The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,47
in a pinch, then pulled cloth tepees out over her small breasts. “Nice rack,” she mouthed at Laurel, grinning.
Laurel flushed. She’d forgotten to take out the cotton balls she’d stuffed into her training bra that morning.
“Would you like a snack?” Mother asked.
She hadn’t yet noticed the sudden sprouting of Laurel’s fluffy bosom, so Laurel shrugged her backpack off and hugged it to her chest. Down the hall, where Mother couldn’t see, Thalia laughed silently, giving Laurel a double thumbs-up. She went into their bedroom and closed the door with elaborate gentleness, Thalia’s signature anti-slam.
Laurel kept her backpack clutched across her front and nodded at Mother, who got up and wafted through the swinging door into the kitchen. Laurel blew her air out in a relieved sigh and let the bag slide down until she was holding it by one strap, the heavy book-filled bottom resting on the floor.
“Tell Mother I went to change out of my school clothes,” she said to Marty.
“Hold up,” he said. He was wearing faded jeans that had been washed baby-soft and one of his loungey flannel shirts, but his body language did not match the comfort of his clothes. His long torso was folded stiffly at the waist, his spine not touching the sofa back.
As the swinging doors came to rest, he tipped his head to one side, appraising her, until Laurel wished she’d kept her backpack in her arms.
“Little Laurel, are you finally growing up?” he asked.
She flushed and turned her back, looking out the windows as if she’d suddenly become fascinated by the view into her own backyard. The bird feeder was empty.
“I need to go change,” she repeated.
“You’ve already changed,” he said. “You’re getting to look exactly like your mother. I never noticed till now.” His tone had an unfamiliar edge. He didn’t sound like Laurel’s redneck, drawly uncle, the one who called her Peapod and brought her packs of Juicy Fruit. “Are you turning into a lady?” He made “lady” sound like a dirty word, not a thing a girl would want to be.
Laurel let the backpack drop entirely and crossed her arms, even though her back was to him. She felt the cottonballs flattening, and underneath, she felt her heart thump, hard and fast.
“Little Lady Laurel. Want to see something?”
She didn’t move, didn’t answer, uncomfortable and not sure why. Then, in her mother’s tidy family room, she heard the unmistakable rasp of a zipper being drawn down.
“Want to see?” he said, wheedling-like.
Her stomach turned, went sour, as if she had eaten something that was beginning to go rotten. She knew what he’d unzipped. His flannel shirt had pearl snaps on it. His leather jacket was beside him, but it had buttons.
“Want to see, Lady Laura-Lee?”
It was so dead quiet she could hear the muffled rasp of his calloused fingers on the denim. She stared at the empty bird feeder until her eyes ached from not blinking. The worst part wasn’t the nasty undercurrent in his voice. It wasn’t even that she’d loved him her whole life. The worst part was that a piece of her had a hard time not looking. She was eleven years old and had only a sister. She had never seen one.
Laurel heard the kitchen doors swing open again, heard Mother’s low heels tapping one last time against linoleum before she stepped onto the carpet.
There was a tiny silence, and then Mother said, “Laurel, honey, I told you to go change.” She spoke sweetly, in her normal dulcet voice, as if Marty’s cock weren’t loose in the room.
Laurel headed back to the hallway that led to her bedroom, careful to turn around by going right, so that she never looked at Marty or Mother. She walked down the hall to the room she shared with Thalia.
Thalia sprawled on her stomach on the floor. Her gutted backpack was beside her, and she had three open books, a notebook, and a yellow folder scattered across the floor. Laurel could hardly see a speck of carpet.
When Thalia saw Laurel, she sat up and said, “What happened?”
Laurel said, “Uncle Marty,” like his name was a complete thought.
Thalia made one of Daddy’s faces, that fierce kind of bird-looking, foreign and intense, as if she could see straight through Laurel to something beautiful and strange three feet behind her. Then she blinked and said, her voice matter-of-fact, “You still have your fake tits in.”
She picked up a pink highlighter and pulled her history book into her lap. All at once she was