her curly red hair off of her face. A spot of sunlight shone through the trees, just missing Beth’s feet with its warm rays. Years ago, Beth had run through these woods without a care - and with a best friend. Now she was seventeen, a woman in her society’s eyes, and now she was more alone than ever. She closed her eyes and let the wind carry her off into her thoughts.
“Johnny! Johnny, where are you?” Beth called and giggled as she ran. She looked behind trees and in bushes, but to no avail. Johnny was a better hider than Beth was a seeker. But nevertheless, the wheels in Beth’s little mind turned trying to think of a place she hadn’t looked. “The stream!” She whispered, and smiled smugly. He wouldn’t win this time.
The ground was soft from the rain the night before, and flowers had shot up everywhere. Beth ran lightly, as to not make much noise and headed over to the bridge by the stream. It wasn’t a long bridge, nor was it high - just long enough for Johnny to crouch under and win another game of hide and seek. But not this time. This time, Beth would find him.
As she approached the stream, she walked more slowly. She held her breath as she came to bridge, as if her gasps for air would make Johnny magically disappear from his hiding spot.
“Gotcha!” She shouted as she popped her head under the bridge, but there was no groan of defeat from Johnny. He wasn’t there. Beth sighed and turned around, disappointed in the failure of her wonderful idea. She jumped back at the sight of something falling from the tree above her, and stepped back with a shriek.
“No, I believe that I have got you,” Johnny chuckled as he landed. “You really have to get better at this game, Beth. It’s no fun for me.” Beth punched him playfully and he smiled and took her hand as they walked back to town, their feet kicking up the dirt from the road as they went. Their parents would probably be angry - it would be dark by the time they got home, and children weren’t supposed to be out after dusk. They passed the schoolhouse and the meetinghouse on their way into town and arrived at Beth’s house a good thirty minutes later. Johnny walked her inside, hoping that if her parents saw they had been together they wouldn’t be so hard on her, and then he continued down the road to his own house.
“A ten year old girl should not be out past dark,” Beth’s father said sternly as he latched the wooden door behind Johnny.
“We lost track of time,” Beth apologized. “Really, we were just in the woods. You know how pretty the leaves can be in autumn…”
As the seasons changed and the short cold days of Autumn turned to the warm sunny days of early Summer; back to Winter and then Spring, Johnny and Beth spent every spare moment in their sheltered playground. No one else in the village ever had any reason to go there, although sometimes Beth’s three younger sisters would try to tag along, convinced that Beth spent all of her time away from home kissing their beloved Johnny that was at their house so often. He would buy the three of them new rag dolls every Christmas and let them play with his horse whenever he rode over to see Beth. Beth found all three of them to be wretched, a nuisance, and often would command them not to follow her - Johnny was her friend, not their playmate. And while Johnny, being an only child himself, loved the three girls dearly, he understood that the forest was sacred ground - it was his and Beth’s and no one else’s.
When they were fourteen, Beth and Johnny would still play their games of hide and seek. It never got old in the forest with all its wonder and secrets that could never all be revealed. Beth was late arriving one day; her mother had asked her to stay with her siblings while she walked to town to pick up some bread from the store, and when Beth finally got to the Oak tree where she had always me her friend, she discovered, to her horror, what appeared to be a very injured Johnny lying amongst the leaves. She ran to him, two tears already trickling down her cheeks.
“Please be alright,” she whispered as she took his hand. She squeezed it tight and put her hand on his chest to feel for a heartbeat. A very sleepy Johnny then opened his eyes.
“Well it took you long enough,” Johnny said with a yawn. “Where’d your mother walk to, Massachusetts?” As he sat up, he caught the look in Beth’s eye as she tried to wipe a tear away before he could see it and figure out what she had been thinking.
“Oh, Beth…Beth…” Johnny murmured as he wiped another tear from her face. “What’s wrong, what happened?”
“I though that - I thought you…” Beth tried to choke back her tears and then broke into sobs.
“Beth…Beth, listen to me,” Johnny said as he lifted her chin so she was looking at him. “I don’t ever, ever want to you cry over me. Please don’t cry over me…” He kissed her forehead and wiped her tears away once again. They would not play their game that day - she couldn’t bear to lose him twice.
“Having a best friend means you never have to say good-bye,” Johnny had once told her. “Even if they leave - if the go away or die or what have you - you will never lose them. A best friend is a part of you for now and forever…that way, even if you lose them, they’ll still be around, you know?”
“How can that even make sense?” Beth questioned. “How can you lose someone and not lose someone at the same time?”
“Well, you’ll lose their physical being…that you understand, right?” Beth nodded. “But a dear friend…a friend who you love…their soul becomes intertwined with your own. So in that sense, you’ll never lose them.” Johnny could tell by the look on Beth’s face that she didn’t understand his philosophy. But she rarely did, nor did he understand many of her ideas. At seventeen, it wasn’t always easy to understand the workings of the mind of another seventeen-year-old. “You’ll understand in time, Beth. You may just have to experience it to know.” He leaned back against the oak tree and put his arm around her. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” he said to her.
“I’m the only friend you’ve ever had,” She replied teasingly.
“This is true,” He nodded and chuckled about the truth that was in her pointed humor.
The next day, Beth was late getting to the oak tree, as she was much of the time now, because her mother always wanted her to stay home. “You’re becoming a woman, now,” She would tell Beth. “and I have yet to teach you to sew, and you can barely cook strew without ruining it. You are grown up now, you should stop playing those silly games with that boy.”
“I thought you liked Johnny, Mama,” Beth questioned. Her mother had always been fond of her dear friend, and she couldn’t understand why she would disapprove of him after all this time.
“I do like Johnny,” her mother replied. “But you’re grown up now, you should not be spending all of your time with boys romping around through the forest. It is not proper.”
“What is proper, Mama?” Beth snapped back. She had never put up with anyone trying to break up hers and Johnny’s friendship, and surely would not start now. “My not having a friend, is that proper? Not being happy and having fun, would you consider that proper?” And with that, Beth walked out of her house, and down to the woods.
“Where have you been?” Johnny asked when he heard Beth’s footsteps approaching. He didn’t even look up from his drawing to see if it was her - he just knew.
“We had a…problem at the house,” Beth said, trying to sound casual.
“Oh, that kind of problem,” Johnny nodded, understanding all too well.
“What are you drawing?” she asked, looking at the piece of paper in his lap as she sat down next to him. On it was a skillfully drawn sketch of a leaf, its shades and veins clearly shown by the careful pencil marks made on the paper. The red, orange and yellow color from the leaves around them almost leaped out from the black and white drawing. It was so exquisite, so close to perfect, that Beth could not take her eyes off of it.
“Do you like it?” Johnny smiled shyly. “I figured I would have some time before you got here, so I brought along something to keep me occupied…”
“It’s beautiful, Johnny. I never knew you could draw like that.”
“Neither did I…I was just bored I guess. Do you want it? I mean, you don’t have to take it, you just seemed to like it a lot.” He extended the piece of paper towards her and she took it and gazed at its beauty for a long time before slipping it into the pocket of her dress. “I never thought something so simple could be so beautiful,” she said in awe.
“Those are the only beautiful things,” Johnny replied with a smile.
Beth choked back more tears and she held the leaf that had fallen into her lap. She pulled the drawing out of her dress pocket, unfolded it and gazed at its magnificence. Beth had not slept at Johnny’s house that fateful night. As the two ran through the woods, still playing their childhood game of hide and seek, Johnny slipped on some wet leaves by the stream. He fell more quickly and less gracefully than the leaves around him, and his head hit a rock in the stream. Beth, who had still yet to win a game in all these years, was more determined to find Johnny’s hiding spot than ever. When she came to the stream nearly thirty minutes later and saw that the spot that Johnny lay was not his hiding spot at all, she ran to him with the same panic that she had years before by the oak tree - only this time, Johnny would not wake up. She kneeled in the shallow water, cradling him in her arms. She knew that she had found him too late - she had lost the game again, only this time she had lost much more than that. The water numbed her feet, her body collapsed like her sisters’ rag dolls, and she knew that Johnny’s spirit was floating above her amongst the trees…in the opposite direction of the leaves that they both loved so dearly.
Johnny’s parents insisted on putting “Jonathan” on his headstone, despite Beth’s pleas to put “Johnny” instead.
“No one knew him as Jonathan,” she begged. But his parents, grief-stricken as they were, said that Johnny had been baptized as Jonathan, and would be interred that way as well.
Beth could barely force herself to attend the funeral. As she had once pointed out, she was Johnny’s only friend…and he was hers. He was all she had ever needed in a person, and when they lowered his casket into the ground, she could not bear to watch. She had lost him so many times before in the forest, but never like this. Now, she had not only lost another round of their game…she had lost everything that she had ever known.
As she sat under the oak tree, staring at Johnny’s drawing and at the leaf that the still unrelenting wind had brought to her, she allowed the tears to flow in a steady stream down her cheeks.
“I thought I told you not to cry for me.” Beth lifted her head cautiously. She could have sworn it was his voice, but the only thing visible was the wondrous wind creating a tornado of leaves just above Beth’s head.
She knew then that Johnny had been right. Their souls were intertwined, and though she had lost his physical being, Johnny’s soul would never be gone from her, nor would it be gone from their woods. He would always be a part of the trees, and the leaves, and the stream.
“Something so simple can be the most beautiful of all things,” she thought. “…Something like friendship.” Beth stood up slowly, gently placing both the leaf and the drawing into her dress pocket. She looked up into the fading light of the afternoon sun, and let Johnny’s relentless soul carry her off into her memories.