Jack Brinkley trudged through the thicket of trees and unforgiving branches with his father’s shotgun slung on his shoulder and a napsack chock-full of supplies.  Each step he took was less cautious as his feet carried him further away from his childhood home. Sweat hung just above his brows, taunting him with the broken promise of breaking the surface tension and dribbling down his face. His only thoughts consisted of waiting for the drops of sweat to drip, waiting for gravity to quit playing games. As Jack took each mindless step through the sound absorbing grasses, he didn’t think about what picture they would use on the back of milk cartons, or the color of his shirt on the day he disappeared. He thought about the sweat, and the way his footsteps grew quieter as he drew further away from the risk of being heard.

Two weeks ago, in Level 3 math, Ari Abrams bragged to Jen Atkins about the abandoned cabin his older brother found deep in the woods, when he and his football buddies were running around with baseball bats and beer they snuck out of his father’s basement. They hadn’t realized how far they’d ventured until they found an unheard of clearing with an undocumented cabin, completely empty.

“Whadda ya say Jenny? You wanna take a little hike with me? I’ll keep ya safe Jenny, you won’t be in any danger. I’ll keep you warm.”

“You’re a pig Abrams.”

“Aw c’mon Jenny. I payed my brother 15 bucks to draw me a map. He hauls chicks there all the time.”

“Your brother’s a pig, Abrams.”

Jack held the map out in front of him, trying to match the marked path on the paper with the path stretching ahead of him.  It was simple enough to understand- a straight line headed toward South Carolina if you walked far enough. But for some reason, no one had been through that neck of the woods. Or maybe, Jack thought, the grown-ups knew… they just didn’t want to tell us what was out there.

Left foot and then right. The carton of shells in Jack’s bag rattled, like chunks of ice in a glass. Only these chunks of ice could blow someone’s head off.

The whole world is yellow. Dried yellow leaves on the floor flattened by feet beneath yellowing grass. The tree branches are thin and the air is even thinner as Jack continues to move effortlessly through the thinness and the yellowness of it all.

Crisp, thin, autumn air. Sweet in a young man’s lungs and flirting with the edges of his flannel. Air that tells a man it’s time for a smoke. Nothing like a cigarette on a fall day, thought the man. Jack pulled a box of Camels out of his front pocket and put the cigarette in his mouth, letting his spit on the inner edges of his lips be absorbed by the filter so that if he opened his mouth the thing would just dangle there. The first cigarette to ever touch his lips.

As he hiked he tried to light it, but found it difficult to do both things at once. The cigarette sizzled against the flame and Jack inhaled. The smoke tasted exactly the way it smelled. It tasted like rotting teeth and stomach pains. His throat felt sore and thick as the smell wafted through his nose and seeped into his lungs. But he liked the way the thing looked pinched between his two fingers and liked the way he felt as he raised it to his lips and squinted his eyes as if a pretty girl was watching. He liked exhaling the smoke through his nose- watching it coil around invisible wisps of wind and then fan out into the shafts of light breaking through the trees.

Jack smoked two more cigarettes and then threw up in a bush. After that he smoked three more.

“Be a man,” Jack’s father always said.

“The dark won’t hurt you. A punch to the gut. That’ll hurt. But a man never lets it show.”

But Jack wasn’t a man yet. He was still a boy. Still a boy as he bit on his lip and shut his eyes tight enough to seal the tears back. He would pinch his eyelids so close together that his world became red and murky beneath them and his whole face would sting. He never cried in front of his father because if he did he would always be a boy.  He would never get to smoke a cigarette or hold a gun or drink a cup of coffee.

A week before the Plan hatched Jack cried in front of his dad. Maggie, his dog, had died right in front of him. He waited for him to tell him to buck up, to quit crying and act like a big strong man. But he just sat down on the edge of Jack’s bed and put his arms around his shuddering shoulders and rubbed his arm until the tears were sticky streaks down his face.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t let ‘em see that it hurts. I shouldn’t let you see it.” He looked up at his father but the drops in his eyes made everything blurry. His voice quivered and it made him so mad that he cried even more.

“I had a dog when I was your age. She was big, with shiny black fur, and would always see when I was sad and prop her head in my lap and just stare up at me. Her eyes were big and clueless-she didn’t know why I was down. But she would always sit there. She would sit there and be sad right next to me. We buried her in a clearing we found deep in the woods and covered her grave with biggest sticks we could find. I sat there until the sun set and then walked away without turning around. I never could find the clearing again, but I hope it’s still the same. I remember it was all yellow, and the setting sun made her clearing glow.”

His dad looked up at the posters on Jack’s wall and the dark wood grew darker with the loss of light. He sighed heavily and without looking away he said, “You’re just a boy, Jack. You’re ok. You’re still just a boy.”

The sun was getting tired and all the yellow surrounding Jack turned to gold. The stillness of the leaves began to stir, as if they were slowly waking up from a long nap. As Jack continued to walk he yawned. His eyes grew heavy and his footsteps were softer, moving with less purpose. He pulled a thermos from his bag and looked down into the mud colored water. It smelled bad, and Jack already knew it tasted bad. But he put the thermos to his lips and forced the coffee down his throat. It was lukewarm and made his mouth taste like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in a week. He kept sipping. He kept walking.

His stomach felt queasy and his hands were all jittery. Each step he took was out of control-like his body forgot how to move without shaking. Each joint lost its flow with every tiny movement Jack made.  He wondered why adults loved coffee and cigarettes. They made him feel sick and they made him smell gross and he just couldn’t wrap his head around it. But he did it anyway. He smoked more cigarettes and drank more coffee and cleared more ground distracting himself with fantasies of living alone in the woods.

He would hunt his own food, chop his own wood, and live off the land. When he ran out of cigarettes he would hike into the nearest town and buy three packs at a time. He’d sell one right there outside the shop. He’d smoke one for himself. Then he’d go back into town and sell the other a week later, and buy three more. This way, he thought, he’d always have a little bit of money just in case he couldn’t trap any food or if it got too cold. Eventually, he’d get a job, or maybe he wouldn’t. He was a free man, living in a cabin that no one knew about.

Jack came to a clearing. No cabin. But it felt familiar. The setting sun made all the yellow glow, and right in the middle was a mound of what must have been sticks. The years of rain and snow and sun on the pile turned them to a melted hump of rot and dead moss. The boy sat down and knew where he was. It was so peaceful, so yellow, and it brought clouds to Jack’s eyes. He couldn’t wait to tell his dad it hadn’t changed when he realized his dad would never see him again and the clouds turned to wet and heavy storms that surged in Jack’s vision. He wouldn’t cry- he was passed the childish crying.

As he got up to leave he thought he heard footsteps loitering behind him. He looked around and saw nothing. He walked faster and left his ears turned up. The shotgun was now in his hands but the damn coffee kept his fingers shaking.

The morning Jack left home he woke up without realizing it would be the last time he would sleep in his own bed. It was the last time he would kiss his mother goodbye and the last time he would eat her breakfast.  He didn’t even know.

The idea of running away had been brewing for a while. But Jack didn’t have the map, and he didn’t have the motivation. Then he found the map.

He spotted it of Jen’s backpack after she pulled her homework out that morning in math. He knew because he saw Ari’s tragic handwriting and doodles marked all over it, and a picture of a cabin with a heart around it that said “JEN AND ARI 4 EVER”. Jack thought about how gross it was and waited for the lunch bell to ring. He stayed back from class so  he could steal it. He succeeded.

On his way out to lunch he walked by the teacher’s lounge and noticed an unattended cup of coffee sitting on the counter through the glass in the door. He peered inside and found the room empty. The door was unlocked. And the coffee was just sitting there. So he went inside and grabbed the ceramic mug of warmth and knew, for reasons unexplained, that he was just a sip of coffee away from manhood. He was a sip away from proving his father wrong- he wasn’t just a boy. So he drank it and tasted the bitterness of being grown up, and the bitterness slid down his throat and slithered its way deep into the darkest depths of his insides. He put the cup down and walked out of the room without looking back. He walked out of the school without looking back. He walked straight to the ditch where he hid the supplies he’d been collecting for two weeks and he ran through the trees and into the world of yellow and guess what- he didn’t look back. His heart pounded fast and he felt the blood rushing through his legs and the cool air on his face and he laughed. And he was free.

Coach Biggs saw Jack Brinkley walking out of the teachers lounge in a navy blue collared long sleeve shirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots. No one else saw him walk out of school and no one saw him running into the woods. No one saw him again.

Jack Brinkley’s body was found 50 feet away from the abandoned cabin residing on the town border. Around him were two empty shotgun shells, three unlit cigarettes, and puddle of coffee that mixed into the pools of blood oozing out of Jack’s head and Jack’s torso and Jack’s arms and Jack’s legs. Blunt force trauma, multiple stab wounds to the abdomen, and his arms and legs were bound by rope. His face was a mass of bloody pulp and gushy things that forced the police investigating the scene to take a moment to clear the tears from their eyes and the bile from their throats.

“He was just a boy” one of them said, “Just a boy running away from home.”
But when Jack Brinkley turned around and saw the figure with a rock in one fist and a knife in the other, he didn’t hesitate to grab the gun and pull the trigger. And when Jack drank the coffee he didn’t spit it out, he kept drinking it. He threw up after smoking the cigarettes and then he smoked some more. Because Jack Brinkley was a man when he left and he was a man when he died. And he knew that. As he lay on the ground and looked around him all he saw was yellow fading into white. The blood was sticky all around him, and he felt it as it drained from the safety of his body and out into the world. Into the world of men who cry and boys who think that they can’t.  

“Look at me. A man doesn’t cry in the dark, but everything is painted in light.” And so he cried, drawing his final breath with his final thought on being old.

“At least I don’t have to drink more coffee.”