The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,106
her keys, then threw them across the yard in a bright arc that came nowhere near Thalia. They landed in a heap in the dust, and Sissi cackled as Thalia went to retrieve them.
“Go,” Thalia said to Laurel.
Thalia had left the Volvo running, so Laurel got in on the driver’s side and backed up onto the road. She wound her way through DeLop’s warren of streets, a mix of gravel and old asphalt and dirt, all crisscrossing and doubling back. The paved ones had common names, like Alice and Janet and Jasper. The others were homemade and nameless. Laurel kept her windows down, moving slowly and looking side to side.
The late-afternoon heat was keeping most people inside. She saw a young woman she didn’t know well, not part of her family, sitting out in the square of dirt she’d fenced around her trailer and watching a filthy baby grubbing around. The baby was shirtless and probably getting sunburned, and looking at its fat belly and the sag of the heavy diaper pulling at its legs, Laurel remembered the feel of Bet in her arms at that age. She’d felt that tightening urge to pick Bet up and run and keep her. Why hadn’t she? They wouldn’t be here now if she had. Bet would be in Shelby’s school, her narrow calves poking out from under a plaid uniform skirt.
About a third of the kids in DeLop had never seen the inside of a school building. Some had parents or older siblings who would take them two miles to the highway, as close as the bus would come, so they could glean a meager education from the county school. The kids who did go almost universally dropped out before getting through middle school. Bet, still registered in seventh grade, was an anomaly, and her dogged attendance was the main reason Laurel had chosen her to be Shelby’s pen pal. If Bet made it all the way through eighth grade, she’d be one of the best-educated people in the whole town.
Every now and again, one of them made it to high school. Laurel knew of only two kids who had graduated, and both of them had stopped being DeLop kids. They had gone out into the larger world and hardly ever came back.
Laurel couldn’t blame them. Still, she should have known she couldn’t pull Bet out of DeLop, drop her down in Victorianna, and not have the child feel the knife-sharp cut of difference. Of course she would long for a place to sit down in Laurel’s world, but Laurel had not made room for her. The spare baby, Thalia had called Bet, rubbery and unreal, offered as a sacrifice.
The Volvo crept down the middle of Lance Road, and Laurel peered hard in all directions. DeLop’s colors had washed out, a collage of rain-faded gray wood hung with shreds of clinging paint and metal so rusted it had no shine. Little flashes of the colors she associated with Shelby pulled her eye, shining in the dull landscape. Her heart leaped at a flash of bright pink, but it was only an overturned toy baby carriage abandoned by the road. Lime green caught her attention: a plastic bucket. A glimpse of neon orange was only a stolen traffic pylon peeking out from behind a pile of trash waiting to be burned. None of the colors were Shelby.
Was Shelby afraid? It would be so unfamiliar here. There was no trash service, and litter dotted every surface, scraps of food boxes and bottles and chicken bones. Most of the mobile homes had no indoor plumbing. Had Shelby ever seen a tin roof? They were everywhere here, some silver, some green; on rainy Christmases, they’d had to yell over the drumbeat of rain on tin. There were rusted propane tanks in almost every front yard. The Folks used propane for heat when they could pay for it. Would Shelby even know what those tanks were? Would she know to be quiet and cautious, or was she dashing about, bold as Thalia but not a third as worldly, poking her nose around, not paying attention to her surroundings, while Bet backed off and then slipped out of sight around a corner. The dogs here didn’t know Shelby, and almost everyone kept dogs that were as territorial as the people were. The people didn’t know her, either, and they were far more dangerous.
Laurel wished she had brought Shelby here before, the way Thalia had wanted her to. When