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There was a small stream down in the woods on the south side of town. It flowed down from the mountains or somewhere out of state. Mae wasn’t really sure, as she and Casey had never followed it all the way to the source.
There was a point, partway through, where the stream almost turned into a proper river. It flowed faster and dug itself deeper into the ground. And situated right on the banks was a large, half-dead tree that hung over the stream, its roots partially exposed by erosion.
When they were little, she and Casey used to sit in that tree after school and talk about stuff or have pretend adventures. It was their tree. They hung out there a bunch.
He had been the one to find it. They used to explore the forest and get into all sorts of trouble back then. He spotted it while they were in fourth grade, and he turned it into their spot. It was a gnarled, bent old tree that they could both climb up and sit in without much trouble. It was a place where the two of them could get away from the world for a little bit and unwind.
Almost every day after school, they would head out there and hang out. Sometimes they’d wrestle or find a dead animal and poke it with a stick, and sometimes it was a more casual affair and the two of them just talked all afternoon.
Casey had a lot of ideas and plans in his head in those days. A lot of their time together was spent by him just telling Mae what he was thinking. Some of his ideas were attainable and some of them…were not. That didn’t matter to Mae though. She listened to them all and even threw in some of her own.
What he wanted to be when he grew up changed just about every day. They were just silly elementary school ideals, but he was so excited for them all. He wanted to be a police officer, an astronaut, a firefighter, an actor, a rock star. That last one lasted almost a year. That’s where the idea for the band came from.
For a while he planned to build a fort in their tree and stock it with water balloons for an imaginary war. And then he switched gears and laid out detailed plans to create an innovative movie theater chain with Mae. And then that was replaced with an idea to own a carnival and travel across the country.
Casey had so many hopes and dreams in him.
So much he wanted to do.
It was only when middle school started that reality began to set in and Casey started to mellow out some. Mae could see his change in attitude when he realized that a lot of what he wanted to do was much harder than he expected. Especially for someone like him in a town like Possum Springs.
That was when he realized that his family wasn’t the most cultured or well-to-do people in town. A lot of people looked down on him just because of who he was and who his parents were. Borowski was a well-respected name in town. Hartley was most definitely not.
It crushed him for a little while. It upset him. He would often complain to Mae about how unfair it felt while they were out at their tree. How he resented his family for what they were.
And then Gregg barreled into Mae’s life, and by extension, Casey’s, and everything was pushed to the side. The three of them fed into each other in a way that just Mae and Casey could never hope to match.
The three of them started doing crimes together then. Just small, trivial things, of course. Some petty theft. Some destruction of property. Gregg needed to burn off all his excess energy, Casey needed an outlet for his frustrations, and Mae just liked to destroy stuff.
There was no shortage of old, abandoned things in Possum Springs that could be broken without repercussion. It was about then that Mae got into baseball, and she got a bat as a present one year and the three of them wreaked havoc with it. No bottles were safe from their destructive tendencies.
But, in the end, all that crime was really just a Gregg thing.
That’s not to say he dragged the other two into it or forced it on them. They all loved it. But, the majority of the time, when it was just Casey and Mae by themselves, the two of them would retreat back to their tree and do their own thing.
They had spruced it up over the years, the area around their tree. There was a ramshackle stick bridge across the stream, warning signs they had stolen from the old glass factory, tattered blankets and sheets, a rope ladder, and a whole bunch of other things.
They never brought Gregg there.
It was their place.
A home away from home.
Casey talked about new plans he had. How he wanted to travel the world and see different cultures and countries. How there was some history museum a few hours away in another city that he really wanted to go see. How he was thinking about buying a drum set to play some music.
It was around that time that Mae broke off contact with Bea. Bea was too different compared to the rest of them. She wasn’t the type for crimes. Mae didn’t want to drag her down with them.
And what a terror Casey, Gregg, and Mae were. At least, they thought so at the time. Casey picked up skateboarding and practiced all over town, much to the anger of older residents. Gregg started to carry knives and got into fights sometimes. Mae began to shoplift small items and really rebelled against her parents. They got yelled at a lot by Mae’s Aunt Mall-Cop, as they called her, but they never got in any real trouble. They were more of a nuisance than anything, but they imagined themselves anarchists.
And so their ‘crimes’ continued.
When Casey took up smoking at the end of middle school, he would always smoke out by the tree. It was the only place he could do so without any adults judging him. Mae would always try a few cigarettes, but just about died from the smoke inhalation every time, so Casey tried to keep it down around her. It took until about midway through freshman year of high school for them to figure out that she was allergic.
Soon after, Casey started to head out to the train tracks by himself to smoke every day after school. The times they hung out at their tree grew less frequent after that. They only managed to meet up maybe once or twice a week.
And then almost immediately after that was when she snapped and attacked Andy Cullen. Beat his head in with a bat.
Things changed after that.
Mae had to go to court-mandated therapy with Doctor Hank for a while, and most days after school she ended up just going straight home because she couldn’t bear to be outside her room anymore.
Both Gregg and Casey had tried to help her, but she pushed them both away. She didn’t want to let anyone in, back then. But Casey could tell that she was hurting something fierce and only tried harder. He really cared, more so than anyone else.
It took almost half a year before Casey managed to drag Mae out to their tree and get her to talk to him. She had been avoiding him for a long time, but he eventually got through to her. He got to her like that.
That day, she broke down and confessed what she was going through and what had happened at the softball game. The shapes, the confusion, the anger, and the sadness. How she felt that nothing was there for her anymore.
And Casey helped her through it all.
He was the only one she ever confided in about all that, until Bea years later.
It helped, though.
She got better after that. The fearful looks that the other kids threw her and the names they called her behind her back stopped bothering her. Killer. Nightmare Eyes. She managed to ignore them.
He helped her get back to normal.
He helped pick up the pieces and put her back together.
Casey was…
He was…
Well, Mae didn’t really know what he was to her.
He was her oldest friend.
He was her best friend, even more so than Gregg.
They had been inseparable since they met.
They’d bared their souls to each other.
They had done crimes together.
They bled together.
They would die for each other.
He was there for her.
He was like an older brother sometimes, always trying to keep her safe and helping her with her problems.
At one point, she thought she might’ve been in love with him.
When she was going through puberty, some deep, stupid, optimistic part of her hoped that maybe they would get together someday. Many a time, she had imagined confessing her love for him and kissing him and running off to build a life together with him. It wouldn’t have been all that different from what they had now, she had thought at the time. She had even dropped a bunch of hints that she liked him, though to no avail.
It never happened of course.
He wasn’t interested. He never was, as far as she could tell. And, after a few years, she realized she wasn’t interested either. She loved him, but not like that. It had just been teenage hormones.
Instead, she got together with Cole in junior year, which was an absolute miracle after what had happened with Andy Cullen. Not everyone at school thought she was some freak or a vicious killer anymore, and that made her happy. Things were looking up for her.
And Casey stayed by himself, doing his own thing, silently supporting her like he always did. He got into guns around then and started hunting with his dad a lot. Mae went out with them once but couldn’t really get into it.
They hung out occasionally over the next year, though rarely at the tree anymore. When Mae wasn’t doing things with Cole, she and Casey mostly just slummed around town with Gregg doing whatever peaked their interests that day.
Then Gregg started going out with Angus, and they began spending more time together by themselves, so it was back to just Casey and Mae again.
Back at their tree.
Casey’s ideas and plans had changed drastically since he was younger. They were a lot more realistic and a lot less interesting now. About the only cool thing he was still into was playing drums in the band, but he knew that that wasn’t ever going to go anywhere.
He talked about starting up his own business doing something or other, but knew he would never find any funding. He talked about settling and finding some menial, low-wage job as a mechanic or a janitor or a construction worker. He talked about just leaving Possum Springs to travel the country and figure things out as he went along. He thought about that one a lot. Thought about hopping a train and riding the rails to anywhere far away.
But he never did.
He stayed. He stayed with Mae and the rest of his friends and family.
During senior year, the two of them began to drift apart some. Mae had to reassure Cole a couple of times that no, there was no reason to be jealous of her hanging out with Casey so much. He was like a brother. They weren’t seeing each other.
But, regardless of what she said, for Cole’s sake, she stopped hanging with Casey as much as she used to. Outside of school, they only really saw each other a few times a month, and that was generally only when they got together with Gregg and Angus.
And then before Mae knew it, she was graduating high school. She had somehow managed to get decent enough grades to get into college, and she would be leaving at the end of the summer. Out of everyone, she was the only one getting out of Possum Springs.
And then summer came. Her last summer vacation.
Cole ended up breaking up with her as nicely as he could, because he wasn’t willing to do the whole long-distance relationship thing. Mae cried for a while, and then Casey helped her get over it and she wrote ‘Go Get Dead, Angel Face,’ which, in hindsight, was a terrible, terrible song that her friends would lord over her for the rest of her life.
But it was a good thing, in the end, being free of Cole.
She and Casey hung out a lot that summer.
It was nice.
That whole summer was one big goodbye for the two of them. One last hurrah. They did a lot together. They hung out back at their tree almost every day and pointedly tried to ignore the fact their time together was rapidly coming to an end.
It was almost like they were kids again.
And it ended much too fast.
The day before she left for college, she spent the whole day with Gregg and Casey. It was a great time. One of her favorite memories.
And when Gregg went back home at the end of the night, she and Casey went off on their own and hung out at their tree one last time.
They talked all through the night about anything and everything, about the future and the past, about hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings, and before they knew it, it was five in the morning. They spent the entire night together.
And Mae’s bus to college left at seven o’clock. In two hours.
Mae never regretted that. Sure, she felt as if she was about to drop dead from exhaustion, despite the fact her blood was about seventy percent coffee, and her parents about killed her because she was almost missed the bus ride out, but it was worth it. Casey was always worth it, to her.
Everyone came to see her off, of course. Her parents, Gregg and Angus, and Casey. They all had their goodbyes and their well-wishes for her.
And then, very last, was Casey.
She could still remember him standing there, trying his best not to cry.
They hugged each other for what felt like ages and said their final, final goodbyes.
He was glad that one of them at least was able to get out of the town, he had told her. He would miss her a lot.
She would miss him too.
When she got onto the bus and looked out the window at everyone, all waving goodbye, Casey just stood there, staring straight at her, his eyes never wavering.
He started to cry then, but tried to pretend that he wasn’t. He didn’t want anyone to see. She could tell though. She always could.
As the bus pulled away, she waved back at everyone.
And Casey continued to stand there, with his paws jammed into his pockets, and watched her leave.
As the bus turned the corner and drove off down the road, everyone disappeared into the distance.
And that was the last time that Mae Borowski ever saw Casey Hartley.
It was the last time that Casey ever saw Mae.
The fact that Possum Springs had no cell reception was particularly cruel. She couldn’t really keep in touch with anyone back home while she was in Durkillesburg because none of them had phones. Sure, she tried to message on the computer them from time to time, but that pretty much stopped when her condition started to resurface again.
And when she was at her lowest, living off pizza and cough medicine, when she couldn’t leave her room because she was too afraid of that horrible statue outside her window staring down at her, and everything she knew began to fall away from her again, she tried to hold on to Casey.
She tried to remember him and how he helped her after that initial incident all those years ago, how he managed to help fix her in a way that Doctor Hank couldn’t.
And that was how she got through her time at college. Inch by inch.
It was because of him that she managed to hold on as long as she did, when everything around her was meaningless shapes.
Because Casey Hartley was family.
He was a part of her soul.
He knew her, and she knew him.
No matter what happened to her, she always had him to hang on to. Just like she had Bea, Gregg, and Angus to hold on to now.
She loved him. She really did. She may not have loved him in a romantic sense, but she loved him as strongly as she possibly could. She loved him more than life itself, and she knew that he did the same right back.
Sure, he wasn’t perfect in any sense of the word, but that didn’t matter to Mae. He was her friend. Her companion. Her other half.
He was a wonderful person, despite what everyone else thought of him.
He really cared.
He was selfless.
He was bound for glory.
He had a vast imagination.
He could find joy in the simplest of things.
He was always there for his friends.
He wanted to do something with himself.
He wanted to be someone important.
He wanted to get out of Possum Springs and experience life to the fullest.
He wanted so desperately to be anywhere different.
But he never got the chance.
His life began and ended in Possum Springs.
He was dead.
Killed by a bunch of people who looked at him and saw nothing of worth.
Killed because they only saw the worst of him.
Killed because they thought no one would ever miss him.
Well, Mae missed him.
She missed him hard.
His parents missed him.
Gregg missed him.
Angus and Bea missed him too.
There weren’t thousands of people crying because Casey Hartley was gone.
But there were enough.
And only four people in the entire world knew what actually happened to him.
He didn’t run away and hop a train.
His body was at the bottom of some pit in a collapsed mine.
And he deserved more than that.
Mae felt that he deserved a mausoleum. That’s what he deserved. A big mausoleum like something the ancient Greeks built. Or a pyramid, like the Egyptians.
Or at the very least, a funeral, with his body buried in a coffin in the ground and a headstone to mark his final resting place.
But that couldn’t happen either.
There needed to be something for him, Mae felt. Casey needed something and someone to honor him, because no one else would do it.
And that’s where she was now.
With Gregg and Angus and Bea.
Mourning the loss of their friend at the one place in Possum Springs he ever really cared about.
At their tree.
Her and Casey’s tree, down by the stream in the woods.
They stood there, remembering him.
All of them wishing that he had managed to die anywhere else.