The Other Girl

I remember the girl by the creek, though her face is always blurred around the edges, like the light was too bright that summer. I can still see the way she stood on the rocks, hair stirring in the warm breeze, watching me with a quiet patience I didn’t understand at the time. We were seven going on eight.

She had the same soft, white-blond hair, the same furry caterpillar eyebrows, straight and stubborn above her eyes. But her eyes were softer than my sharp blue, and her smile stretched wider across her face than mine ever could. Back then, she felt like the only steady thing in a world I couldn’t quite make sense of, because somehow, she was always there.

She was hopping from rock to rock on the creek when I first saw her, chanting:

Cinderella dressed in yella,

Went upstairs to kiss a fella.

Made a mistake and kissed a snake—

How many doctors did it take?

She noticed me mid-line and froze, balancing on one leg on top of a rock.

A lopsided smile tugged my mouth, and I finished the verse in my head.

“Take your shoes off!” she shouted.

If I ever asked her name, she pressed a finger to her lips, shushing me, her eyebrows wiggling.

“No name, no name,” she’d chant and run off, wet feet slapping stone.

So, I stopped asking.

I followed anyway.

We dashed up and down the creek side, slipping on the rocks, splashing mud, until we flopped on a warm flat boulder, breathless and soaked. Her face had a dark bruise on her cheek, just like mine. My breath hitched, and I looked away. Maybe she had a life like mine.

That’s how I became the one who talked the most, while her wide blue eyes just took everything in.

Now, as I think about it, I'm not sure how long she’d really been there, or if those afternoons at the creek happened the way I remember. I recall the cold rush of the water at my ankles, the grit of sand between my toes, but the girl herself wavers in and out. I can’t even recall her voice clearly, or how she always seemed to know when I needed her.

That summer, whenever I tore across the meadow, tears streaming, trying to outrun what I never could, she’d be waiting on the rocks as if she’d been there all along. We’d chase dragonflies and search for crayfish under the summer sun, and for a little while, I’d forget how scary my home felt since everything had changed.

Sometimes I would run to the creek early, before things in the house got out of hand. I could feel it coming in the air, before the shouting ever started. I didn’t think she was there the day that I had barreled down the embankment, hair wild, a stick in hand, thwacking at plants and rocks. When I spotted a turtle and raised my arm to swing, she caught the stick mid-air. She pressed her forehead to mine and whispered, “Hurting people hurt others.” Her breath feathering my face, she said, “You don’t need to do that. We got this.” Maybe it was her quiet words, or perhaps it was her secret smile, but even the creek ran calmer that day.

Something in me had shifted.

That was years ago, and I don’t remember deciding to drive out there, to that godforsaken place. But I found myself standing on the bank again, staring at the same rocks we had once hopped across, ridiculously hopeful, searching for something, for her. There were no pictures of her, not even in the old class school year albums I checked. No one remembered me being with another girl. She had vanished like a dream.

But there was another reason I had come. I clambered over boulders and under fallen trees to our spot, harder than I remembered, and dropped to my knees. I moved a mid-sized rock and dug until my fingers scratched metal. This is where we had hidden our crowns and power stones for safekeeping. I thumbed the rusted latch open, tin creaking, and there were the crown and the stone. But only one pair. Hers was not there.

I felt a jolt of fear and an ache behind my ribs. The flower crown looked so fragile, I didn’t dare touch it, so I closed my fingers around the smooth river stone, the one we searched so hard for, then spit-shined and baked on a bed of wildflowers, on top of the hottest boulder we could find. I felt my lopsided smile return; it had been a proper ceremony.

But the questions came anyway. How could she always have known how I felt before I did? Why did she always have a matching bruise?

A ripple traveled across the creek, and something inside me rippled with it. I can almost hear her laughter, the slap of wet feet on stone, there and not there.

But only one pair.

The last time I saw her, I remember it in flashes: her wet hair, the glint of a dragonfly wing, the way she kept looking over her shoulder as if listening for something I couldn’t hear. “We don’t have much time,” she said once, though I didn’t understand what she meant. I stayed as long as I wanted; no one ever came looking for me.

Until they did.

Voices crashed through the trees, across the creek, loud, frantic, then threatening. I glanced at her, hoping she would tell me what to do. She stepped close, held my fingers, and looked me straight in the eye, wiggling her Caterpillar brows. “I believe in you,” she said, simple and sure, flashing her special smile.

Her hand fell away as the voices got closer. I looked toward the trees, then back to her, but she was gone, her wet footprints already fading from the boulder’s sun-warmed surface.

Sitting there with the tin in my lap, I finally understood why no one remembered her but me. The realization moved through me like a shock; she had given me comfort, calm, and a safe place through the hardest summer of my life, because she had been mine. The loss of her hit me all over again, deep and visceral, but so did something else.

I stood then, feeling the strength in my legs, the quiet resilience that had carried me through every year since. I breathed in the scent of moss, creek water, and pine. Then I smiled, a full, wide smile that stretched across my face to match hers. Someone had believed in me, and that’s all I had needed to hear.

I slipped the stone into my pocket before I left. As I turned to go, a single wavelet crossed the creek, brushing against the rocks we used to leap across. For a moment, I almost saw her there again, but it was only my reflection, smiling widely back at me.