"Nothing happened." Joyce kept her eyes down, not looking up at her friend. She didn't like where the conversation was going.
"Something bad happened to you." Jessica sat next to Joyce on the bench, trying her best to help. "Will you tell me what it is?"
"I don't think I can. I hate to think about it."
"It might help to talk about it. I might be able to help you."
Joyce sighed and looked around the park in which she and her friend sat. "I don't know."
"I'm your friend. You can tell me."
"Okay." Joyce took in a breath. "I'll try not to cry."
It happened in November, Joyce started to say, a couple years back. I was fifteen. My best friend, Kent, was sixteen. We were great friends, really. Some people we knew thought that we should be dating, him and I, but it wasn't like that between us. We were just good friends.
Kent really liked to hunt. I didn't know how he could do it – how he could spend hours outside, in the cold, hoping to come across an animal so he could kill it. I was fine with the idea of killing animals for meat. I just didn't like being the one doing the killing. I only ever agreed to go hunting with him because he pleaded so much, and I knew I wasn't nearly good enough with a gun to actually shoot something. Actually, I did end up shoot something, but that happened much later.
On the morning that we went hunting, Kent drove us out into the forest as far as his car could take us, and then he and I walked another mile or two into the woods. Kent had a place picked out where he thought we'd be more likely to find deer. We set down our stuff, got out our guns, and waited. I couldn't have known how boring it'd be. We got there at six in the morning, and would have to stay until around eleven. Kent was really nice when he said it, but he encouraged me not to talk, since it would scare away the deer. Just because it gave me something to do, I ended up eating my share of the breakfast we had brought more than an hour before Kent had planned to eat it. A couple hours later, I couldn't take it any longer. I set down my gun, sighed loudly to fully express my boredom, and told Kent that I was done, that I wanted to go back.
"We're never gonna find one." I complained, "There might not be any deer in this forest at all."
"There's deer out here." Kent assured me. "I've hunted here a dozen times before and I've seen them." Kent didn't turn to talk to me, but instead kept his eyes on the forest around us, searching for any sign of game. He could get very serious about his hunting.
"Well I'm done." I set my gun down and threw back my head. I sighed again and said, "You can keep looking for these deer of yours if you want, but I don't see the point."
"Okay." Kent looked briefly down at his watch, and then back at the trees surrounding us. He watched carefully for a deer among the bushes. "It'll be noon in twenty minutes. If we haven't caught anything by then, we'll go back."
I shrugged. "Fine. You can have another twenty minutes if you want it, but I'm done." I started to unload my gun and put it away.
"Here, let me do that for you." Kent set down his own gun and reached for mine.
"I can do it." I said, "Remember, earlier you spent all that time showing me how to clean it out and put it away. There's no way that I sat through all that for nothing. I'll do it myself."
"Okay, okay." Kent chuckled a little and then checked his tone. He didn't want to scare away the deer. "Just try to be careful."
As I cleaned my gun, Kent finally spotted a deer. It was a doe and medium sized. It was a beautiful woody brown with white spots on its back. I quickly turned back to my work cleaning the gun. I did not want to see the deer get shot.
Careful not to scare it away, Kent raised his gun and aimed at the deer. He waited a moment, as the deer slowly came closer and into an area free of bushes and branches. Then, when the doe was close and the shot was clear, he slowly pulled down on the trigger.
Continued in part 2.
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