At the Edge of Everything, We Skip Rocks

Jack listened to his rock skip once, twice, across the lake before sinking into black water—and felt something of himself sink with it.

The freezing bite of the water swirling around his bare ankles could almost distract him from Scott beside him, using the torch in his mouth to see by as he sought out smooth rocks. 'Something with a groove,' he always liked to proselytise, 'Y'need that notch for leverage.'

There was a pitched, muffled 'ha!' of satisfaction at his left as Scott spotted something suitable. Jack's eyes caught the torch shifting in the corner of his vision, and turned to watch him snatch up a flat rock nestled in a tangle of arrowhead. It was late. Jack was tired. Scott never seemed tired.

A dull click bounced across the glassy surface of the lake as he switched off the torch, and then he was leaning back on his hands with a low whistle. The dock was just wide enough to preserve a few inches between their pinkies.

"That sucked," he said simply, tossing the stone in his hands a few times to 'get a good feel for the weight of it. You gotta connect with the rock, Jack.'

Jack wasn't sure if he was talking about his pathetic attempt at skipping a rock, or the farewell party they'd snuck away from—hours ago, now—to mess about in the woods by the lake house and ignore the obvious. He yanked his right jean leg back up to his knee as he felt it slip. If Scott noticed the force of it, he didn't say anything.

And Jack knew that now would be the time to say it, to point it out. The very last time. To demand that if Scott saw something, or thought something, because Jack was so sure that he always saw everything, and never said any of it—that, just once, he should. He should notice and say, for God's sake, that something had made him sad, or worried. But Jack was no better, because he didn't either, and he could have talked about that stupid party and those stupid shrimp cocktails and cheese crackers, and Scott's stupid dad's stupid job that was carting them off to stupid Australia. Without him.

But he just looked out at the stillness of the lake and bunched his right fingers into the denim of his jeans.

"'m not as good at it as you," he muttered. "The rock was bad."

Scott laughed easily. It was like liquid fire pouring down his ear.

"A bad workman blames his tools," he said, voice pitched low and sage and mocking. At Jack's lack of reaction, he nudged him in the arm with his bony elbow, earning a hiss of annoyance for his effort.

"I've got a perfect rock right here," Scott continued.

Jack could hear the smug note in his words, there in the dark that had swallowed them whole. If he blinked, he saw Scott's chipped front left tooth in his boyish, lopsided grin. It burned behind his eyelids.

"Here."

The torch flicked on again, and Jack felt him press a cool, flat stone into his left hand. He winced against the light, against the relaxed slope of Scott's back, the simple stretch of his casual smile. How could it be that Jack was sinking into dark water, and Scott was flat on his back, arms outstretched, serene and unaffected at the edge of everything? Perhaps Jack was wrong—perhaps Scott never saw anything, anything at all.

"Skip it."

In the withering chill of the evening air, spun colder by the frigid lake before them, Jack felt something knot up in his throat. He stared down at the stone in his freckled hand—a thumb shaped groove, just how Scott liked them, worn smooth by the lake's patient work. Grey, speckled. Perfect, Scott had said. Perfect.

Jack stuffed it into his pocket, almost feverish. Goosebumps sprung across his arms. When Scott laughed, the stone was heavy as a boulder.

"I'm bad at it," Jack said hastily, hand clenching hard around the stone in his pocket, even as it set his hand aflame. "I'll skip it when I'm better."

As a breeze swept over the pair of them, Jack stole a look at Scott from the side of his eye, trying to put everything to memory. His torch illuminated the soft planes of his pale face—his pointy nose and the last of the baby fat sitting on his cheeks. His eyes, almost black in that cone of cold light, were glittering. Mischevious. Jack couldn't find it in himself to laugh with him. Not when Scott was looking at him like he knew he had no plans to get better, like the bare fact of it amused him.

"Dude," he said at length, and pointed his torch right at Jack's face. He blinked the stars out of his eyes as Scott leaned forward with that glittering grin. "We're s'posed to be having fun! It's, like, almost midnight. That's basically the witching hour."

"Isn't that at three?"

"What, three in the morning? Everyone's asleep by then."

"Not witches."

"Uh, yes, witches. They gotta recharge their magic for their evil spells."

"'Recharge their magic'?" Jack asked, a little incredulously, and a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth despite himself.

Scott sighed with his whole body, as if Jack had missed something both simple and obvious.

"Yeah, J. If they don't regenerate their magic, the freakin'… potency! The potency of their magic goes out of whack."

The little smile grew into a full blown grin as Jack shook his head, fingers loosening from the rock in his pocket as he focused on the cool water around his feet. The stone felt lighter. Kinder.

"You're the expert," Jack murmured, and there was laughter glowing through the tiredness in his voice.

"That I am! Nice to finally be acknowledged around here," Scott said, and began a fresh search for a rock, sans torch-in-mouth. "Bit late, but I'll take it."

Jack's smile slipped off his face the moment he said it. He wondered if Scott noticed, even with his back turned. He knew he wouldn't say. The air was awash with the sounds of crickets and buzzing, the quiet lapping of the water when Jack shifted his legs, the yawning creak of the dock beneath them as Scott reached down to swipe at the rocks in the arrowhead, on the hunt for a new skipping stone.

"So…" he started haltingly, looking up at the half-moon and trying to commit that to memory too. Each click and brush of plant or bug, he bundled up into his ear canal—every twinkle of a lonely star he pressed into the backs of his eyes, where the important things were.

Scott didn't react to Jack's mumble, seemingly absorbed in rock hunting.

"Will we—I mean…" His fingers tightened into denim, and he drew his knees up to his chest. "I know we're friends now, but… do you—"

"Yes!" Scott exclaimed, voice whipping across the clearing as he produced a wobbly, stodgy rock from the dirt he'd been knuckles deep in.

A moment later, the rock was skipping ten, eleven, twelve times across the lake's smooth surface, before slipping into the water. The echo of its journey seemed much longer and much more terrible. Scott was smiling again, but not as widely. He leaned back to glance at the half-moon, too. Jack could just see the pale, raised scar at his temple.

He'd earned that during their most spectacular—and last—'branch jumping competition'. Perhaps they knew more at eight, climbing to higher and higher branches, goading each other into jumping to the lake with reckless abandon, than they knew now, here, at the warbling line between this moment and the rest of their lives. Jack's eyes burned and burned. He didn't blink.

"That's how it's done, J. Didn't even need a perfect rock."

"Right."

Scott was quiet for a moment. He heard him fiddle with something as he kept his eyes trained on the militant line of trees bordering the lake. He was trying to learn each ridge and contour. They were impossibly tall, blacker still than the wine dark sky at their backs, and he suddenly felt very small and a little silly. But then Scott was tapping his shoulder, and Jack was turning, and there was something new in his hand, where the perfect stone had been. The tall, tall trees were forgotten.

"It's got three faces," Scott said quietly, and pointed to one of the small minute hands on the wristwatch in Jack's loose fingers. "You can, uh. You can put different time zones on it. So you don't—so you'll know."

And then, at the answering silence: "I took it from my dad's lockbox."

Jack stared at the watch for a moment, then turned his gaze back to Scott. His eyes were wide, unbelieving. His friend tilted his head, looking deeply serious as the chatter of the clearing seemed to quiet for a surreal stretch of seconds or hours or years that pulled between them. Everything was still, laid bare for Jack to store forever. It burned. All of it, burning and burning. And Scott leaned down and splashed a shower of ice-cold lakewater right into his face.

He reeled back, spluttering and laughing in equal measure, as the rubber watch in his hand ticked to midnight. And everything burned for a different reason now, from the freezing bite of Scott's affection, and from their rising laughter, because they were laughing together, and he couldn't even really remember why he'd been so sour before. He was with his friend. Scott was right—(he was always, always right)—they were meant to be having fun.

Jack didn't know what time it was in Australia. He didn't care.

"Your face!" Scott squawked with unbridled glee, before screeching as Jack started forward to return the favour. "Wait, wait! Truce! Truce!"

As he gave half-blind chase, watching Scott's back as he sprinted out of the reach of Jack's 'freezing hands', he tried to hold onto the free ring of his laughter, the crinkles at the corners of Scott's eyes, the easy way he dodged Jack's weak attempts at tackles. Five hours from now, his friend would pack himself into the back of his family car, with lives stuffed into suitcases, and be gone from him forever.

But now, it was the witching hour. He gripped the wristwatch tight as Scott's grin loosened the knot in his throat, that bunch of everything unsaid. And maybe Scott was not his to keep, but he'd had him, for a time.

At the end, or perhaps the edge, of everything, they had skipped rocks. Their magic came pouring back from the arrowhead and the lake and each final peal of roaring laughter, each echo of years of skipping rocks and failed fishing attempts and branch jumping competitions. It rose up without their sleeping. The moon was bright and full to bursting.

He'd never felt lighter.