Matt Murphy meets you out at Mr. Fieldham’s Pond. Mr. Fieldham owns the woods across from your house and you often make up stories as you wander through the thick cluster of trees. In the winter, the woods thin and sans foliage, the entire area looks like magnified hair follicles.

Deep in the wood is a stocked fishing lake. You and Matt trespass often to get out to this lake. In the summer you sometimes swim in it. In the winter, you slide around on it in your stocking feet.

The two of you sit on a long hollow log. It sounds like Matt’s mom was pretty upset about the story you told to his brother. It contained all sorts of things that you shouldn’t have said, I guess.

Matt tells you that he doesn’t get it because his brother told him a ghost story about a boy that was trapped under a lake in Chicago when he cracked through the ice. He said that the boy still beats against the bottom of the ice on cold nights down near Navy Pier.

You tell Matt that he shouldn’t believe anything that his brother says. Anyone that is too scared of your story would probably make another story much simpler so they could understand it. Probably even if there was the ghost of a dead boy in Lake Michigan, it wouldn’t be able to make any sound, it would just have to stare up from its bed, the surface if the water seeming as impenetrable as ice.

Matt’s pretty quiet for a bit. “Do you still feel like sliding around on the ice?” he asks.

Not really, you say.

Matt gets up and walks away. Between the story you told his brother and the French girl project, you get the feeling you aren’t going to see him much anymore. You plod back to your house where you microwave a cup hot chocolate and heat up some leftover macaroni and cheese. Was it last year that you broke your arm? Really a year ago? There were so many things you couldn’t do, then, like pick up each macaroni and slide it over each tine of your fork.