Found Fossil

At the southwest corner of a suburban housing development, a small untamed wood thrives, not trimmed and planned and manicured like everything around it.  But it seems to hunch slightly, as if it knows its wildness is a facade, only reluctantly allowed out of some sentimental impulse, and at any second it might be chainsawed into proper order at the whim of the association.

Still, if you walked all the way to the center, where a small stream flowed in the gentle shade, you could imagine yourself miles away from civilization.  That was part of the reason June came here.  She was sitting cross-legged at the base of an oak, furiously sketching on a large pad.  Her other charcoals rested in the hammock her skirt made across her lap, and she paid no mind to the mess it was making of the beige cotton.  Her head was bowed forward, her hair framing the sketch with auburn curtains, occasionally brushed aside to let more light through.  A pair of sandals sat atop a canvas bag beside her.

The trickle of the stream, the soft breeze rustling the spring leaves - June did her best to evoke them somehow in dark lines and smudges with hints of motion.  It felt like a precious moment that, if left uncaptured, would be forever lost.

Crack.

June tried to ignore the harsh sound, focusing again on the splashes of water, the birdsong, the hum of a wayward bee.  Subtle strokes, start small and build carefully, can't erase...

Crack.

The teen sighed, and lifted her head.

"Must you?" she asked.  "I'm trying to get something here."

"So am I," replied an unrepentant voice.  "I think these are Cambrian."  The owner of the voice was a girl of eighteen, five weeks older than June, give or take a day.  She crouched next to the stream, a growing pile of stones beside her, most originally flat and rounded but now each broken into at least two pieces.  Her short blonde hair was mostly hidden by a floppy boat hat, and her hiking boots were caked with mud, some fresh, some long since dried.

"And when was that, again?" June asked.

"About five hundred million years ago," responded the other girl absently, her hands fishing in the stream bed for more rocks.

"Then you'd think you could wait a couple hours longer, and break them open at home?" June noted.

"Only about one in twenty actually has a fossil...that'd be a lot of heavy stone to carry unnecessarily," countered the rock-hound.  Her name was Emma, and she was the other part of why June came here.  They'd met here accidentally the summer before freshman year, and thus only slightly more recently than the Cambrian, in relative terms.  So much happens in high school, it's hard to grasp until you can look back on the whole of it.  But they'd been together since that day, through four years of ups and downs.

"I still can't believe you got a scholarship from this.  Rocks," June complained, a little more bitterness in her tone than you might expect.

"Paleontology," Emma corrected, leaning back as her hands freed another palm-sized stone from the wet ground.  "Some of the original fossil-hunters got quite rich selling them to museums, and a lot set up scholarship funds in their own names."  She braced the flat stone edgewise against a large flat rock and tapped it expertly with a small hammer.  The stone split neatly down the middle, and the girl examined the newly-exposed face of each half, tossing them aside in turn when she was sure they were "empty".

"I know, you told me," grumbled June, dropping her eyes back to her sketch.  A lot of people at school thought her friend was weird, Aspie maybe...it seemed like she never expressed much emotion.  But June knew that was deliberate...Emma just didn't like people to know when she cared about something - she'd had a bad few years in junior high, and keeping her face blank was ingrained now.

Crack.

So, from long experience, June could tell that Emma wasn't as casual as she seemed.  But June didn't want to talk about the real issue any more than Emma seemed to, and thus they just spiraled around it like whirligigs waiting to hit the ground.

Crack.

Maybe you had to break something open to get something better out of it.  Or maybe she was just looking for reassuring platitudes, because that was crap.  June's strokes grew sharper, longer.  On her pad, the wood was beset by a fierce spring squall, new leaves sundered and scattered before they could fulfill their promise.  The earlier tranquility was gone, not erased but sketched over, until only memory said it had ever been there.

June became distracted by the break in the stone-splitting rhythm her friend had established, and looked up again, brushing her hair back.  Emma was kneeling, staring at half a stone in her hand.  It had broken cross-wise instead of flat, and the center was uneven to boot.  June knew by now this wasn't what you wanted...if a stone split that way, it could split any fossil as well.

"Sorry.  Did you lose something good?" she asked, her earlier tone replaced by genuine regret.

"I...no.  Did you...put something in the stream?"  Emma had raised her head to look up at June, and for once, she actually had an expression...half-annoyed, half-scared, maybe?  June set her sketch pad and materials aside and got up, walking over to her friend.

"No?  What do you mean, 'put something'?" June asked, confused.  Emma said nothing, but simply held up the half-rock.  June took it and stared for a minute, turning it at various angles, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.  Eventually, her brain stopped trying to call her eyes liars and gave up, letting her at least put words to it, if not any sense.

Sticking partly out of the stone was, quite clearly, the metal tab of a USB thumb drive.


June watched, fascinated as she always was by another person using some skill she couldn't fathom.  It seemed like magic, but people had said the same thing about her drawings, and that was just lots and lots of practice.

"We should talk, you know," said Emma.  June turned to her, wariness painted across her face.  From Emma's tone, it was clear what she wanted to talk about.

"Here?  Now?  Em, this thing is crazy, can't we just-"

"Please, June?" Emma interrupted, taking one of June's hands.  Her stomach began to twist, but she nodded.  They sat on the edge of Carl's bed.  "We're going in different directions," Emma began, quietly.  It sounded like she'd rehearsed this, which, knowing her, meant she probably had.

"For nine months...minus holidays, maybe weekends..." June protested weakly.  Emma looked skeptical.

"How would either of us afford to fly halfway across the country for a weekend, let alone more than one?" she asked.

"I can work.  I can sell more drawings.  It's not impossible," insisted June.  Emma looked away for a moment, and said nothing.  It was a thing she did when she was trying to pretend like she wasn't feeling anything, but to June it was as if she'd burst into tears.  "I don't want to give this up.  I can't, Em."  June's voice broke a bit at this last, and the blonde girl's stoic mask cracked a little.

"You know how I feel," whispered Emma.  "I just don't want this to..fade...to turn into something else.  I want to remember it like it has been."

"So you just crack us apart like one of your rocks?  Put us on a shelf in a museum so third graders can see what love was supposedly like a million years ago?"  Carl turned halfway around to look as June's voice raised, but he clearly thought better of it and returned to his work.  "I don't want to remember us, I want to be us.  We're not a fossil yet, Em, we can figure it out if we just try."

"I have tried, June.  It'd be different if you were going to school in California too, but your scholarship is here, and-"

"I'll give it up," interrupted June.  "I'll move out there and take some crummy waitress job.  You are more important than a stupid degree."  Genuine shock showed on Emma's face.

"No, Junebug...you're really, really good.  Maybe not right away, but eventually, you'd hate me if because of me you threw away your chance to-"

"To live happily ever after?" June asked, cutting in again.  "Hate you?" she asked, incredulous.  "I'll ride a white horse across the country for you, I'll find your slipper, I'll slay a dragon.  I love you, Emma, and I won't give you up without a fight," she finished, fiercely.  They sat in silence for a minute, still holding hands.  Rare tears somehow snuck past Emma's defenses and out of the corners of her eyes.

"Okay," Emma said, almost inaudibly.

"What?" asked June, not daring to hope she'd heard right.

"I said 'okay'!" repeated Emma.  "We're probably going to regret this, but I love you so much, I'm too selfish to let you g-"  She found it necessary to stop talking as June kissed her, and by the time the kiss broke they were hugging and both crying-happy.

"Um," said Carl tentatively from across the room.  "Whenever you're done with...whatever that was...there's something on here you should see."