The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,98
separate bedrooms, supposedly to sleep. Shel had waited in her room for the appointed hour, but her eyelids had gotten heavy. Her alarm clock might wake Bet, asleep across the hall. Bet was not privy to the plan.
Not surprising, really. It was probably not pure teen-girl meanness. Shelby simply hadn’t thought to include her. After all, Laurel had never gone out of her way to truly weave Bet into their lives. She’d made sure that Bet was behaving and that Shelby’s friends were being kind to her, but she’d kept Bet separate, buttoned away in her own little pocket. She’d never made Bet integral and equal, so it didn’t occur to Shelby and Molly to do so, either.
Shelby had tiptoed all the way down to the end of the hall to the rec room, which was farther from Bet’s door and at the opposite end of the house from David and Laurel’s room. She’d closed the door and put the TV’s volume on so low that it was barely more than a murmur. She’d sprawled out in her beanbag, pinching her arm every minute or so to make sure she was still awake. Her eyelids had drooped lower, and the television conversation had blended into a lullaby of empty conversation. Shelby had fallen asleep.
Down in the yard, Molly got bored. She could smell rain coming. Clouds hid the moon, and the night was dark and hot. With the storm getting this close, Jeffrey Coe would not be coming out. Her elation faded. She wished Shelby would come so this would feel like fun again. It was dark near the gazebo, but she went back there anyway, dropping to her knees to feel around the base where she knew she could find round stones and pebbles. She gathered a small handful.
She picked her way across the blackness of the yard to Shelby’s dark window. Molly tossed rocks at it, one after another, pinging them off the glass.
Nothing happened. Molly decided to give Shelby five more minutes, then she would go home. The only light in the backyard came from the underwater pool lights. Molly was drawn to that blue glow. She walked around the pool’s edges, her toes pointing ballerina-style with each careful step, like a gymnast on a balance beam. At the far end, she shuffled lightly down the length of the diving board, sliding her feet along because it was so springy. She reached the end and sat down, dangling her tennis shoes over the glowing water.
Inside, the rocks hitting Shelby’s window had woken up Bet Clemmens, who got up and went across the hall to Shelby’s empty room. Shelby’s window overlooked the backyard, so Bet had a clear view of Molly in her light-colored dress, noodling around on the end of the board.
Bet went downstairs. The alarm was set, so Bet put in the code and waited until the light went green before she slid open the glass door. Molly, at the far end of the pool, heard the door. She didn’t know if it was Shelby or one of Shelby’s parents coming out to bust her. She peered across the yard, trying to see. She scrambled to her feet, but the soles of her tennis shoes slipped on the board’s damp surface. Molly tumbled backward, banging her head, and then splashed into the water. Bet saw the water contract as it accepted her, saw it splash up after. Ripples spread to the edge from the place Molly had fallen, but she did not rise. Under the surface, Molly had gone still, rolling facedown as the water filled her and cooled her.
Bet started forward on instinct, stepping over Shelby’s dammit and coming all the way to the taller wrought-iron fence around the pool. There she stopped, her fingers curling around the latch on the gate. She was thinking. Her hands dropped to her sides. She didn’t go down into the water, and she didn’t yell for help. She simply stood and waited. She watched Molly die, and then she watched Molly be dead. She stayed that way for a long time, her flat unchanging eyes on Molly’s body as it drifted.
She saw, the Ouija board had told Laurel, and Laurel, focused on Shelby’s lie, Shelby’s palpable, unhappy guilt, hadn’t seen nor noticed the quiet girl sheltering her daughter in her shadow. Bet was so affection-starved that Laurel’s wary caution and vague kindness seemed a feast to her. Laurel hadn’t understood or seen the growth of Bet’s awful love,