Three Red Scarves

The boys had known each other so long, they couldn’t even remember a time when they weren’t friends – Jerry, Terry, and Michael. Their mothers had all grown up friends, as had their fathers, and their families had lived in the same little Washington town their entire lives, making friendship almost inevitable.

Since toddlerhood, they’d spent their summers splashing in the same kiddie pools and their winters walking single file through the snow together toward whatever snowball fight location looked the best that day. And as the boys grew taller and the years grew shorter, they continued to stick together, in orbit together like brother planets in a miniature solar system.

But as boys grow and become more complex, so do their troubles and aspirations. And eventually, when winter comes, they stop reaching for the scarves their mothers gave them when they were children. Instead, they choose bright red scarves of their own, winding them tight around their throats to protect them against the elements. Snow, wind, and ice. Connections, longings, and heartbreaks.

*

Terry’s scarf was woven from the red of the cardinals that used to land outside his window in the wintertime. As the years wore on and his parents seemed to fight more and more often, Terry would just look out the window and admire all that white that made the world feel quieter, safer, and more peaceful somehow. And the cardinals would come and go, picking at tasty little morsels only they could see within the snow-covered branches of the trees – little red flashes of living energy in a barren, silent world.

As Terry grew, he buried himself in his books and his studies. He’d bottle up the warmth of the summers while they lasted and ration it out through the winters to keep his spirits up. That bottled sunshine made it easier to handle the particularly cold, white winter when his younger brother disappeared before being found the following spring, cut to ribbons six towns over. And it also got him through the winter after that one, when his mother committed suicide, and his father built a turtle shell inside his chest and moved into it alone.

*

The red of Jerry’s scarf had come from the scarlet of all the fires that had punctuated his life. It had seemed to him as a little boy that whenever something wonderful was about to happen, there was a fire lighting up the scene. Summer campfires with people gathered around, roasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories. The fireplaces and grills his father would start when it was time to celebrate. The candles his mother would light at Christmas time.

The memory of the warmth of those fires and the smiling faces they illuminated protected Jerry from the cold of rejection when it became apparent that he was just wired differently from other kids. Life made sense when he was with Terry and Michael, but other people were harder to read, like opaque ancient novels written in dead languages.

So when the coldness of the world and the perceived emptiness of other people got to be too much for Jerry, he tied his fire-red scarf a little tighter around his neck and turned up the collar of his coat. And for the moment, it would be enough.

*

But Michael was a different sort of boy. It wasn’t clear where the red of his scarf had come from, but it was quite possible that he had simply come up with it by observing the scarves of the other boys. He supposed that if he’d known how to make a scarf for himself, he would have chosen the very special red of summer strawberries. But this was the kind of skill that must come naturally or not at all, and Michael did not have it.

He could not look within for the necessary materials and tools because they were not there to be found. So he did the only thing he’d ever known how to do – look to other people and do his best to reproduce what he found there. But it was an adequate enough method, as Terry and Jerry had been wonderful enough influences in his life.

And while Michael was still young, they were enough. But unfortunately, all boys must grow up. And as they grow, so do the questions and concerns they take into adulthood with them.

*

Terry, Jerry, and Michael did what most little boys from small towns do as they grow. They continued to go to the same schools, and they remained friends. They began the intricate process of unraveling who they really were as people outside of their families and their social circles. And little by little, they began to find themselves and see the silhouettes of the men they might eventually become.

Terry loved animals, biology, and anything that let him study the marvels of the earth. Meanwhile, Jerry loved dreaming things up and then building them so they could exist and be useful in reality. But Michael, always the odd one out, had never taken a shine to much of anything.

As he got older, Michael’s childish angst bloomed into an adult’s very serious tendency toward depression. He never stopped hanging out with Jerry and Terry entirely. But as the other two boys continued to mature and find paths for themselves in life, Michael found it harder and harder to relate to them. He hated that Jerry’s being in a happy relationship or Terry’s getting into the college he wanted to go to made him jealous, but that didn’t change the facts.

Michael just wanted somewhere to belong. Other people in a line on their way somewhere through the snow. People Michael could follow because they were part of the same pack and spoke the same strange, lonely language he did now.

And that’s how he wound up falling in with darker people who didn’t walk in the sun so much as they reclined in the shadows. People who’d been left with dark, sucking holes in the middle of their chests because of the cruelties and misfortunes of life. People who wore scarves in the blackest of blacks, perhaps because they had never heard of red, blue, or green.

Michael saw this and mistook it for sameness, as so many lost people do, and that was that. He forgot that he did know what red looked like, forgot that a borrowed red was still red all the same.

*

Years later, Terry was away at college, studying ornithology (one of his childhood passions) and absolutely loving the environment there. Moving away from their little Washington hometown had turned out not to be for his friends, but Terry loved how different things were out here in Florida.

It was so sunny and vibrant here. Everything seemed to be turned up to top volume at all times – the colors, the music, and even the food – and it did Terry so much good to be here. Some days, he almost forgot there was such a thing as snow, winter cold, or dead family members, but he still had the red scarf from his childhood. Every so often, he would stumble across it folded in a drawer and remember his friends.

He still received letters from Jerry once in a while, and they followed each other on social media. But Jerry had always been an introspective sort. Once someone moved out of his orbit, that person was out of sight, out of mind for the most part. Still, Terry knew his friend was happy living his quiet domestic life these days. He’d married that pretty girl he’d started dating when they were all still teenagers, and now he had the little family he’d always wanted.

Terry was told their barbecues were legendary.

Michael, on the other hand, hadn’t fared so well in life. The last time Jerry had mentioned him, he’d developed quite the collection of little addictions. And no one ever could figure out how he made his living, but those were answers no one who had known Michael way back when really wanted.

There’d briefly been a wife at some point, although you couldn’t call a relationship that lasted all of a month much of a marriage. As for children, who knew, but Terry supposed anything was possible. But people would have to go on wondering, because Michael had skipped town some time ago and hadn’t been heard from since. It was anyone’s guess what he was doing now.

*

That night, as Terry slept, he dreamed of the winters so long ago when he and his friends had been little children. Children so small, even their little coats seemed to swallow them whole in the wintertime. They were three little heads walking single file through the snow with their cheerful, red scarves wound tightly around their necks, their breath turning to steam in the cold.

In his dream, he and Jerry had kept up, climbing the hill to their favorite skating spot one after the other, but keeping pace with one another. But every time Terry would look back further to see where Michael was, he’d have fallen just a little bit further behind. And then, when the boys had nearly reached the top of the hill, Terry looked back one final time.

There was Michael lying in the snow, far down the hill where he’d fallen. He could see the bright red of his scarf where its tassels were draped over the snowbanks. But there was far too much red to just have been the scarf that he saw, spread out in a bright, scarlet pool around Michael’s body, red as the summer strawberries he used to love so much.