Under its veil of May fog waited the lake, cold and steady as a corpse. By rights, Spring should have been running the place by now—mid-May in North Texas was too late to be this chilly—but things in nature ran irregularly. A year before, there’d been snow, an Oklahoma Norther that had buried the burger stand, the shake shack, and the Rec center, leaving the picnic tables, tree houses and high dives idle, white, and silent as phantoms. 

Punching through the mist, a school bus. Gravel crunched, tires whined, and a squeal of breaks shattered the lake’s loneliness. 

“Evvvvveryone out!” the bus driver shouted. 

Jackrabbits trying out their brand-new legs, the students leapt out, bouncing on their sandalled feet to work the waking back into them. “Everyone here!” cried Mrs. Barton, their teacher. Students corralled to her side, and she talked them through proper lake behavior, sketching the boundaries of their play, repeating the story of the boy who’d drowned years before, reiterating the dangers of the high diving board but reminding them, always, to have fun, and savor the honey of these last days of junior high. Then they were off, bellowing, running, racing, crying out their destinations. 

“I’m going to go off the high dive! Gonna go twenty feet!”

“I want to go to the beach!”

“Let’s get on the slide before any other classes go!”

“Mrs. Barton—the Frisbees!”

“Tag, you’re it!”

Their cries of joy streamed in their wake, scattering the mists, waking the morning. All except one small boy, who’d been the last to dismount. He was in rimless glasses with a sack lunch bag, scrubbing his eyes, peering at the mist-enshrouded forms as though he were an alien crash-landed, confused, vaguely threatened, ready to get out. He was small for thirteen, and he was stocky and unpleasant to look at, with green strap sandals and purple and green bathing trunks, and an off-white “Westhaven Panthers” t-shirt. What must the lake have thought about a boy like this, so clearly a poor swimmer, a nothing athlete, a Mama’s boy? 

The boy didn’t care. His concerns were stuffed into the lunch bag: a smashed sandwich, a pencil, a fantasy paperback, a clump of scribbled-over, printed pages entitled The Ruins of the Fog Kingdom, by Carter Wilkinson. Its composition, reading, editing, and rewriting had engrossed him the entire ninety minutes of the bus ride. Of countless buses since the beginning of sixth grade. Every day, to and from school, in the hallways where he’d tripped, stumbled, righted himself only to go right back squinting at his project, and in rides to dentist appointments, doctor checkups, piano lessons, Carter had revised his vision. The Fog Kingdom would be his magnum opus, his message to the world.

So much had he poured into it, he’d long stopped caring that he was ignored at recess, sat alone at lunch, never invited to birthday parties. Ghost, the other kids called him, because he was always slipping around corners, running through the halls to his next classes so he could have more time to read, zipping his hoodie up to hide his face from conversation. What was the point of talking with others if it was only to pretend to care for things he never would? To learn subjects he didn’t like to speak about them in order to hear other people speak about them who liked them as much as he. What was the point of people? As for the citizens of the Fog Kingdom, these were lives he could maneuver, fates he could twine to fit his dreams and desires. Fog Kingdom was the real conversation, everything else was interruption. 

“Carter?” Mrs. Barton said. “Don’t you want to go in the water?” 

Carter shook his head, eying distrustfully the sluggish liquid now jockeyed into heaving rolls by the breaking bodies. A billion cracked mirrors, jagged lines of white surf, catching blades of morning sunlight that streamed over the crowning high dive which sent pitching children flailing into the cold cushions of water like an all-enveloping bed. Others rushed, dove, splashed, cannonballed, jackknifed, and pummeled the surfaces with such abandon you’d think that the children had never seen such a thing as a lake before; that it was almost too wonderful an invention. 

“But it’s just fine. You’re only cold for a moment, and then you get used to it.”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Y’know, I think it would be really fun for you and your other classmates to have some playtime together. Hey, Melanie! What game is that you were playing near the shore?”

Melanie was his lab partner from biology.

“Red Rover,” she said bashfully. 

“Why don’t you try it, Carter? The other boys won’t be too rough.”

Carter knew the game. It involved charging into walls of interlinked arms and either tearing through or getting hamstrung trying to escape, like a fly sticking itself into a spider’s net. Caught, you joined the team and added your hands to the walls. Escaped, went back and did it again until you lost. 

“Well…”

“Or the others can come here and play with you?” 

“No, no. It’s fine.” Carter stood. “I’ll try it.” He knew the others did not like his type of game. If the kids were not shooting and falling, they would not understand. For Carter there was no ball, no goal—nothing but the playing out of a fiction whose rules were as opaque and fluctuating as a castle of fog. 

He played one round of Red Rover, running easy to get caught, and making such a weak net the others did not care when he slunk away. Not even Mrs. Barton, ever mushing her students down the hallways, pressing them forward, digging for answers, not even she cared if Carter chose to go away. Not on the last day of junior high. 

Waking, the morning tossed her hair, dusted the fog webs from her skirts. Carter tested the surface with his toe and shivering, retreated to the log he’d been sitting on. Back to the Kingdom. 

Wind chimes from a distant backyard skittered across the water’s surface. 

Next year, no, in three months, everything would change. A new school with burlier kids, louder buses, more subjects to get lost in, less time for the Kingdom. He had to finish it all now, before it was too late…

“What are you reading?” 

“Just a book,” he answered automatically. “I’m still working on it though.”

“Are there any good parts?” 

Carter looked at the boy who had joined him. He was not one of theirs, not a Westhaven Panther, meaning he was here with one of the other schools on their field trip. Short, pudgy, pale, in a dark green t-shirt and purple swim briefs and no flip flops. His hair was unruly and wet and rather dirty, but he had a soft, young face that reminded Carter, in a way, of his own. 

“Well, there is this man, a warrior, and he lives in the clouds, you know, like real clouds…”

Echoes of pealing laughter, cacophonous splashes and spastic giggles, and blasting cannonballs. The world swirled in a tumult of noise around him, drowning them out. 

“Do you want to go by the trees?” the other boy suggested. “It’ll be quieter there.”

Carter glanced at Mrs. Barton, who was policing the shoreline. Ten minutes. Thirty? She’d never see him leave. 

The boy leading the way, they circumnavigated the water to the edge of the live oaks. Carter talked. Words, ideas, details, pieces of plot long kept within the secret of his manuscript all came flooding out in the joy of sharing what he had in solitude and secrecy so long labored at. Great mountains, rivers, fields, and forests, their splotchy leaves blanketed in the blood of a dozen battles, with their clarion-horning heroes, their flashing swords, and gore-daubed helmets. All forgotten in the mists of time, but one day to be recovered. 

The boy latched onto his every word. More amazing still, as the talk went on, the forest sprouted Avalon lakes, and grew the groves of Celtic tales, alive with the bears and beasts who dragged you down to caverns where you slept a year and a day and emerged a king among nymphs. Here was a new world, the daylight eaten by the canopies, natural shade pooling the ground like springs. Tiger-winged butterflies roared from branch to branch. Were it not for the wind lisping leaves and the thin light in winking straws, time itself would not have been. 

They began to play. Reenacting stories of Carter’s own devising, which the boy knew as intimately as he himself. His stories, then the myths and legends and the epics. They were the Riders of Rohan on the Pelennor Fields. They were Matthias slaying the serpent, Asmodeus. They were Rand al’ Thor skirmishing with a Trolloc. They were the Wanderer, the Magician, the Exiled King. 

They led charges against monstrous odds, and scaled one-hundred-foot towers, and cast spells that exploded in fireballs of grit, twig, and mulch. Each new plot led to more; each excavation of the story uncovered some new plot to play out. 

Weary of day, the trees rested their shadows on his back. 

On they played. Their epic soared. Kingdoms rose, rebelled, fought, split, and formed anew. Heroes strode forth, clad in the glory of young boys’ imagination, toppling demon-headed giants, misshapen sorcerers, hellish hags. 

Wind gusted from the lake, biting and cold. 

“I need to rest,” Carter said. “We need to stop.”

They had been playing for hours. For lifetimes. What difference did it make in this time-eating forest? Carter was tired and hungry. The stories had gotten more intricate, their threads more convoluted. His world contained more roots and branches than there would ever be time to discover. Sated with story, he had tired of the game. The fantasy had begun to switch again into reality, nymphs turning back to trees and brooks. It was time. 

“I have to leave now.”

“But you can’t leave,” pleaded the other boy. “There’s still more.”

“I really have to. They’ll be missing me.”

What made him say that? He knew they did not miss him. It was the other way around. In the game he hadn’t wanted them there, stumbling into his fictions like lost tourists, but in the forest, cut off from the world, he missed their muttered hellos, the games of run, tackle, shout.

“But I don’t want you gone,” the boy said. “Stay here. Tell me more stories.”

The boy locked his hands on Carter’s forearm. They were clammy. 

“Stay here forever…”

Cold, pale, sickish green… the hands of a boy who had slept too long underwater…

With a cry, Carter shook them off and thrust the boy aside. He was soft, baggy, fetid, and splashed into a tree, vanishing in a shower of cold mist, ripped away by a sudden wind. 

How long had he been there? Carter was running through the trees and dappled day, mixing shafts of black and gold. Back through the live oaks, to the edge of the shore of the lake, now hung with the same mist the sunlight had killed. How late was it? Had they left without him? Why was he so cold, so empty-feeling, and where had this dampness crept up from? 

He slowed. In the gray world were the misty forms of his schoolmates, of Melaine and Mrs. Barton before the door of their bus. 

“I’m here!” he cried. “Don’t leave without me!”

He slowed to a walk. His feet hurt terribly for he’d lost his sandals in the run. He neared the figures. The mist fell from them like white cloaks. Mrs. Barton faded into a caution sign, the bus into a car flashing blue and red lights. The students were in the uniforms of police officers. Had he run to the wrong side of the lake? The diving boards looked the same, but perhaps it was a trick of perception. But here was the log he’d sat on just that morning while the others played Red Rover. Here, tattered and mud-smeared, were pages: “And it was in this way that the Legend of the Fog Kingdom…”

“Shame to do this, but we’ve gotta call the search off,” an officer said. 

“But they still haven’t found the body,” said another. 

“It’s been over a week. I’m sorry, but the boy’s gone.”

There was a silence. “I swore these accidents would never happen again,” the other man said quietly. “Not after the last one.”

“Some things you can’t help.”

“I suppose we’ll have to close the lake down then? Make sure nobody else can lose a child.”

“Suppose we will.”

The men disappeared into the car.

“Wait!” Carter shouted. “Who are you talking about? What’s happened? Where is everyone!”

The car idled, dipped up and over a pothole, slipped into the fog, disappeared. 

He was alone.

Carter turned back, collected the sodden pages one by one, shuffled them into order.

Completely alone. 

They would come back. His friends would remember. They had to. And if not? He would have to wait. An hour. A day. However long it took. He would wait, and when they returned, he would never let them go.