After another long day at school, Stuart took a shortcut home, through the woods where his friends would hang out, to the fort they'd discovered last summer. None of them were there that day though. All the paintings he kept hidden from the world were safely stored away under its boards. An easel stood under the tree that held the fort between its branches, near a stream that was clogging up with autumn leaves.
He decided he would finally give Noelle one of his paintings on this gray day. He took the one where he'd painted her face in the shape of a heart, with a dagger pointing out of one of its eyes, a gush of blood bringing carnage to a pretty face. It was a morbid yet lovely painting, a crazy paradox that only the heartbroken can know. His friends had warned him against giving her that one, but he was going to anyway. He needed her to remember him, somehow, and this was the only way he knew.
When he got home, he was relieved that his father wasn't there yet. His little sister was playing out in the backyard of their trailer park. It was full of junk that his father had either stolen or discarded. She was playing with a slashed tire out there, trying to ride on it, pretending it was a vessel that could take her far away from there.
Then he heard his father's pickup truck pulling in. His father slammed the front door as he came in, seeing the painting his son was holding.
"What in God's name is that?" he asked.
"It's a painting, I made it for a girl."
He wouldn't dare. His father was not a caring, understanding person, especially when he had a beer in his hand. When his son refused, he slammed the beer can down on the table and lumbered after him.
"Give that to me, you little shit!"
Stuart bolted for the back door, running through the yard with the painting in his hand. His father yelled curses at him as he jumped the fence, running through the fields in the valley beyond.
His sister watched him running away with hopeless eyes. The last thing he heard as he outdistanced his father was the sound of him calling her a useless little whore while beating her. He thought about turning around to help her, like he always did, but then he would lose the painting. And he would just end up getting beat himself, again.
He ran as far as it took to get to Noelle's house, a two-story yellow one in a tidy neighborhood. Not wanting to be seen, he crept through her backyard, which was thick with trees. He hid behind one of them, trying to see if anyone was home. This is wrong, he thought to himself. If I get caught, she'll never think of me the same way. Since he saw no movement, he figured nobody was there.
Desperation, that worst of emotions. It was making him do something he'd never done before- creep up on someone's house to spy on them. He missed her so much, he needed to see her again. Then he remembered the painting, and why he'd brought it with him. That smile she always wore disgraced his sense of justice. He was certain she'd never been hurt before, that she had never been rejected in her life. Well, he would find a way to crack through that armor of innocence that protected her soul. It didn't seem fair that she would get to live unscathed, while he suffered on her behalf for no apparent reason. The painting would scare her enough to realize that not everything in the world was blue skies and prancing ponies. And she would finally see that he loved her deeply enough to create something so passionate.
He went to leave the painting on her back deck, with his name signed on the bottom- his way of confessing his feelings. When he got there, he saw someone watching him from the window. Miscalculation, disaster. The worst day of all time. Frozen in his steps, he had no idea what to do next. He couldn't tell if it was her or not, which didn't really matter. The instinct to flee was strong no matter who it was, but so was the instinct to show her. He set the painting down next to the back door and ran, ran even faster than he had from his father.
When Noelle looked at the painting, she was shocked at first. There was her face with blood all over it, stabbed in the eye with a knife. Most girls would have taken this as a threat. But then she looked deeper and perceived that the shape of her face in a heart symbolized the giver’s own, that it felt like a knife had been plunged inside it, only because he'd longed to be with her. She was accepting enough to pity him, to be impressed that he'd demonstrated such originality, and thought it might be interesting to know him better. She set off to write him a letter, a letter in which she asked if he liked to climb mountains.
Reading her letter made Stuart feel elated with joy. He'd never felt happier in all his life. He didn't know a thing about climbing mountains, but it didn't matter. Of course, he liked them. He was climbing them all the time in a metaphorical sense.
After Noelle and Stuart got to know each other, he ran away from home to live with her. Noelle's parents had his father prosecuted for child abuse, and his sister went to live with their aunt far away. The two young lovers saw the world together. She taught him to climb mountains, ski down them, ride horses, raft the rivers, sail the seas; he taught her about music, literature, how to play poker and run a marathon, and all the other sciences, sports, and arts. They had much to learn from each other, while the things they held in common were strong enough to keep them together: a love of nature, a passion for fitness, the courage to keep climbing.
