Chapter Text
Pat was obsessed with trees.
He thought they were cool.
You could do loads of things with trees, like climb them, or carve things into them, or build things in them like tree houses or really neat swing sets that have slides connected to a platform at the top (if you were feeling crazy). They help you breathe too, and breathing is cool.
They could be great hiding spots if you were playing hide and seek (but you’d need one with a nice big trunk), or a good spot to park your bike if you wanted to swim in a pond nearby (nobody likes a warm bike seat, and trees provide great shade during the summer months). Sitting under one while reading a good book is another reason why they were cool. Pat saw someone doing it once when he was passing by a university on his way home from school, and he thought it made them look mysterious, and smart, and cool .
Maybe under a tree is where you’d confess to your crush that you’ve liked them for years. Maybe it’s where you’d have your first kiss. Maybe it’s where you’d experience your first heartbreak when they dumped you for someone else. Or maybe, if you were Pat, it’s much simpler than that. Maybe it’s just a safe place you’d go for some peace and quiet.
🍃
He was lucky.
He had a really special one close by.
Sure it was in his neighbor’s backyard, the neighbors he wasn’t allowed to interact with, but he could still see it from his balcony when it would sway in the wind.
It was a really pretty tree (if trees could be called pretty), with long leaves that almost touched the ground and a nice, wide trunk. It had lots of branches sprouting from it. Each one started off thick where it connected to the trunk, but then became gradually thinner and delicate at the top where it started to bend downwards (probably from the weight of the foliage). It almost looked sad to Pat, like a pout, sorta round at the top with an immediate droop at the sides until it became heavy and pointed straight down.
Even if it was a sad tree, it still made Pat happy when he looked at it.
It didn’t always look sad, though. Pat noticed that the tree had its own set of expressions if you paid attention to it like he did. Sometimes it would look angry, like when it was extra windy and the gusts would blow so hard that a bunch of leaves would be scattered across the yard. Or when there was a full moon the tree looked asleep, not a single branch moving under the white glow that covered it like a blanket. And then there was Pat’s favorite, when the tree looked happy.
It only happened when the tree had company, like it was excited to provide something that its visitor needed. Pat could relate to it, he understood it. He was the same way. There was one person that made the tree look the happiest, though.
It was the little boy that also lived next door, his neighbor's son, probably somewhere around Pat’s age (he wasn't sure). The tree would suddenly twinkle under the sun the moment the boy set foot in the yard, like it was smiling at him as he ran under it. The boy would smile back, a big toothy one that made his dimples sink so far into his chubby cheeks you could probably see them from the moon. It made Pat happy to see someone else love the tree as much as he did, even if there was a small part of him that wished he could be the one down there, instead of watching from a balcony.
After that, the tree didn’t look the same if the boy wasn’t under it. It felt incomplete to him, like he was trying to look at a drawing that was half finished. So when the boy appeared, Pat couldn’t help but watch him too.
He would watch the boy play under the tree, carefree and clueless that he had a pair of eyes on him. He watched the boy run endless laps around the large roots jutting up from the Earth, leaping and lunging over them like hurdles until he collapsed under the shade, giggling and breathless.
Sometimes Pat would watch him pull a clear bin full of toy cars into the yard, rummaging around for three or four of them (usually the same ones, probably his favorites), and dragging them along the bark like it was a never-ending road, making elaborate zoom and crash noises until he grew tired. Pat remained a fixture on his balcony, destined to be an observer and nothing more.
One time, he noticed the boy just sitting there. Quiet and still for a change, just looking up at the sky with his knees pulled to his chest. The boy seemed sad…or lost in thought (he couldn’t tell from that far away). Pat had just started to wonder what was on the boy's mind, but then the boy laid down. His head landed in a patch of shade from the canopy of leaves above him, fingers digging into the grass beneath him, and then he closed his eyes.
That’s another cool thing about trees. They made for a good spot to take a nap.
But then Pat heard something. It sounded like someone was crying. He strained his eyes trying to focus on the boy's face, searching to see if it was coming from him, but the shadows that were casted onto his features made it too hard to tell. Until the boy sat up and wiped his nose with the edge of his sleeve. Pat could see the redness that tinted the boy's cheeks, eyes obviously swollen and also a little red. Why was he crying? What made him so upset? Why did he sit out in the open where anyone could see him? The influx of questions made Pat realize three things:
One: Trees were a good place to cry under if you were out in the open. Nobody would ever be able to tell.
Two: He and the boy next door shared something in common. That tree was their safe place, even if one of them was stuck on a balcony.
Three: He really wished he and that boy could be friends somehow. Maybe the boy wouldn’t be so sad if he wasn't always alone.
🍃
Pat never liked seeing people sad. It was even worse if he couldn’t do anything to cheer them up. He believed a simple smile could change someone’s entire day, he experienced it first hand. His baby sister, Paa, was a prime example. She seemed like a tough kid, trying to act older than she was or stronger than she was just so people would take her seriously. Underneath the facade, though, she was as soft as a marshmallow.
Pat knew that already.
She annoyed Pat to no end, but he’d do anything for her at the end of the day. Seeing her upset was always tough for him. She’d scraped her knee on the playground at school one day, came home puffing her cheeks like it was nothing until she saw the concern in her big brother’s eyes. She’d immediately curl up in his lap with tear-stained cheeks and he’d always wipe them for her, cooing that it was okay, she just needed to be more careful.
When the tears stopped, he’d ask her what happened. She’d explain some rotten little boy was messing with her and she’d shoved him to the ground, but when he went down so did she, and that’s when she got the scrape. Pat spared her the whole ‘ girls shouldn’t start fights ’ lecture she would get from their Pa, the opposite of what Pat had always gotten, knowing she was more than capable of taking care of herself.
He’d just smile down at her instead, patting her small head and telling her he was proud of her. The smile she gave him always reminded him of the sun, bright and warm. He wanted to make sure she never lost that glow.
He was a good brother.
He was a good son too, but putting a smile on his parents’ faces was much more of a challenge for him. He couldn’t seem to avoid the backhanded comments from his father no matter how hard he tried. There was always a ‘but’ that came after any praise, like that was the toll to cross the bridge and he never had enough change.
Then he started to notice how often his Pa compared him to the boy next door, the boy he had never even met, the boy he’d never even seen his Pa speak to let alone the boy’s parents. “Your grades are good, but his are better.” his Pa would say as he reviewed Pat’s report card. He wanted to ask his Pa how he knew that, but he didn’t because he already knew the response he would get. “I’m friends with some of the faculty members you know, we talk,” his Pa explained even though Pat didn’t ask. He didn’t need to.
“How is rugby going?” he changed the subject when Pat just nodded. “Have they made you team captain yet? I was made team captain after only two weeks.”
Pat had been on the team for three.
After shaking his head no, his Pa would just smile at him and give a pat on the back, the kind that said without saying ‘ better luck next time ’. It gave him a gross feeling where his Pa’s hand made contact. The sensation of the impact buzzed like the reminder that he wasn’t doing enough, that he’d failed again. It stayed with him after his Pa excused him from the table. It stayed with him as he climbed the stairs and entered his bedroom. It stayed even after he quietly closed his door and buried his face into his pillow. And it was there after he’d cried so much that he’d fallen asleep.
Pat seemed like a tough kid, he tried hard to be. But just like his sister, he was also as soft as a marshmallow on the inside.
Thankfully, it wasn’t there anymore when he had finally woken up. The sound of someone singing softly made him peel his eyes open and lift his head out from under the pillow he had stuffed it under. It was almost like magic the way it carried him out of bed, across his room and onto his balcony. Whatever sadness he felt earlier was gone when he saw the boy next door sitting under the tree again.
He was sitting criss-crossed and slouched over as he messed with something in his lap. He was humming while he worked, and even though Pat didn’t recognize the tune, it still sounded nice. He watched as the boy occasionally lifted his head up to look at the tree, then back down to his lap again. It looked like he was drawing something. The boy must have felt the way he was staring at him though, because he suddenly paused and turned to look over his shoulder. Pat had to duck behind a column so he wasn’t caught, which must have worked cause the boy was back to humming and working on the thing in his lap when Pat finally peaked around the edge. He stayed like that for a while, humming and pausing to look up at the tree, then back down, repeating the steps over and over again. Pat just sat there too, observing the steps. Calling them out in his head one by one before the boy acted on them.
It had gotten dark quickly, but neither of them seemed to notice until a street light behind their houses came on. Pat caught the boy looking at it at the same time as him, and then there was the sound of a door opening. He had spun around quickly to see if it was one of his parents coming to call him for dinner, but was relieved when it wasn’t and his door was still tightly closed. It must have been the other boy’s parents instead, because when Pat returned his eyes to the yard, the boy was already walking back to his house with a sketchbook tucked under his arm.
That was when something unexpected happened.
Pat had watched him get all the way to his back door, like his eyes were glued to him, and then the boy stopped. He stopped and looked right at Pat. Pat froze for a second like he had just seen a ghost, but he couldn’t remove his eyes from the ones that burned a hole into his. Was the boy mad? Pat couldn’t read his eyes from this far, but they looked blank. Expressionless. It made him uncomfortable, and when he got uncomfortable he smiled. Like an idiot. That made the boy do something funny in return, something else Pat wasn’t expecting. The boy smiled back. A small one, but it was there. Pat knew it from the way a crater formed in the boy’s cheek. He’d recognize the dimple anywhere, even from the moon.
And then it was gone, just as fast as it came. The boy went into the house without a second glance, but right before the door fully shut, Pat heard the boy’s Ma say “Go clean yourself up, Pran. Dinner is ready.”
Pran .
The boy’s name was Pran