In Seven Minutes

Jackie and I were best friends until I tried to kiss her and she told me she didn't like boys. We were thirteen, I think; the summer before eighth grade, so yea. I had been hanging out with Jackie's family all summer. They had a nice house, and even though it was old, the wooden floors reminded me of what homes should be like. Kind of romantic, right? Everyone's smiling around the dinner table in a well furnished house with paisley window shades and blue wooden sidings.
Also my own parents decided that it was time to fight again--I can't remember what this one was about, but it started when I found my mom crying on the red sofa in the dining room with a piece of paper in her hand. It didn't end until after they both had challenged the other to a divorce. But they couldn't do it. Hell of a summer though.

Jackie and I had gotten bored of pretty much everything else to do around town and in her house. No new movies. No new stores. We had biked to the lake nearly every day. TV was almost painful, we'd watched it so much. I had started looking through the cabinets and drawers in her kitchen, staring at the multicolor cooking set and the fine silver with fluted handles tucked away underneath the regular silverware in a kind of hidden compartment. I was that bored.
One of us suggested tag. I laughed because there were only two of us. What about hide and seek? That was Jackie's idea, definitely. I wouldn't tell her I was scared of the dark, but I was especially afraid of the dark when I also happened to be in her basement.
The stairs creeped and as my feet alighted on the concrete floor I instantly realized that this was a horrible idea, to be playing hide and seek in a basement that randomly erupted with noises of plumbing and strained air conditioners. She wanted to hide first, and I agreed. She turned off the light and as I sat down on the stairs, eyes in my palms, counting aloud to twenty or thirty, I tried very hard to hear her. Her summertime bare feet sweeping across the smooth floor. The air circulating around her as she moved carefully through the rooms below her house.
But I could not. And as I walked around after reaching thirty, navigating like a blind man, I tried to humor myself. Maybe get her to laugh so that I could find her and we could both go upstairs and do something less creepy. Like a cross word.