light & gather

Ryan was my best friend in the neighborhood. My mom used to say we were so close we could’ve been twins because we were born on the same day.

Ryan had spiky hair and a BMX bike my mom said wasn’t safe, but we took turns doing jumps on it anyway. Sometimes when I slept over, we’d sneak out after his parents went to bed and cut through the woods behind our neighborhood to the elementary school. We’d hang out under the bleachers or by the swings, talking until we got bored and decided to go back home.

Ryan loved to try to scare me. He’d tell ghost stories about kids who got lost in the woods and never came back. I always acted like I didn’t believe him, but I did — at least a little. Nothing ever scared Ryan, though. Halloween was his favorite holiday, and he treated it like a sport.

One year, his parents let him watch Nightmare on Elm Street, and he showed up dressed as Freddy Krueger — plastic glove, striped sweater, the works. I went as Mikey from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and he teased me all night for it.
“Cowabunga, dude,” he’d say, in this terrible surfer voice.
“At least my mask doesn’t look like it got dipped in acid,” I told him.
He grinned and said, “That’s the point.”

We lived in one of those good neighborhoods — the kind with full-size candy bars and neighbors who went all out with fog machines and strobe lights. House after house, we filled our pillowcases with chocolate until they were almost too heavy to carry.

Then we turned down a street I’d never seen before.

There was only one streetlight, flickering, and one house at the very end with a blue light shining in the window. Everything else was pitch-black. It was almost the end of the night, and something about that street felt wrong — quiet in a way that didn’t feel right.

Ryan dared me to go but I said no. He called me a chicken. I said I didn’t care.
Then he double-dog-dared me to ring the doorbell.
I still said no.

He laughed and called me a baby — “Come on, scaredy-cat!” — but I wasn’t going near that place.
“If you want someone to go so bad,” I told him, “why don’t you go?”

He stopped laughing. The blue light blinked like it knew what we were both thinking. He stood a little taller, smirked, and said, “No problem.”

I watched as he started down the street, the sound of his candy bag brushing against his jeans. When he stepped under the streetlight, it flickered once… and then went out. So did the blue light in the window.

Everything went dark.

I stood there, frozen, waiting for him to laugh or jump out and yell “Boo!” — but he didn’t. I called his name. Nothing.

After a while, I convinced myself he was just playing a trick — sneaking back to his house to make me look stupid. So I went home.

The next day at school, I asked Ryan what happened. He just shrugged and said he didn’t know what I was talking about.
That afternoon, when I asked if he wanted to ride bikes, he said he had too much homework.

After that, Ryan wasn’t the same. He started going by his first name — Dustin — and stopped hanging out with me altogether. I’d see him at school or sometimes at the grocery store with his mom, but he acted like he barely knew me.

I tried to find that street again, but I never could. It was gone — like it had never been there at all.

And Ryan — or Dustin — was never the same again.