Flying in Place (4 page)

“Yes,” I said. I’d suddenly realized how I could offer Jane an adventure and find out whether Ginny had been real, all at the same time.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. At one point I saw Myrna talking to my mother in the hall, and my stomach clenched; but when I stopped by Mom’s classroom after lunch she gave me one of her sweet public smiles, a little more guarded than usual, and said only, “Myrna Halloran told me you got cramps after all. Are you all right now?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m going to Jane’s house after school so we can study for the math test.”

The smile vanished at once. “Emma, how in heaven’s name can you study anything there? The place is always full of screaming children, and they must keep the television on twenty-four hours a day. Soap operas and game shows, stupid celebrities chattering trifles: just what you need to prepare for an exam.”

The Hallorans’ TV alternated between sports and PBS, and the loudest person in the house was Tom, but there was no point in saying so. Mom must have had cramps herself, because she’d never been this bitchy about the Hallorans where someone from the outside world might hear her. They were much more popular at school than she was.

She tugged at a stray wisp of hair, and for a moment she looked so much like Ginny that it gave me goosebumps. “I don’t see why you won’t let your father help you with homework. Your grades would probably be better.”

I’d made honor roll four marking periods in a row. No sense saying that, either; Mom would just remind me that it hadn’t been high honor roll. “When, Mom? He’s always at the hospital.” Except at dawn. “Jane’s good at math.”

“Well, bring her over to our house where it’s quiet, then. Do you really have to go over there all the time?”

This time I will be bringing her over, I thought, but you’re so deaf you’ll never know about it. “I already told her mother I’d be eating with them,” I said. “I might as well go straight there.”

She turned her head away from me, and I saw her throat quivering. “Pizza,” she said. “Pizza and potato chips. That’s what they live on, isn’t it? On that diet you’ll get as big as their house.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. Give them a break. They grow their own salad, you know. I can’t eat your flowers, can I?”

“If the state of my rose bushes is any indication, their dogs are doing vile things to the lettuce.
I
wouldn’t eat their salad.”

“They haven’t asked you to,” I said, and watched her face turn white. I was really asking for it: she might say I couldn’t go there at all. I swallowed and said, “Mom, they wash everything before they eat it. Mrs. Halloran’s a nurse; she’s not going to give her kids the plague. She cares about nutrition as much as you do, really she does. Don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” she said coldly, and went back to grading vocabulary quizzes.

As I’d expected,
I didn’t have much trouble convincing Jane to go to the lake instead of home. “It’s too nice a day to stay inside,” I told her. “We can study after dinner.”

“Sure,” she said. “You’re the one who’s always so hyped on studying. We can go to the beach and get some sun—”

“Not the beach,” I said. “Another place.”

“Huh? Where?”

“A place I know,” I said. “Where we can talk without anybody hearing us. I have to tell you a secret. It’s about an adventure.”

Jane shook her head. “You’re talking like a book.”

My eyes stung. “Aw. Come on, Jane. I thought you liked adventures.”

“Well, sure, if it’s fun. Will it be fun?”

“Sure,” I said.

“This had better be good, Emma.”

“It will. I promise.”

So I took her to my favorite spot at the lake. A mile north of town, and accessible only by dirt roads, the lake was the only place where I was always happy. I loved it even in the summer, when everybody went swimming. I hated wearing a bathing suit, because it showed too much of my body, but once I was in the water people couldn’t see me. I was safe in the water; I could stay there for hours.

Sometimes I thought I should have been born as a whale or a walrus, some big animal that was graceful underwater, even though it had a lot of fat. It was good to be fat in the water. Fat helped you float, and it kept you warm. “You have your very own wetsuit,” my father had told me when he was teaching me to swim. He’d smiled when he said it, and he’d even complimented me on my endurance. I knew he wanted me to swim a lot so I’d lose weight, but I liked the compliment anyway. Today I clung to that memory, because so many others were spoiled.

It wasn’t warm enough to go in the water yet, even if I did have my own wetsuit, but that meant I could wear jeans and a sweatshirt and not have to worry about anybody seeing too much of me. And the lake was beautiful: silver water surrounded by tall green trees. You saw deer come out of the woods to drink sometimes, when there weren’t too many people around, and there were always birds and frogs and waterbugs. Schools of minnows swam in the shallows, casting intricate shadows on the bottom; the water reflected shifting patterns of leaves and clouds. There was always something to watch.

Jane usually went to the eastern beach, where the other kids hung out and blasted their radios, but today I took her to a small abandoned dock on the western shore, where you could almost forget that anybody else was around. I spent hours there, safe in the knowledge that no one could find me. I’d never told anyone about the dock before.

“Aren’t you hot in that shirt?” she said as we walked there. We were both sweating. “I should think you’d at least roll up the sleeves.”

“I’m okay.” Jane’s skimpy shorts and tank top embarrassed me; I was uncomfortable even looking at her. “I don’t want to get bug bites.”

“So use bug spray. Shoot, Emma. You wear too much clothing. Me, I’d be dying in all that stuff. Where is this place?”

“We’re almost there,” I said. I hoped she’d like it.

She didn’t. “This is your secret place?” she said when we got there. “This old dock? Everybody knows about this place. They don’t come here ’cause the beach is more fun, that’s all.”

I felt myself turning red. Now Jane thought I was a fool. Did people know I’d been coming here? Had they been watching me? “It’s just a place to talk,” I said. “It’s not the secret.”

“Okay, so quit being so weird and tell me the secret.”

“You have to promise not to tell anybody.”

“I can’t do that until I know what it is.”

“Jane!”

“I’ll promise if it’s something that won’t hurt anybody.”

“Of course it won’t hurt anybody! I wouldn’t do that.”

“Okay. So tell.”

“All right.” This wasn’t going very well, and I was getting nervous. I drummed my hand on the wooden dock and got a splinter. Great. “Okay. There’s this locked room in my house, see—”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know what’s in it. It’s locked.”

“Why’s it locked?”

“My mom doesn’t want anybody in there.”

“Oh. Like my mom and her study. You can’t go in there when your mom’s in there? It’s her quiet place? Is that it?”

Every room was my mother’s quiet place. “No, she doesn’t go in there. Nobody goes in there. That’s why I need your help, because I want to find out what’s in the room.” If I could get into Ginny’s room, maybe I could find proof that she was real. The bracelet she’d talked about, or those yellow pajamas. Then I’d know I wasn’t going crazy. But I couldn’t tell Jane about Ginny, because then she’d really think I was weird.

“If your mom doesn’t want you in there she must have a reason,” Jane said. “Anyway, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“Well, see, I can’t find the key—”

“Try the key to another room, maybe. I can’t pick locks, Emma.”

“The other rooms don’t have locks. Not working ones, anyway. My mother had this one put on before I was born.”

“Wow,” Jane said, and laughed. “She really doesn’t want you in there.” But at least she sounded interested now. “What do you think you’re going to find, anyhow? A dead body or something?”

My mouth got dry. “I don’t know. But it must be something pretty interesting. So anyhow, you know that big ladder your dad used when he was painting your house? Do you still have it?”

Jane started giggling. “Shoot, Emma! What, we’re going to drag that ladder out of the garage and climb into this room and nobody will see us? Are you crazy? That ladder must weigh about thirty thousand pounds, anyhow. We couldn’t even carry it. Use your own ladder.”

“We don’t have one,” I said. “My father hires people with equipment for stuff like that—”

“Oh, people like us, right? Because he’s too busy being a rich doctor and having dinner with the mayor? Huh! Can’t even get his hands dirty with paint.”

“He gets his hands dirty all the time,” I said, my throat constricting. “He cuts people open.”

Jane glared at me. “He hardly even says hello to any of us.”

“Well, I do, don’t I? Come on, Jane, you have to help me—”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “The whole thing’s nuts. If your mom doesn’t want you in there you shouldn’t go in there. You’re asking me to steal my dad’s ladder—”

“Not steal! Just borrow!”

“It’s wrong,” Jane said. “If Daddy caught us he’d be mad. It’s dangerous; we might fall. Anyhow, we wouldn’t get away with it, even if we did it at night. Even if we got the ladder out of the garage without my folks knowing about it, you think we’re going to climb into that room without anybody noticing?”

“We could do it when my dad was at the hospital,” I said. “My mother never hears a thing.”

“Your
mother?
Are you kidding? Emma, you even
think
about whispering to somebody in that class and she’s on you like fur on a gorilla. Forget it. This whole thing’s stupid.”

“But—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Hey, look. Here come Tad and Billy. I wonder what they’re doing all the way over here?”

She finally sounded happy, but my stomach clenched. We were out here alone, miles from the beach, and boys were coming. Big boys, bigger than we were. They were both wrestlers; they won prizes for keeping people pinned on mats. “We’d better leave,” I said. “Do they see us?”

“What? Of course they see us, dodo! They’re coming to say hello. What’s your problem?”

“Nothing,” I said, although I felt as if I were about to be sick. I didn’t see how Jane could be so comfortable around boys. It must have been because she had all those brothers. “I don’t like them, that’s all.”

“Huh. Well,
I
think Billy’s cute, personally. Hey, Billy!”

Billy sat behind me in social studies, and I thought he was a dumb hulk. But she was calling him and waving, and we were on the dock, on a thin piece of wood sticking out into the water. They could stand at the end of it and keep us from getting back onto shore; they could throw us down and pin us and no one would know because we were so far from the beach.

I never should have brought Jane here. I was safe here by myself, but she attracted too much attention, and now everyone would know where I went when I wanted to be alone, I needed a place to be safe, and she’d ruined it. But I’d never been safe, had I? Everyone had known about the dock all along, I hadn’t been safe at all.

“How you doing?” Billy asked, slouching towards us. His fingers were as big around as sausages.

Tad trailed behind him, looking hot and bored and stupid. “Hey, Jane. Emma. Just hanging out? I thought you geniuses studied all the time.”

“Nah,” Jane said. “Too nice a day.” She started talking to Billy about the math test while Tad stared at her breasts beneath the thin cotton. Nobody was paying any attention to me.

They’d seen us here and knew we were alone, and Billy was distracting her while Tad stared at her, just stared, stared all he wanted and thought about what he wanted to do to her. I could see the gleam in his eyes, see him wiping his palms on his jeans.

How could she keep talking about math? Couldn’t she tell what was happening? She wasn’t even paying attention, just sitting there chattering at Billy. He started boasting about the latest wrestling meet, and Tad took a step closer to Jane.

“There’s an old rowboat around here someplace,” he said, interrupting Billy’s description of his winning hold. “Somebody just left it on shore. We were going to look for it and see if it would float and go out in it. Want to come?”

“Sure,” Jane said. She stood up, and her breasts jiggled, and Tad wiped his hands on his jeans again. “Does it have oars? You mean somebody just left it there?”

“It’ll be an adventure,” Billy said cheerfully, and I hated him because he was using my word. Had he and Tad heard me talking to Jane about Ginny’s room? Had they been spying on us? “If it sinks, we can all swim back to shore.”

The boat wasn’t hers any more than the ladder was. It didn’t even belong to her family. How could she do this? “It’s not yours,” I said, too loudly, thinking of how much more Jane’s tank top would show if it were wet. I knew I should warn her, but my throat wouldn’t form the words. You mustn’t ever tell anyone, he’d said, and I couldn’t. “You shouldn’t take it if it isn’t yours. Right, Jane?”

They all looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was there, and Billy laughed. “Oh, come on, Emma. Whoever had it, they don’t want it anymore, or they wouldn’t have left it there. They abandoned it.”