Dark Water - Laura McNeal [19]
Or maybe Hickey and Greenie would just go back to school and leave me here, unless Greenie made him walk with her along the trail, calling for me like I was a lost dog until Greenie started to worry that I’d been picked up by a serial killer, so she would call the police and give a description of my yellow hooded sweatshirt, my hoop earrings, and my jeans.
At the same moment that I decided to call Greenie and tell her I would just walk all the way home along the river, something I’d wanted to try for a long time anyway, my phone rang inside my yellow pocket. I looked at it first, afraid it was my father again or my mother standing in the attendance office, her face red with the humiliation of having a delinquent child, but it was Greenie.
“Done walking?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Done drinking?” I shouldn’t have said anything. That’s the way it is with friends and family. If you insist on criticizing them, they want to get rid of you.
“It was just one beer, Miss Priss. I told Hickey we ought to head back, anyway. Get there while Paula Menard can still slip us a tardy pass. Otherwise we’ll have to go to Thursday school. Or Saturday school. Or maybe even Sunday school.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Meet you at the car, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but it came to me that I could stay there in the sunshine, on a rock, on the river, without Greenie or Hickey or anyone to disturb me. I knew my mother had told all of my teachers that my father had left. She’d made a point of it after I flunked a chemistry test. “Why did you have to tell everybody?” I asked at the time. But now I saw that I had a get-out-of-jail-free card. If I explained that my father had called and invited me to his love nest in Paris, my mother would write me an excuse note, I was pretty sure, and I was also sure my teachers would accept it.
“You know what?” I said to Greenie. “I think I’m just going to stay.”
“What?”
“I need to think about some stuff. My dad called.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” she said. “But call me later. I don’t want to worry that a mountain lion is digesting you.”
I told her I’d call. Then I dialed my mother’s cell phone, which I knew she turned off during the day so it wouldn’t ring during her classes, and I left a message about being fine, just being on a walk, working some things out that Dad said that morning, and I’d talk to her later. Then I did something I almost never do outside of school: I turned my phone off.
Fourteen
I stood in the river up to my knees and let the water flow soft and cold around me until I felt, for just a second, that I was moving and the water was still. Then I put my shoes back on and hiked farther along the trail than I’d ever gone and I could see no one, no houses, no power lines, even. Suddenly I was in the wilderness instead of five miles from home. I stopped to breathe a little and looked across the river, where instead of reeds and willow bushes a thicket of oaks and sycamores grew.
The Santa Margarita isn’t very deep or fast, so it was strange that I’d never explored the other side. Mostly the other side didn’t look that interesting, but these trees were tall and elegant and protective. I looked down at the river and decided it wasn’t too deep, that I could probably walk across if I rolled my jeans up high enough and used a few rocks as stepping-stones. I ended up soaking my thighs, but it was worth it: under the oaks it was foresty and dark and spacious. It was so peaceful and level that you could have pitched a tent, and as I walked around thinking about that, I realized that two sycamores in the farthest corner