“What kind of a freaking name for a road is that? Brushy
fork?” I asked.
“A scary name,” replied Amy, clutching my arm like a Spade purse.
We had taken a long walk away from the party, down a road which was supposed to meet up with another, the legendary Brushy Fork. They said a girl was murdered on that road. They said satanic rituals were performed on it monthly. They said to stay away from that road at night.
They said this and that and all of it was just pathetic romantic fodder for two sixteen-year-olds wandering off from a nearby party. We were looking to scare ourselves, create our own little thrill since no guys were interested in us back at the ranch. Amy and I were teenage explorers. Lookout, Vasco da Gama, we youngins would find the latest route to sugar and spice and everything nice. Or in our minds, the road to hell.
We’d built it up, so by the time we arrived at the actual street, where the road sign gleamed tauntingly at us, we were already prepared to scream. We did so accordingly. The trees surrounding us did nothing. No road-inhabitor waiting for just such a moment came at us with a chainsaw.
“What the hell are we doing?” asked Amy, exasperated, after our initial terror lost its fervor. We stood there for a few moments. Amy looked at me questioningly- the same look she would have one year later when she’d try to get me to take speed with her, and proceed to almost OD after she’d downed both our doses.
“Well,” I replied. “We could go back.”
“Well that’s boring,” she returned. As ever, the most easily bored.
“Well let’s walk down the road then,” I said. Yeah, big whoop. We began to walk, warily, down the blackened street. In silence for several minutes, waiting for Mephistopheles to appear, wave his brushy pitch fork at us, do the damn can-can or something. Anything. It’d be nice just to have the unusual memento.
We heard a noise in the woods. That sent us off, squealing down the road, absurd little teenagers with fright in their minds and red dye in their hair. We ran frantically, continuing to scream at the night, but the dark has a lipless mouth- it could swallow but could not respond. We were the scariest thing on Brushy Fork that evening.
And what’s more, once we reached the end of the road, we realized we had to cross it again to get back. The second time, we just listened quietly to our own nervous breaths, laughing nervously at our youth in idiocy.