The Tree of Knowledge

On Saturday, July 7th 2012 I had a perfect day.

The night before, I had hardly slept, because all I could think about was Jace. I don’t know how long exactly I had been in love with him. Maybe I always had been.

It’s possible that I fell in love with him the day his dog mowed me over on the sidewalk when we were five years old. I skinned my elbow and cried while the puppy licked my face. Jace took me to his mom, who put a band-aid on my arm. But it was Jace who kissed it to make it better and promised the puppy didn’t mean to hurt me.

The “puppy” was a two year old Great Dane named Duke. Why Jace’s mom ever thought little Jace, at less than four feet tall including his rather formidable afro, could ever have managed to hang onto the leash of a dog already twice his size, I will never know. When she wasn’t looking we used to pretend Duke was a horse and ride him around the block. When we were six, Jace broke his leg trying to jump from the branch of his father’s pomegranate tree onto Duke’s back. That was a long summer of endless rounds of Twisted Metal on my PlayStation before the cast came off and we could go back to climbing trees.

When we got older, we traded in tree climbing for indoor rock climbing. We spent half our life at Stone Works, a historic old grain silo converted into a rock climbing gym. The six clustered silos had climbing holds hammered into the walls, all the way to the top. It was the nation’s tallest indoor climb, and conveniently located a bike ride away from home. It was there that I fractured my tailbone bouldering when I was twelve, falling off the wall from what should have been a safe distance had my rear end not smacked right into a rather pointy hold on the way down. Jace teased me mercilessly for months about my “broken ass.”

Best friends doesn’t seem like an adequate phrasing. We were inseparable.

But we never dated. Our first homecoming dance freshman year of High School we talked about going together, but after much discussion and a healthy mutual dose of self denial we decided our friendship mattered too much to risk on a fling.

So Jace took Brittany Melbourne. I did not like Brittany Melbourne. They dated for the next few months before she demanded that he stop spending so much time with me and he told her to take a hike. Brittany showed up at Stone Works that night and yelled at me, but it proved more than a little pointless. I was clinging to the wall at the top of the silo at the time and all I heard was angry, screechy echoes.

After Brittany it was Lila, and then Melanie, and then finally Ingrid, who Jace swore up and down was “the one”, but I knew that had more to do with the perfect curve of her hips than her personality. He even tried to take her climbing, which she put up with right up until she broke a nail off on a hold.

But he still insisted she was the one right up until she went down on the quarterback at a party.

That was June 30th, 2012. So on July 7th we found ourselves to both be single for the first time in a very long time. And out of nowhere (though, I suppose I had really known in all along) I realized I was in love with my best friend. I was out on a first date with this guy, Joe, and Joe wants to see some low brow comedy. I suggested a slasher movie and Joe says, “Horror movies are dumb.” And all I can think is how Jace and I have watched every trailer, dying to see this movie, and how much I’d rather be at the movies with him. I wanted to give Joe an elaborate comeback explaining the importance of the Horror genre to cinema, but in the moment all I managed was, “You’re dumb.” And I went home.

After staying up all night thinking about it, I rode my bike to his house at seven in the morning and climbed the drain pipe to his window. He was snoring almost as loud as Duke was on the bed next to him when I shook him awake. Unable to contain myself any longer, I blurted out, “I’m in love with you.” Jace opened one eye, still half asleep and muttered, “I love you too, Kit.” before closing his eyes again. A full ten agonizing seconds passed before he sat bolt upright, really looked at me this time and said, “Wait, what did you say?!”

I didn’t bother to repeat myself. Instead, I leaned in and kissed him. For those four beautiful seconds the world stopped and he pulled me tight against him. I forgot to breath. When it ended, he looked at me and asked, “Are you sure you want to risk this?”

“Hell yes.”

We spent the rest of the day snuggled together on a branch of the pomegranate tree. We laughed and we made out and held hands and watched Duke chase squirrels. We talked about all the people who were going annoyingly declare they knew it all along. All the things we wanted to do. The places that would be awesome to fool around in.

I didn’t ride home that evening. I floated. I felt so high and so wonderful I thought I’d never come down.

When I came through the front door my dad screamed at me and demanded to know where I’d been all day. He’d been crying. My mom didn’t even look up. She was watching the news on TV, staring, completely transfixed by the images.

“What happened?” I asked.