The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,108
she ran. She thought she would call David, but her fingers were wiser. They hit the code for Thalia’s cell.
Thalia answered by saying, “At Della’s. Haven’t found her.”
Laurel yelled, “I think Bet took her to the Frog Hole. Get David. He doesn’t know the way,” and then she hung up and saved her breath for running.
She circled the perimeter of Enid’s fence, going back to the familiar place between two trees where it was possible to slip sideways into the brush-filled woods. The slim trail led up, and Laurel hurtled along it, running flat out with the branches catching at her clothing and scraping her bare arms.
The strip mine’s sides were so sheer it looked like someone had taken an enormous bread knife and cut a slice out of the earth. The stagnant water, a fathomless green, crept up its sides and then evaporated out in an endless cycle with the rain. This year had been damp, so the water would be high, emerald green and unmoving, so deep that the sun could warm only its surface.
Laurel saw a flash of color: the familiar hot pink of a Justin Timberlake T-shirt. There Shelby was, forty feet up the path, close to the edge of the quarry with her back to Laurel. Bet was right beside her, standing in profile. Shelby had a big piece of brick held up over her head, high, in both hands. As Laurel cleared the rise, rushing forward, Shelby hurled it in. It arced out over the water, plummeting fast, and Shelby yelled, “Ka-boom,” as it splashed down.
Bet Clemmens was fiddling with something, and once the brick had sunk, Shelby took it from her. As Bet leaned down to pick up her own chunk of brick, she saw Laurel, fast and breathless, racing up the trail behind them.
Their eyes met, and Bet’s mouth dropped open in silent surprise. Laurel skidded to a halt, her hands lifting, palms facing Bet.
Bet glanced down at the chunk of brick she’d just scooped up, then her gaze flicked back at Laurel.
“Shel,” Laurel called, a warning in her tone.
Shelby didn’t look back or respond, just stayed by the edge of the quarry. Then Laurel saw the little wires going into her ears. Shelby had her iPod headphones in. That was what Bet had been fiddling with, working the controls to find a song.
Shelby was standing so close to the edge. The water was high, a ten-foot drop into fathomless green.
Laurel was seven feet away. She realized she could hear the tinny echo of some boppy tune pumping into Shelby’s ears, an inappropriately cheerful sound track. Bet shifted the brick in her hand as if testing the weight of it.
“You waited this long,” Laurel said. “You don’t want to.”
Bet’s original surprise had faded, and her eyes had gone as blank and glassy as the surface of the Frog Hole.
“This is that part now,” Shelby said, in the overloud voice of someone with headphones in.
“Please don’t,” Laurel said.
She had so much more to say. She wanted to tell Bet she saw the difference now, she understood how Daddy had brought Mother down the hill. He’d made a place for her. Laurel had given Bet American Eagle jeans and colored sandals and watched her with a hard, suspicious eye, but she hadn’t made a space for Bet. Now here was Bet, leading Shelby to the Frog Hole, trying to make a space for herself.
Bet peeked at Laurel sideways out of one dead eye. There was no time to say these things. Bet’s face was expressionless, as if all her focus had turned inward.
She was wavering, and Laurel said, “It can all still be okay.”
The words fell flat between them. They weren’t true. There was Molly, and that could never be okay.
Bet’s body seemed to come to some decision.
Shelby said, “He’s saying, ‘You better take my heart,’ I’m pretty sure. You want to listen?” Her hands were moving up to take out the earphones, and Bet said, “I’m real sorry.”
Her hands moved, too. The brick came up.
Laurel was already running toward them, but Bet was too fast, smashing it down into the back of Shelby’s bright blond head, at the center part between her braids. Laurel saw the vivid spurt of fresh red blood, and Shelby stumbled forward. Laurel was reaching, her fingers scraping against the bright pink of the T-shirt but finding no purchase. Bet dropped the brick and shoved Shel in the small of her back as she crumpled. Shelby went over the