Read Freewill for Free Online

talk. Tell her, everything you know. Tell. Her. Everything.
    â€œI was going to be a pilot,” you say. Your eyes are suddenly so watery you could be looking at her from the bottom of a chlorine pool. “But they put me in shop. Wood shop. Tied me up in wood shop. The opposite of learning to be a pilot. Like a punishment.”
    Now you have done it. Don’t you ever tire of it? Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like to talk to somebody and not scare her away?
    She goes right up to the sculpture, rubs her hand over it, and as she does, you can feel it in your own fingertips. The hours of careful rubbing, just so, not too fast, but not too slow, until there is nothing but butter there to the touch. She looks at it and talks to you.
    â€œIt is very nice, what you did. It is very nice. Beautiful.”
    Beautiful. That didn’t hurt a bit.
    â€œYou know,” you say, backing up, backing up the hill, backing away from Angela and the poor lovely girl whom you knew. Did you know her? “Even if you did like guys, I wouldn’t bother you. I wouldn’t even think of it.”
    You make her smile. She still has her hand on the piece. She looks your way, smiles a rare broad grin that makes her look about half as old. “I think I know that already,” she says.
    She does not try to persuade you not to go.
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    Listen to it, Will. You are the one who keeps setting the alarm to turn on the radio to talk the talk and deliver you the news before your being gets filled with anything as useless as music or the goodness of oatmeal. So you listen.
    People are copycats. Teenagers are worst of all. Why be like that, when life is still fairly new and all the choices arestill wide-open? What is wrong with people, that they are doomed to repeat what has come before?
    Helpless? Is that what they believe? That they are locked into a pattern of behavior that was established perhaps before they were born, and so when they get the signal, they leap?
    Small towns are the worst, aren’t they? Why is it that one sad sorry story has to lead into another? Shouldn’t it, if life made any sense at all, work the other way around? Cautionary tale, and all?
    Hear that? This one was seventeen. Say, you are seventeen, aren’t you? This one was also a guy, though he was neither a pilot nor a woodworker. And importantly, this sad unfortunate young man dated that sad unfortunate young lady, while you never did. You’ve never dated anybody, so you’re safe there.
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    This time, you are not alone.
    In the murky blue of predawn, she is already there when you arrive at the bridge. The diving point.
    The point of departure.
    You know how you manage it. You manage it because you keep setting the foolish alarm ever earlier. You should sleep more. Even when you lie there, hour blooming on hour, you know you are not doing anything like sleep.
    But Angela. What is she doing here? You were to be first.You are supposed to be first. You like being first. Second isn’t even close.
    So you should be more upset than this.
    â€œHi,” you say as if you had been expecting her, which makes no sense.
    â€œHi,” she says in the same way, which makes plenty.
    You lay the wood carefully against the riveted steel abutment near the hundred-year-old dedication plaque, high above the burbling brown river.
    â€œSo then. What are you doing here?”
    She shrugs. “Grieving. Mourning. I’m curious. I’m a ghoul. I’m afraid. You tell me.”
    You nod. Good move there. Could mean a lot of things. Could mean nothing. In your own ways, both speaking exactly the same language.
    â€œYou don’t seem the type to be afraid,” you say.
    â€œThat’s appearances for ya,” she says.
    You go to the edge together, peer over together. Talk doesn’t come easy now. Talk never does. But this is worse, these things more