Excerpt from: In the Woods Between Our Houses, a novel
Kris Evans

My best friend, Jillian, and I were in the woods practicing our Mary Lou Retton balance-beam routines when we heard it, the low, sorrowful call of the bullhorn--an actual horn, from an actual bull.Jillian's older brother, Bob, brought it back from their family vacation to North Dakota three years before. There had been arrowheads, too, and dream-catchers, moccasins and beaded dolls, but the bullhorn was the only thing that survived past that first summer, and its call was reserved for single purpose: to announce a bird funeral.We'd known it was coming, of course; we'd heard the three short blasts of the horn the day before.Bob always gave us time to prepare.

Jillian crossed herself, giggling--she had the best giggle in the world, bubbling up from nowhere and spilling out all over everything like warm liquid you wanted all over your skin--and hopped down off the log that lay perpendicular across the path between our houses.The log was at the midway point, my house up the hill, hers down.I could run from mine to hers in three minutes flat if I timed the log-jump right, but it took seven minutes to get back home. The log was situated across the path so that you had to choose whether to go under it or over it.Jillian always went under on the way up and over on the way down; I went over both ways.

"Wait," I called."The dismount."I stretched my arms out at my sides, my right foot in front of my left.I bent my knees and threw my hands into the air before taking two quick steps and leaping off the log, kicking my legs out karate-style.

"Stick it, Lizard!" Jillian called, modeling the landing pose, hands above her head, chin high, back arched, her eyes steady on mine.I lived for these moments, having Jillian all to myself.She was beautiful, with big blue encouraging eyes and thin delicate wrists, a smile that stopped me every time.I watched her as I sailed through the air, wishing I could freeze that moment mid-flight.When I look back now, that's the moment--the look--I want most to remember, that uncluttered adoration, the pure and unnamed love we had for each other.

I didn't stick the landing, ending up on all fours instead.If I'd known then what was coming, I might have thought it was a sign, but the leaves on my bare knees brushed off easily--it hardly hurt at all--and Jillian was laughing that bubble of a laugh.She shook her head, flipped her hair and put a hand on her hip."That was, like, not even an 8," she said, pursing her lips like the older girls in the neighborhood.We both doubled over with laughter.Those were the girls who never came to the bird funerals and stayed out of the woods entirely, the girls who fawned over boys and fashion and made their faces up like soap opera stars, the girls we had vowed the summer before we would never become.Jillian and I were going to climb trees until our knees gave out or arthritis, like her grandma had, stopped our hands from working.We were going to be best friends for the rest of ours lives, and this log, this perfect place at the absolute center of our lives, would remain just that, the center.We were sure of it.

"Come on, you," she said, cupping my neck in her palm and nudging me down the path.Her fingers were warm and dry."We're going to be late."