I wanted to write a chapter that felt like summer. Like being twelve and knowing exactly who your person is.
Chapter 9 is my Stand By Me chapter. My Goonies chapter. The one where two boys go somewhere forbidden and come back changed—or at least, one of them does.
I didn't plan it this way. But somewhere in the drafting, I realized what I was actually writing: an Amblin movie stripped down to bone (pun intended).
There's a specific tone those films have. Stand By Me. The Goonies. Super 8. Early Stranger Things before it became about other things. They're about friendship that doesn't announce itself. About kids who bicker and compete and give each other grief, and you understand—without anyone saying it—that they'd walk through fire for each other.
That's the register I wanted. The banter that masks the depth. The loyalty that shows up in action, not declaration.
But I write spare prose. No swelling scores. No camera pushing in on a meaningful look. So the question became: how do you capture that warmth without abandoning the restraint?
The answer, I think, was structure.
Those films follow a clear shape. Act one: the ordinary world, disrupted by a decision to go somewhere. Act two: the journey, with obstacles that reveal character. Act three: the destination, where something shifts.
Chapter 9 follows that exactly.
Act one is Widow Maren's drying rack and the conversation by the woodpile. Fionn decides to visit the forbidden clearing. Colm agrees. They make a bet. This is the ordinary world—two boys who know each other's rhythms, who bicker like they've been bickering for years.
Act two is the journey. The bone alley. The Boneholder territory where people pull their children inside when Fionn passes. Colm's father's kill site, where Colm reveals something he's never said aloud. The obstacles aren't external dangers—they're internal ones. The curse pressing against Fionn's skin. The expectations pressing against Colm's future.
Act three is the clearing itself. The moment Fionn kneels in the ash and waits for the wrongness to hit. And it doesn't.
The Amblin trick is earned sentiment. You spend an hour with these kids being kids—annoying each other, competing, deflecting—so when the emotional moment arrives, it lands. You've earned the right to feel something.
I tried to do that here. The "witness, not accomplice" exchange. The bet about apologizing to Widow Maren. All of it building toward the moments that matter.
Colm appearing at the mouth of the bone alley. Not waving. Just waiting.
Neither of them mentioning it afterward.
That's the friendship. That's what I wanted to capture. The showing up. The not making a thing of it.
Here's what I was actually writing about: Fionn deciding he's done being defined by the curse.
For twelve years, everyone has told him what he is. Cursed. Wrong. Even his own body seems to agree—the way dragon bone makes his skin crawl, the way he's always looking at the sky without knowing why.
This chapter is Fionn going to the one place where the curse should be strongest. The origin point. The circle of dragon blood where they found him. And discovering... nothing. No wrongness. No confirmation of what everyone believes.
The clearing was just a clearing. The earth was just earth.
He's not cured. He's not explained. But he's no longer waiting for his own body to condemn him. That's the shift. That's the coming of age.
Colm matters here too. More than I initially planned.
He's the Boneholder's son who should be learning to hunt dragons like his father. Who has "the eye," whatever that means. Who carries his own weight of expectation.
And he chooses to spend his day walking into forbidden territory with the cursed boy. Not because he doesn't know what people think. Because he doesn't care.
"Worth it."
That's the whole friendship in two words. I could have written a speech. Could have had Colm explain what Fionn means to him. But those films never do that. The kids in Stand By Me don't talk about how much they love each other. They just keep walking together. They just show up.
The risk with this chapter was sentimentality. The Amblin films can tip into it—the score tells you what to feel, the camera lingers a beat too long. Without those tools, the prose has to work harder.
So I kept it spare. Colm at the bone alley is one sentence: "Colm." He stood there. Waiting.
No commentary. No "Fionn felt a rush of gratitude." Just the action. The presence. Trust the reader to feel it.
Same with the ending. "Worth it." Full stop. Not "Worth it, Colm said, and Fionn understood in that moment that their friendship transcended the petty divisions of Boneholder and Edge-dweller, that—"
No. Just: "Worth it."
I don't know if I pulled it off. The balance between warmth and restraint is thin. One extra sentence of interiority and you've crossed into sentimentality. One sentence too few and you've lost the emotional thread entirely.
But this was the chapter I wanted to write. Two boys. A forbidden place. A friendship that doesn't explain itself.
If you've ever had a person who just showed up—not waving, just waiting—you know what this chapter is about.
That's what I was reaching for. That specific kind of love.