Mem'ries

“Mem’ries! All alone in the mooooonlight....”

Penny’s singing, which might more accurately be described as shrieking, reverberated off the rock walls of the cave.

“Stop!” I shouted.

“Yeah, you might cause a cave in or something,” said Ben.

The three of us were working – more like, squeezing -- our way through a womb-like underground tunnel, in search of... the other side of the river.

“I can hear my ECHO, echo, echo, echo, echoooooooooo...” Penny persisted, switching from singing to simply making noise.

“Nuh-uh,” Ben nudged her. “You’re doing that on purpose. There is no echo in here.”

“Is, too. Is, too. Is, toooooo....”

Ben punched her in the arm.

“Ow! That hurt.”

“Serves you right. Serves you right. Serves you right...” I made fun of her.

Penny stuck her tongue out at me. I could barely make it out in the yellowish glow of my official Girl Scout flashlight.

“God, it’s a good thing Nick couldn’t come afterall,” Ben changed the subject.

“Whaddya mean?” Penny looked at him like he knew some top secret secret.

“I mean, numbnuts, he mighta got stuck in here!”

Ben was right. While Ben was taller than me, he was also pretty skinny. Nick, on the other hand, was a giant, built like a linebacker. He actually just might have gotten stuck in some of the parts of the tunnel we’d just been moving through.

But Nick hadn’t been allowed to come with us. He had told us his parents wouldn’t let him come.

Why he had told his parents what we were planning on doing this afternoon was beyond any of us, but his dad had gotten real mad at him and outright forbidden him to go inside any “stupid ass caves” (his dad’s words).

The rest of us, of course, were not stupid, and we hadn’t told our parents anything. We were just outside playing, riding bikes, hiking in the woods behind our house, as far as the parents were concerned. They wouldn’t expect us home until dinner.

And that’s the way we liked it.

I mean, c’mon. We were not dumb. Although we couldn’t articulate it at the time, we were all fans of the premise: “It is better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.”

And we really wanted to go exploring and find a cave. The cave. THE tunnel.

We had heard for years, growing up in S-town, all about the tunnel that ran underneath the river. Indians had used it to go back and forth from one side to the other in the days long before there was any bridge.

Nobody seemed to know where the entrance to this tunnel was anymore, but it was a well-known fact that there were a whole series of caves and tunnels around the limestone cliffs between the town cemetery and the reservoir. Teenagers had been going there for years to drink beer and smoke dope and have sex and stuff. There was graffiti on the cliff walls, and remnants of bonfires scattered all around the base of the cliffs. There was also an old refrigerator, minus its door, of course, but we had no idea how it had gotten there.

All we knew was that we were men on a mission. To find THE cave. To find THE tunnel.

“I think Nick was just a fraidy cat,” Penny said, after a time, for no seeming reason.

I laughed at her. Nick was anything but a fraidy cat. He just had really strict parents.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Penny said. “It’s YOUR boyfriend who’s the fraidy cat!”

I glared at my little sister, would have socked her one, but she was too far away from me. Clear on the other side of Ben.

Nick was NOT my boyfriend. I did not need any freaking boyfriends! I only hung out with Nick because he liked the same things I did, which were pretty much the things that every other girl I knew didn’t like. And pee wee Miss Prissy Pants Penny was only along with me now because my parents were out and I had to watch her. ‘Cuz I was older. And like way more responsible.

As for Ben, he was just this neighborhood kid who never had anywhere to go or anyone else to hang out with. So, we put up with him. You know, just kinda cuz.

Cuz that’s the way it was.

But I knew, knew in my guts, in my core, that we were on the right track. This tunnel was gonna pan out. We were gonna emerge, in the not too distant future, into the sunlight again. And we would be… on the other side of the river.