It’s a secret that only belonged to us, the observatory on top of the hill, but now I’m sharing it with you. If you leave the Maxbell through the half-cracked window behind where Ricky always sits and tread carefully through a trail of broken branches and fallen pine cones, climb up the creaking wooden stairs and then tiptoe past the abandoned picnic table, you will see the observatory.
The observatory is a plain old building fraying at its edges. Cracked walls, a tattered iron door, and a lock so rusted that the only option to enter is through a window someone forgot to close years and years ago. The most memorable part about the building is its smell, a moldy tang that disgusts at first but gradually makes itself familiar, just like how it first made itself at home in all the grayness and decrepitude the observatory had to offer.
Anyway, my story starts with a bucket of paint, a bucket of pale blue paint Ha got at the Canadian Super Store a thirty-minute walk plus thirty-minute bus ride away. I guess it really started the day stars showered from the sky. The tip of our boots damp from the moist earth humming under us, we trekked up the secret path towards the observatory for a picnic. We lay down there on muddy blankets at the abandoned table, drinking October’s rustles as pepsi and eating starlight as freshly-baked cookies. Cupping her hands together to catch some of the wind dripping down my chin, Rothanak toasted the observatory. To our secret.
We became discontent with our little secret, you see, with that little thing, falling apart in all seventeen corners we dared to look.
We decided to paint our secret, to wrap it in pretty ribbons so that next year someone else would love it enough to adopt it as their little secret. So there would be someone else to toast it the next time the stars fall, and the next, and the next.
I dipped my paintbrush into the paint and started working, brushing over the dent from the wild frisbee incident and the angry scratches from the false bear alarm accident. Our marks became hidden under a smooth layer of pale blue, a blue as smooth as the surface of Pedder Bay when the new people come next August, a blue as pale as the November sky that watched as I erased us from our old, moldy secret.
Everything was too still, too quiet; there wasn’t a single day I was there that the forest didn’t welcome me with some sort of chirp or whoosh. I looked up and saw birds circling. I looked back and saw a wolf.
It cocked its head, and I could almost hear it thinking food? Saliva glistened at the corner of its mouth. I was alone, Ha and Rothanak had decided to go back early, and I knew I wouldn’t make it into the observatory before I got ripped into shreds.
I mustered all my courage and stomped to the rhythm of my racing heart. The wind screamed from behind me. My paint bucket rattled.
The wolf pawed at the earth. I stomped even harder. It faltered. The forest howled. Slowly but surely, it took a step back, and another step back, and fled into the woods.
I stumbled back after I was sure the wolf was gone, crumpling to the ground when I hit the freshly painted wall. Dang it, now my hoodie is dirty. There was now a smudge the shape of my back on the observatory wall. Staring at the paint, no longer glossy like the bay or clear like the sky on a sunny August day, I burst into laughter until the chilly air burned my lungs. And even then, I kept laughing.
I took the paint and brushes with me, leaving the smudge as it was.
The next day, we hiked up the secret path together, crushing leaves and branches as we munched on the cookies Ha had baked. Their jaws dropped when they saw the new human-sized smudge on the wall of the observatory.
What were you thinking? I thought we agreed to fix this place, not ruin it again?
Well, you see, I never told you, but I ran into a wolf the other day…