The Hideaway
When my parents got divorced, my dad moved into a house three blocks away and left the shed in our backyard to rot. The kind of shed with cheap plywood walls, a warped door, and windows smudged with spiderwebs and the grease of a thousand hands. Growing up, the shed was the one place my friends and I could go where no adults ever followed, which made it holy for us.
We called it the Hideaway. Capital H. As if it were a place on the map, and not just a twelve-by-eight box full of broken lawn tools and the ghosts of old rakes.
By the summer after sixth grade, it was me, Jenny, and Ryan. None of us were what you’d call cool. Jenny’s mom worked at CVS and made her wear ugly orthopedic shoes because her ankles collapsed inward. Ryan was skinny and fast and said his dad was in “healthcare sales,” which meant pills, which meant the two times I slept over his house I saw things nobody ever explained to me: expired bandages in the cereal cabinet, a fridge full of frozen needles, a room with tin-foiled windows. My parents, just like our neighbors, were good at pretending everything was fine.
The Hideaway was where we kept the box. It was just a shoebox with a half-broken Nike logo on the lid, but we treated it like a safe. Inside: a lighter Jenny stole from the break room at CVS, Ryan’s copy of Goosebumps #8, a plastic bag with a single cigarette, four pixie sticks taped together with duct tape, and a folded-up note none of us admitted to writing that said in all caps, “IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN TO THE DEAD.” It felt dangerous and sacred, the way secrets do.
We made up a rule that you could only come into the Hideaway if you had something new to add to the box. At first it was just candy, movie ticket stubs, a dollar bill with a dick drawn on Washington’s head. Eventually, Jenny brought in a bottle of NyQuil she swiped from CVS (“For emergencies,” she said, not caring to define what would count as one.)
After that, things escalated. We stole more. Little things at first, stupid things: a rubber bouncy ball, a packet of sugar from Denny’s, a chipped plastic ring from the church lost-and-found. We spent entire afternoons passing the cigarette around, lighting and relighting it, coughing, pretending to like it because we thought it made us look cooler and older.
One afternoon, in the blue dusk between summer and fall, we made a blood oath. Ryan said he’d seen it in a movie, so we used Jenny’s safety scissors to slice our thumbs. We pressed them together and swore to never tell anyone about the box, the shed, or each other.
“I think I’m going to die,” Jenny said, staring at her bleeding thumb. “I can feel it in my feet.”
“You’re fine,” Ryan said, maybe a little too eagerly.
We sat there, blood on our hands, breathing in the shed stink—mold, grass clippings, something older and sourer. For a second, the world felt very small, the three of us alone at the center of something big.
Then school started, and everything changed.
Ryan went out for cross country, started running with the fast kids. Jenny got into anime and wore cat ears to school. I tried to act like nothing was different, but I spent a lot of time alone, doing homework at the kitchen table while my mom watched old HGTV shows with the sound up too loud.
The Hideaway stayed empty for the most part. The box collected dust, then mold, then a weird white fuzz around the edges that made me sneeze. I went back sometimes, sat on the splintered floor, and tried to remember what it felt like to be part of something bigger than me.
One night in late October, Ryan showed up at my window. He was crying, sniffling, snot on his sleeve. His dad had been arrested that afternoon. The cops took his stepmom, too. “They called my dad a dealer,” he said. “They said Tiger had swallowed a pill and died in the tub. The officer carried him outside in his arms.” Tiger was their neighbor’s Egyptian cat.
He asked if he could sleep in the Hideaway. I said yes, and we snuck out. Jenny didn’t answer my texts, but I left the shed door propped open in case she showed.
Ryan and I stayed up all night, sitting in our old spots, staring at the box in the dark. He told me everything, all the stuff we half-knew but never said out loud. How the pills weren’t just his dad’s, how he found his stepmom passed out in the backyard last winter. How he thought about running away but never got further than the mailbox.
“Do you think the blood oath still counts?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. And then: “I suppose.”
We opened the box together. The lighter was gone. So was the note. Just a crumpled up pack of gum, some movie stubs, and the NyQuil, in part leaked out, sticky and blue on the cardboard.
Ryan started to laugh, hysterical, bitter, cracked. “We’re so fucking stupid.”
We left the box open and went inside when it got cold. Ryan’s mom picked him up the next morning. I didn’t see him much after that.
Jenny moved away before Christmas. Her mom got transferred to a new CVS in another state, and Jenny didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I saw her once in the spring, walking down the street in a coat that was too big, eyes on the ground. She waved at me, just once, then kept walking.
My dad finally tore down the shed that summer. He said it was “an eyesore.” I watched him pull it apart, sheet by splintered sheet, until it was just a bare patch of dirt, no different from anywhere else in the yard.
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I walk to where the Hideaway used to be and dig with my hands. I keep hoping I’ll find something: an old movie stub, a lighter, a note in handwriting I don’t remember. Mostly, I find rocks, old screws, the soggy ghosts of things we left behind.
If anyone asks, I say I barely remember that summer. Just a shed. Just a box. Just some friends I don’t talk to anymore.
- The Hideaway - December 6, 2025
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
