8:14 AM

Throwing his linty, fleece jacket over his shoulders, Oscar dashes out the back door through the cool morning air to the garage, where he hastily fumbles with the padlock before yanking the door aside, grabbing his bike by the frame, and spinning it around to face the street. There is a sudden, jarring clank from the gears as his sneaker slams into a reluctant pedal. He leaves the garage door unlocked. Immediately, the icy air attacks his deep-blue eyes, and his vision blurs. Heart racing, calves burning, blond hair whipped by the wind, he zips around turn after ninety-degree turn, without pausing to appreciate the soft petrichor of the damp asphalt beneath his tires. 

As he approaches the high school, he swings his backpack around front to retrieve his bike lock, pulling out his key to twist it open. He struggles with this for a minute, then pauses his efforts for a moment to turn onto the bike path that leads to the back of his school. Careening down the narrow path, shaky hands and misty eyes working intently at the lock, Oscar notes that despite the enormous student body, his high school campus is calm and silent. He grimaces as he anticipates his teacher’s look of disdain at his late arrival. He glances up from his work. For a split second, his subdued eyes sharpen with terror, and---

7:50 AM

Amelia strolls across the front yard to her battered 1996 Suzuki X-90, backpack slung  over one shoulder, long brown hair still slightly damp from her shower. Absentmindedly, she places her mug of tea on the sunroof and removes her key from her faded jeans pocket. Inserting it into the lock, she turns her wrist, but the key won’t twist, and the door refuses to budge. Perplexed, she removes the key and slips it back in, jiggling it, but to no avail. A look of dread washes over her face as it dawns on her that she most definitely will not be driving to school today. Calculating quickly, she slips her backpack over the other shoulder and starts sprinting down the sidewalk. Wisps of steam catch the morning sun and form a lazy path through the air as they rise from the abandoned beverage atop her car.

As she races along, Amelia curses her luck and laments the loss of the instruction she’ll inevitably miss before she arrives. This keeps white-hot adrenaline coursing through her veins, and her numb feet fall one after the other, tattered sneakers pounding unforgiving concrete with each step. Nearing the final stretch, she veers abruptly onto a path lined with oleander bushes, which brush her arms on both sides as she squeezes between them. Still confused as to why her key failed, she pulls the ring out of her pocket to examine it again, and it snags on an especially intrusive branch of oleander, flying off to the side of the path. Cursing her misfortune again, Amelia stoops to retrieve her keys, intently examining them as she emerges from behind the---

Amelia wakes to find herself staring into a bright, blue sky. For an instant, she is calm, enveloped in a sweet odor that fills the air around her, and in a pleasant warmth that seems to radiate from the soft ground. Then, the ground breathes. Amelia is suddenly conscious and pushes herself to her feet, revealing the softness to be not the ground but the skin of a strange boy lying asleep in the tall grass. Rolling and staggering to her feet, she slowly raises her head, and what she sees amazes her. A gigantic dragonfly buzzes peacefully past her, and encircling the meadow are enormous tre-

“What the fuck?”

She whips around to see that the boy is awake and gawking at the scene around them. 

“Uh, hi,” she says, starting slightly when the boy’s eyes met hers, She is acutely aware for the first time that they are both entirely naked. She isn’t bothered, though, because something about his eyes makes her feel at ease. Then, they travel slowly down her body, and the pleasant sense dissolves abruptly. 

“Hey, buddy. Quit it!” she snaps. The boy jolts up as if from a trance and reddens, realizing what he’s been doing. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” the boy says, and when his eyes meet hers, Amelia kicks herself for feeling at ease once again.

“I’m Oscar,” the boy says, pushing himself to his feet.

“Amelia,” she responds, and for a moment, the air is charged with silence. Then, a drop of water the size of Oscar falls from the sky and lands squarely on his head, drenching him. The two teens stand there in shock for a moment but are knocked to their senses when another drop lands right between them, spraying them both with water and dirt.

Oscar spits sour, tangy mud out of his mouth and spins around wildly looking for shelter, just in time to get another faceful of debris. He’s knocked backward to the ground and blinded. His life flashes before his eyes, or rather, it would, but instead his vision is completely blank, and all he can hear are the impacts of raindrops on the earth around him. Before he has time to contemplate this, the sky lets loose another drop, which strikes him violently in the face. His eyes are cleared, and he sees a hand stretched out to him from above. 

“The rain’s picking up, we have to run!” Amelia is hardly heard over the barrage of water assaulting the ground. She helps Oscar to his feet, and they break for the trees, tripping over clumps of grass as they watch the sky, dodging drops left and right. Miraculously, they arrive at the edge of the meadow just as the shower turns to a torrential downpour. They rest in the shelter of the enormous branches until their breath returns, at which point Oscar remarks, 

“Well, there is a bright side. I’ve never felt cleaner.”

Amelia lets out an embarrassingly loud guffaw, which she immediately tries to stifle. The awe the two feel staring into the deep, dark forest is only slightly dampened by her occasional giggles. 

“Shall we venture on?” Oscar inquires, shooting a look back at the meadow, which is rapidly flooding. Amelia responds with only a worried look his direction, causing the corners of his mouth to twitch slightly upwards with amusement. The pair set forth into the quiet woods.

They talk as they walk on, and Oscar learns that Amelia also has no memory of what life she may have had before waking in the clearing. Time passes, but they don’t know how much, as little sunlight penetrates the dense canopy, and the air remains cool and calm. The forest grows darker still, the trees more peculiarly colored and shaped, and they fill their time with games to distract from the agitation they both feel.

“I spy with my little eye something that is… black,” Oscar wearily sighs and pauses, resting a hand against the smooth bark of a nearby tree trunk. Amelia rolls her eyes as she comes to a halt next to him, then her face visibly whitens, her eyes growing with fear.

“Is it that snake on the tree?” she replies meekly. Before Oscar can say “bingo,” the air is filled first with a chorus of thumps and then an overwhelming hissing as dozens of snakes drop to the ground, encircling them. Nearly blind in the dark forest, Amelia instinctively backs away from the sound and finds herself pinned between it and a tree, petrified with fear. In a second, Oscar is there as well, shooting her a terrified glance as he leans back against the trunk with her. It gives way. 

They tumble back into the enormous tree and roll to the stop at the beginning of a dim, winding tunnel leading off through the earth. They need not decide what to do, as the hole has caved behind them, and there is no use in staying put. The tunnel grows brighter as they walk on, and soon, they can see a curve up ahead through which orange light spills inside.

They tentatively emerge, and before them is the sun setting over an ocean, casting vibrant shimmers onto the water and a warm glow onto the sky. The rain has ceased, and an earthy petrichor lingers in the air. Oscar has the sense that he’s smelt it before, but he can’t imagine when or where it might have been, but he doesn’t care. He is free. The teens collapse to the grass and watch the warm hues give way to a cool, light purple. A gentle gust of wind stirs Amelia’s hair, and she lets out a soft sigh of relief and contentment. While I’m sitting here, she thinks, there is nothing the world can throw at me. She is free. 

As the cool air of the evening graces his skin, Oscar feels for the first time since the summer days of his youth like all of his pieces can come together, and he can be simply him. Amelia stretches her arms wide to absorb the soft electricity floating on the breeze, and her eyes meet Oscar’s. Deep pools of blue gaze calmly into her soul, drawing her closer. He wraps his arms around her waist. Before they know it, the distance between them is no more. Warmth envelops them, and the world melts away. Somewhere far from their sunset on the ocean, nearly in another universe, two heart rate monitors pulse in unison, gaining momentum.