She rubbed at the deep scar on her right calf, which had been aching since her run. But maybe it wasn’t the exercise that caused it to throb.
What happened.
It was buried so deep that she never even thought about it anymore. Almost. Sometimes it surfaced in dreams when she was especially stressed or overtired. Sometimes it came back to her at odd moments—maybe it was a song from that time, or the smell of wet leaves, that certain pitch of a child shrieking in that way that could be delight or terror. Then it came back. Just this clutch in her throat, a hollow that opened in her middle. It was a hundred years ago, a million. But it wasn’t. It was yesterday.
Back then they played. Out on the streets riding bikes with her friends, they had the run of the neighborhood. She walked through the acres of woods between developments, thick green above, ground sun-dappled and littered with leaves, and waded in the cool water of clean creeks. With her best friends, Tess and Hank, she rode to the corner store in the summer heat for ice cream, cicadas singing, heat rising off the blacktop in waves. Quiet afternoons leaked into evenings, the light turning that certain kind of golden orange reserved for summer. She’d arrive home dirty and hungry, with bruises and scrapes, tired just because they’d been in motion all day, running and falling, wrestling, riding, climbing. Her body used to ache, tingle with fatigue when she crashed into bed. And wasn’t there a kind of bliss in physical fatigue?
She’d eat at the table with her mother, sometimes her father on the rare night when he stopped work at a decent time. Summer-night dinners were burgers, or steak, or chicken on the grill, and fresh corn on the cob, fluffy green salads, buttery baked potatoes. Tess and Hank were at her place a lot for supper. Both of Hank’s parents worked big jobs in the city; they were never around. Tess’s father had left when Tess was small, and her mother was an ER nurse at the big hospital in town. She was often around during the day, leaving Tess alone in the evenings or for the late shift. Sometimes Tess stayed with Rain’s family. Only Rain’s mother stayed home, cooking, cleaning, driving them around.
After dinner, maybe they went out again, played with the other neighborhood kids. Flashlight tag. Fireflies in jars. Shrieks rang through the night, squeals of laughter. Eventually, always, someone started to cry. Then moms were on the porches, hands on hips. Time to go inside. Do it again tomorrow.
That’s how Rain grew up, anyway. Most people seemed to think that kids had lost something, that freedom to roam, to play unfettered. But Rain knew better. Kids lost their freedom for a reason. Because it wasn’t safe to roam.
But they didn’t know that then. They didn’t know anything.
“My mom doesn’t want me to cut through the woods anymore,” said Rain that day, twelve. “She wants us to take the long way around if we’re going to meet Hank.”
She stood on the edge of the road. Here it turned off onto a dirt path that ran between two neighborhoods. The dirt path would carry them over a stone bridge, through a stand of trees, until it let them out by a field. From there it was another five minutes to Hank’s house.
“The street is more dangerous, don’t you think?” said Tess with a shrug. “More cars lately.”
That was true. There was a hairpin turn with one of those mirrors mounted up in the tree so you could see who was coming from the other direction. But there were lots of teenagers driving. They drove too fast, were looking at the radio or at each other, anything but the road ahead. A kid had been struck on his bicycle last summer. He was okay, walked around with a cast for a few weeks. They all signed it.
It wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as Rain saw it. More like a mention over breakfast.
Stay out of the woods, okay?
Why?
Mom paused like she did when she didn’t want to answer, looked over to Rain’s father, who was hidden behind the newspaper.
Just listen to your mother, darling. Her father rarely had rules, or chimed in on her mother’s. In fact, if her father ever told her to do anything, it was to question the rules, ask anything, push the boundaries. Believe half of what you see, he was