The Boy in the Castle

This is Nicholas Bell, everybody calls him Nick. He’s there, five foot two, in baggy cargo pants and a gray hoodie. Sometimes I talk to him, sometimes I just watch, sometimes neither of us speaks and he’s just - there. Then I wake, and he’s gone again. But I know I’ll see him in a couple months. I know this because I’ve seen him every couple of months for the past 26 years. He’s my first crush. He died when we were 14.

Nick wasn’t just my first crush. I think every girl from the time they understood what it meant to have warm, fuzzy feelings unlike the kind you have for your mom, dad or dog, had a crush on Nick Bell. He’d never know it though, were it not for that time in 5th grade when a troupe of us girls, led by Carrie Carson, went on a giggling spree, pushing one another into Nick’s general vicinity, screaming, “You like Nick! No — you do!”  His face flushed beet red and he quickly retreated to his safe haven, the tether ball courts, where he reigned supreme.

Nick lived kitty corner to my best friend Hana Nakayama. On weekends we’d crouch under the window in her mud room, surveying his house for any sign of movement. Nick’s house was a small gray stucco bungalow, modest but for one remarkable feature: a protruding round tower, its square indentations like castle battlements. It was such an odd hallmark, and it stuck out from the rest of the cookie-cutter duplexes in our suburb.

Hana and I ate Cheetos and sour keys while dutifully holding our posts. We flipped through issues of YM Magazine (Young and Modern), its teenage content eluding our adolescent minds, the nuclear orange Cheeto dust on our fingers staining every page.

I can’t remember how we found out about the cancer, but I do recall being surprised. We were all surprised — shocked even. Nick Bell? But he could run so fast — jump so high, his laugh was so loud, his smile, so big. Of course, none of it made sense. We had just finished the 7th grade and were entering high school-- our own bodies a confusing quagmire of growth. How could a body at such a vital phase break down? We couldn’t comprehend it all just - stopping.

At his memorial there was no casket. I naively thought that was odd at the time. I had never been to a funeral before, and in the movies there was always an open casket. Of course, this wasn’t the funeral. It was a memorial, or celebration of life as they call it — for us kids, his classmates they weren’t going to have a casket. No, there was simply an 8 x 10 inch photo of him wearing a white t-shirt and a huge grin. His class portrait, framed in cherry wood and placed on a table at the front of the room.

After the service, we filed up to the front to say our final goodbyes to Nick, or Nick’s framed photo. Genuflecting, I quietly tell him I’m sorry, for what I’m not sure, but I’m so, so sorry. I whisper at the picture for a little too long, and it starts to feel performative — like I need to show my classmates how bereaved I am. “I’m sorry” I whisper over and over.    

The program was printed on a single sheet of paper, folded in half. The back had a poem by the author Banana Yoshimoto. I don’t remember the poem but I remember remarking on the unusualness of her name – Banana. The poem was chosen and read aloud by Nick’s best friend — Cam Leppard. He was a year older than us and like Nick, a skateboarder. Even after Cam left for high school and we were still in elementary, he and Nick stayed close. That’s how cool Nick was, even older kids wanted to be his friend. Cam and Nick smoked pot behind the playground in Buffalo Park. Nick told us that although pot was cool, it smelled terrible. “It reeks! The worst thing I’ve ever smelled.” This was the first fact I learned about marijuana. Funny, when I finally smelled it so many years later, I didn’t find it unpleasant. And when I finally tried it, many more years after that, I really liked the smell.

Once we started high school Nick stopped coming to class, but in the fall of 8th grade he came back to surprise us during Phys Ed. We were outside practicing our softball swings and getting ready to scrimmage. Nick, once a star athlete — so talented everyone said he could have gone pro — stood to the side, lingering behind the dugout with his hands in his hoodie, kicking at the dirt with his feet.

He wore a thick blue toque, not unlike before, only now it seemed loose on his head. And though he wore it low, it could not disguise the bare patches of his eyebrows. Even in our early teen years Nick carried some of his baby-fat on his face. It was part of what kept him boyish when all other aspects of him felt mature beyond his years. It was also this boyishness that made him irresistible to everyone around him. A face both mischievous and endearing, both sly and sweet. He had the kind of full-faced cheeks that made his eyes disappear into crescent moons when he smiled. A smile that said “I know something you do not.”

Gone now was the baby fat from his cheeks, his light acne and almond-toned skin replaced with a gaunt and waxen pallor. It was stupid of us to ask, but we were kids, scared kids. We weren’t even used to our own bodies, they so often betrayed us. We didn’t know what we were looking at, what a deteriorating body is supposed to look like and we certainly didn’t know how to process it. So we asked. “Hey Nick, you want to come play? I bet you’ll hit a homer!” someone called out. A few others cheered in apprehensive agreement. “Nah,” he replied simply, “I’m good.”

We struggled to find a topic that didn’t somehow relate to his sickness. Stumbling around different, weak subjects, grasping at past jokes half-remembered.  

“Hey! So I’m getting a puppy,” proclaimed Nick, giving us topic to cling to, gratefully. “Oh yeah? That’s awesome. It’ll be so cute,” we replied.

I thought of a time back in the 5th grade. A cairn terrier had wandered into our backyard and my parents let me keep him until we found his owner. I named him Rover, a play on “roll-over” a command I tried teaching him (without success) that first night. With a newfound egotism, the kind that comes with dog-ownership, I paraded Rover over to the soccer field where my classmates were having a game, Nick among them.  In his excitement to meet Rover, Nick reached out to take the leash and caught my hand instead. The hand-on-hand contact was meager and the time-held even less, but I can still remember the surge of electricity it sent through my body.

Now, Nick in his sagging toque, the bunch of us shuffling around our high school field, that electric charge felt dim, like a car battery gone dead —the earnest flicker of headlights, the turn of the key yielding only a series of hollow clicks.

“I hope we get to meet your dog” I stammered out, drawing circles in the sand with the tip of my sneaker. As 13-year-olds go, we didn’t know much, but even then we understood a puppy would be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a reward, a well-deserved one for beating cancer – if he beat cancer.

A pause. He must have sensed the hesitation in my voice, the doubt.

“You know I’m going to get better, right?”

That was the last time I saw him.

The last time, unless you count my dreams. There, I see him all the time. Sometimes it’s just him, other times he makes guest appearances in my other dreams and occasionally my nightmares. Throughout the decades, I aged while he stayed the same. A forty-year-old woman with a crush on a 12-year-old boy. It’s funny to dream so often about someone I knew so little about.

Only that he was a boy.

A boy who jumped high, ran fast, laughed loud, and lived in a castle.