What She Found in the Woods

I nod, and then something occurs to me. ‘You don’t expect me to hunt anything right now, do you?’ I ask.

He tries not to laugh. ‘Let’s just work on learning how to shoot for today.’

Bo slips the quiver off his back and puts it at my feet. ‘OK. First thing is holding the bow,’ he says. ‘Oh, wait. You’re going to need my arm-guard.’

He unties the thick piece of leather covering the inside of his right forearm and starts to tie it around my right arm, then he stops, like he’s realized something.

‘Are you right-handed?’ he asks, looking at me.

He smells faintly of – not a perfume, exactly, but some blend of natural oils like lavender and sage mixed with cedar and sandalwood. It’s feminine and masculine at the same time. Under that, he smells like a guy who’s been walking around in a forest, but that doesn’t smell bad to me. He notices me leaning towards him, and he freezes, terrified.

‘Yes,’ I say, but he’s forgotten the question. ‘I’m right-handed.’

He takes a long time to recover, and that’s when I realize he must have thought I was going to kiss him. He’s blushing and shaking so badly, it makes me wonder if he’s ever been kissed before. I don’t think so. And I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to kiss anyone more.

But he’s done tying the guard to my left forearm and he’s handed me the bow already and taken a step back from me. And now he looks mortified again. And I remember my first date. I was thirteen and he was fourteen, and Jinka set us up. I didn’t really know him or particularly want to go on a date with him, but Jinka liked his friend, and she chose me to double date with her. Of course, I was so thrilled to share this bonding moment with Jinka that it didn’t matter what boys were with us. We had our first dates together. We had our first kisses together in the back of the same movie theatre. We’d be best friends forever.

I didn’t choose the first boy I made out with. In fact, I didn’t really choose any of the boys I’ve dated, because since then I’ve only dated boys that made sense within our group of friends, and that’s more political than it is romantic. Either that, or I’ve dated guys like Rob, who chased me so spectacularly that saying no to them would have been, well . . . rude.

I’ve never kissed a boy I’ve actually wanted to kiss. But I want to kiss Bo very much. And now I’m the one who’s blushing and shaking. I take a mental step back, and I see us – Bo and I – two idiots standing in a forest thinking about first kisses. I start laughing.

‘So, where’s the safety on this thing?’ I ask.

Bo laughs with me, and all the awkwardness is gone.

‘Right,’ he says, a teacher now, ‘let’s see you plant your feet.’

I had no idea how hard it was to stand. Definitely a skill I’ve taken for granted since I was about a year old. Bo keeps sticking two fingers into different points of my body, and with almost no effort at all, he’s able to tip me over.

‘Enough!’ I say, after about fifteen minutes of this. I turn and nudge him to give him a taste of his own medicine, but he doesn’t budge an inch. ‘Oh. That’s annoying. You didn’t tip over at all.’

‘I’m not doing this to annoy you,’ he tells me levelly. ‘You’ll see when you draw the arrow back. Go ahead. Give it a try standing just like that without your weight distributed.’

I try. ‘Ouch,’ I say. I shake out my fingers. ‘That’s really hard.’

‘Yeah. You have to pull from between your shoulder blades. Like this.’

He turns his back to me, plants his feet, nocks an arrow, raises his bow, and draws. His whole back ripples under his worn T-shirt.

‘Brace your shoulders and back with your legs or you’ll hurt yourself after two or three pulls. It’s all in your legs. You see?’ He turns to face me.

‘I see, but I don’t have . . . what you’ve got going on under there,’ I say, gesturing to his shoulder-chest area. I hold out one of my skinny arms as proof.

‘My sister Raven isn’t that much thicker than you, and she’s a better shot than me,’ he says, and then he sees something. He takes my arm and turns it gently. ‘You’re all bruised.’

I twist the underside of my right arm up so I can see what Bo’s looking at. The crook of my armpit is purple. And now Bo looks angry.

‘What moron taught you to shoot?’ he asks, eyes blazing with protective indignation.

‘No, it’s my fault,’ I say. ‘I should have used a different calibre, but I was feeling stubborn.’ That’s not the right word, so I shake my head and rethink it. ‘I guess I was feeling like I needed something.’ I’m struggling. Why did I do that? And why did I say it wasn’t that hard afterwards? It was hard. ‘I think I did it because I wanted to set myself apart from the other people I was with. I wanted to prove . . .’ I break off, completely at a loss. ‘Something,’ I finish lamely.

Bo watches me for a moment, but I can’t read his face. ‘We’ll do this in a few days,’ he says. He picks up his quiver and slings his bow behind his back.

‘What?’ I say, stunned. And a bit hurt, actually. ‘Why won’t you teach me now?’

‘Heal first,’ he says.

I’m just standing here, staring at him, because even though what he said makes perfect sense, I just told him something real and not very flattering about myself, and he tells me to go home. Why do people bail on me when I tell them what I’m really thinking? He starts to get uncomfortable. He looks like a little boy when he’s uncomfortable.