The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,79

initial clash followed by a symphony of crystal shards ringing off the smashed china and jangling away across the wood.

“Stop it!” Mother yelled, and Laurel drowned her out by sending a double stack of dinner plates hurtling to the floor. David was dead silent, but Thalia started making a strange choking noise, as if she might at any second break into hysterical laughter.

To David, Laurel said, “Get that bitch out of my house.”

David took one step toward Thalia, then paused and looked at Mother. He went still again.

Laurel grabbed a heavy crystal pitcher and held it up. To Mother, she said, “Get out, or this one’s coming at your face.”

Mother’s head wagged back and forth in small negation. Her eyes had not one safe place to land. David went to her and took her shoulders, his face grave and serious. He looked oddly disappointed. “Come,” he said.

He led her toward the front door, out of Laurel’s sight. Bet Clemmens must have still been pressed against it. She came scooting out of their way as Laurel heard the door open, coming to stand by Thalia in the middle of the foyer. Her blank, calm gaze hurt Laurel’s skin.

Laurel heard Mother’s heels tapping out the door and away, to where Daddy was waiting. All at once, the pitcher weighed a hundred pounds. Laurel set it down carefully, back in the cabinet, and started toward her sister.

“Laurel, no,” Thalia said. “Your feet are bare.”

Shattered glass was all around. Laurel stood on a tiny island of safe floor, blinking and uncertain.

Thalia held up one finger and then disappeared from the doorway. David had left the front door open, and Laurel could feel August push its way inside, a wave of heat that rolled across the room. It wilted her in one blast.

Thalia came back with the hallway runner rolled up in her hands. She bent into a deep bow and unfurled it as if laying out a red carpet. It made a bridge across the glass.

As Laurel walked over it, Thalia straightened up and put her hands together, once, twice, then faster and faster, until her hands were a blur. Bet stood behind her, uncertain, looking back and forth between them. Thalia clapped and clapped, calling, “Brava! Encore! Encore!”

Laurel kept moving, passing them both. She ran through the keeping room and up the stairs. She could still hear Thalia’s hands banging together, a one-woman standing ovation that went on and on and on. Laurel could hear her even when she ran into the bathroom. She fell to her knees there in darkness and threw up until there was nothing left at all.

CHAPTER 14

Laurel dreamed the boy with hair like wheat again. This time he was running through her own backyard with that same dog. The dog wasn’t Miss Sugar after all. It only looked like Sugar, with a lot of beagle in the mix. Laurel was below them, looking up the length of the boy’s string-bean body. She could not see his face, only the curved underside of his pointed chin. He was tinted blue, and his limbs were curved, distorted. Around him, her backyard was a wonderland, shimmering, filled with blue-washed stone angels and flowers in full bloom. She realized she was down deep in the pool, looking through the water as the boy ran past her and away.

She wanted to follow him, but Shelby’s familiar hand was curled in hers. She squeezed, and Shelby did not squeeze back. Shelby’s eyes were open, but they did not register the boy, and her limbs shifted gently as the pool water lapped. Her body had no will, no movement of its own, and she was stiller than Shelby ever was. Only her hair seemed alive, tendrils of it coiling and swaying upward, reaching toward the sunlight like yellow petals. Laurel tugged on Shelby’s hand, tried to swim them both to the surface, to the boy, but firm fingers gripped her ankle.

It wasn’t Mother. This time it was Thalia’s hand holding her under. Laurel could see Thalia’s big teeth gleaming, pearly and iridescent, from the thatch of water weeds that had grown up over the concrete floor.

“You can’t get there from here,” Thalia said, then shrugged, nonchalant, like she wasn’t all that sorry about it.

“Watch me,” Laurel said, and her own voice woke her.

The world flipped. She wasn’t looking up from the pool’s bottom. She was standing by her window, looking down at the pool. She grabbed the sill to steady herself. She must have taken