I remember running through underground halls, crying. Well, not crying. I don’t think there is an English verb to describe it, but “wailing” is pretty close. The terrible thing was, I hated the attention, and I didn’t want someone to ask what was wrong. But Sarah’s mom heard me run past the kitchen and down the stairs, wailing. So she ran after me, not wailing. She did ask what was wrong. Repeatedly. What was wrong was, Anna, Sarah, Harrison, and I were playing a hotel game. A business tycoon game of sorts. Anna got the guesthouse, because she’s traditional and the oldest. Sarah ran the waterfall hotel, which didn’t have any rooms, but it was stunningly beautiful and serene sounding. The rocks in the waterfall were mossy, though, and the rushing water was far too loud. I was the proud owner of the garage hotel, because I didn’t have much say in the game. And Harrison, being the youngest, got to be the taxi service. He took a few bikes from the garage, which I said was illegal but no one cared, and set up shop on the lawn. A town meeting was called by the waterfall hotel, because we were running into some issues having no official currency. Harrison and I sat on the grass. Anna and Sarah stood by the rocks along the waterfall.

Harrison whispered, “we should push them in.”

I said, “yeah.” But we didn’t.

Sarah proposed that the new currency of hoteltown would be stone chips. She held up a little disc of stone that had chipped off over the years of children running beside the waterfall. You may see the injustice in this immediately. There were no stone chips by the garage, only smooth asphalt and pavement, the lawn was farther from the waterfall than anything else, and my grandparents would never have useless stone chips inside the guest house. The proposal was met with animosity. Words were exchanged. Harrison left bruised. I left wailing.

Indiana is in the top ten flattest states. When you’re walking your bike up the seemingly biggest hill you’ve ever had to walk up, this fact is not a comforting one. Of all the flattest states, surely Indiana must be the hilliest. I know this way of thinking is a fallacy. Just because I want it to be true, or it seems like it’s true, it doesn’t mean it is. But it is quite terrifying to think that this hill, that’s really giving me the hardest calf exercise that’s ever existed, is miniscule in comparison to all the gigantic hills in the seemingly infinite hillier states. I mean, I may not be the most athletic child, but you’d think I could scale a steep hill with little to know difficulty. See, that’s why I don’t want Indiana to be in the 80th percentile for flattest states. It’s just simply not a world I’d want to live in. And then I got thinking, because what else is there to do on a bright July day in Beverly Shores, that there’s probably so many things we all believe that are really just a fallacy. This specific fallacy that I’m referring to is the one where you accept something as truth because you don’t want the opposite to be true. I don’t want to live in a world where I have to face much larger hills than the one I’m on right now, so it must not be true that Indiana is in the top ten flattest states. Then I really jumped off the deep end. Now, I don’t know where God and I stand exactly, but it does seem to me that the people who Believe and preach the Truth are only sure of themselves because they don’t want to live in a Godless world. Believers don’t want to live in a Godless world. I don’t want to live in a hilly world. By this time, after considering for a long while whether or not I was a believer, and if I was, if it was because of my vehement opposition to Indiana’s hills, I was at the top of the hill. From the top of the hill, I could see Sarah, walking her bike up the hill ahead of me, and behind that hill there were more hills. There were so many hills, and I wanted to cry.

I remember being terrified. So terrified, I didn’t sleep the whole night. What I was scared of was the girl smurf. The girl smurf seemed innocent enough, if only I had not been with friends that day. These were not my usual friends. These were summer friends. The kind of friends who make your body hurt from laughing, who tell you terrible things that exist in the “real world,” and who you don’t keep in touch with. They turned me into a slammed door, a chipped tooth and a keychain. I was a stray 4 of spades, away from my 51 brothers, under the couch or behind the bookshelf. I had fallen down between the slits of the floor vent. The thing they showed me that day was nowhere near the worst but it still kept my eyes jumpy and my heart on call. It was a trailer for a horror movie. This was before I loved horror movies. It was for a horror movie about a doll. The trailer showed barely anything to make your neck hairs stand up, barely anything worth all-nighters, barely anything to get yourself yelled at by your mom, because you turned on all the lights in the goddamn house and you knew we’re trying to spend less on the stupid electrical bill, but it haunted me nonetheless. Sarah kept the girl smurf on a white shelf adjacent to her twin sized bed. Everything in her room was white except the A/C, which probably was originally white when her family first bought it in 1973. The whole night I stared at the girl smurf, menacing with her stitched on eyes. Girl smurf glared. Girl smurf terrorized. Girl smurf was ruthless, horrifying, paralyzing. Girl smurf was war, famine, pestilence, and death. Girl smurf had a bad back from carrying the weight of evil on her shoulders. Girl smurf was a living, walking nightmare! Next to me, Sarah slept soundly, and next to her, Fabi snored lightly. Anytime one of the girls stirred, I shook them awake just so I wouldn’t feel so vulnerably alone.

I remember not being able to breathe. The pines around me started twirling and twirling. Twirling, until we were all sliding, gliding and twisting together. So fast, like spinning on a crystalline white stage, tilted toward the audience for us to astonish our loyal spectators. I was suddenly in the audience, too, eyes glued to the girl in front of me, the trees surrounding, swallowing her whole. I was the great big pine, so old and solidified yet so free and unattached. I became the clouds floating, tip toeing on needles, hugging the girl and blowing away in the wind. I was the sun, jealous of the moon who got to see the stars, and the terrified little hearts pounding away in cavernous rib cages. I was speed, momentum and haste. Going so fast, the air got scared on its way to my lungs and turned around. So fast, the world around you isn’t there. So fast, you don’t ever want to go slow again. I remember muddy shoes. I remember playing dress up in my grandma’s clothes. I remember bad news. In the hot tub. About my grandpa. On Thanksgiving.