First Pages of The Hollow Tree

[JuliaMay82]

The Hollow Tree stands at the end of Rotten Row. It looks like an ordinary tree to almost everyone who wanders past its twisting bark. There are details, like the deep trenches running along its spine and the way the leaves turn translucent in certain slants of light, but it takes time to notice those, and people on Rotten Row seem to be in quite a hurry. 

 

It looked like any old tree to Conor as well. At least until last Tuesday. He didn’t want to go to school that morning – or any morning as of late. He held a cup of tea to his forehead, feigning fever. He attempted loud coughing, wearing his shirt inside out to demonstrate his general sense of disarray, and begging. And, yet, here he was, shuffling books in and out of a locker as quickly as possible, hoping not to run into McKenzie, who was still trying to ask him what was wrong. 

 

He avoided her at the lockers and retreated into his favorite class at Darlingtonia Junior High: Algebra. For Conor, Ellie Fitzgerald's Algebra class was an anchor amid the stormy sea that was his life. Conor's mind was full of ocean analogies lately. The ocean loved change, and anything that stopped changing became trash, which the ocean quickly deposited on the seashore. Beaches were the ocean’s graveyard. Conor, unlike the ocean, was quite sure he had experienced enough change in the past two months to last him a lifetime. 

 

Conor decided to eat his lunch in the hallway, reading the overlapping notes on the bulletin board instead of braving the cafeteria, where he was sure to run into McKenzie. The bulletin board was a mess of reminders about everything Conor wasn’t doing. He could have signed up for the school play or choir or woodworking class or a drum circle. No thanks, Conor thought. One notice did catch Conor's eye. Chess club: every Thursday at 3 pm. Deadline to register: November 1. Of course, Conor thought. Yesterday. The deadline to register was yesterday.

 

Annoyed, Conor ripped the paper from the board and balled it up in his fist. That’s when he saw something strange. Something that made him look up and down the hallway, hoping to see another human for the first time that day. There was a piece of paper tucked behind several others, and it was moving. The piece of paper was twisting, kicking, trying to free itself. Conor watched as a note wedged its way to the surface and drifted to the ground. There, in shiny gold font, it read:

 

The Hollow Club

Open to all who can read these words

Meets every Wednesday at 3 pm at the Hollow Tree

Follow Rotten Row
 

Conor scanned the hallway a second time before kneeling closer to the note. He read the words twice and then watched as they disappeared from the page, receding into it like they were melting away. Conor was left staring at a blank sheet of paper when the lunch doors flew open and 300 middle schoolers flooded the halls.

 

There was only one tree at the end of Rotten Row – a massive, ancient redwood surrounded by stumps. Rotten Row was a long street full of giant houses that all seemed to have one person living in them. The street used to face a grove of redwoods, but builders tore the trees down to construct the houses. The park was still there and not all bad in Conor's view. It had stumps for climbing and wildflowers in spring. None of the houses on Rotten Row ever had their windows open. Conor lived in an apartment, and the only window he had looked out at another apartment building. If he could open his window and see a park, he would never close it, even if that park was a graveyard of trees!

 

Conor realized the hall had gone quiet again, and he was still kneeling in front of the bulletin board, staring at a blank sheet of paper. Conor stuffed the paper in his backpack and rushed to class, late for the first time he could remember.