Flying in Place by Susan Palwick Read Free Book Online Page A

undivided attention was making me claustrophobic. I bent down and patted one of the cats so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”
    “Cramps again?”
    “Yeah. But they’re better now.” Even if I’d been able to talk about Tad staring at Jane’s breasts, I wouldn’t have been able to tell Myrna I was worried because a boy was paying attention to her daughter. It would sound like I was accusing Jane of not noticing, of being stupid or foolish.
    But Jane herself entered the kitchen at that moment, soaking wet, the thin cotton tank top plastered to her breasts just as I had feared it would be. They must have grabbed her in the boat; she must have had to dive overboard to get away from them. No one could swim as fast as Jane could. She was lucky she could swim so fast.
    “What happened?” Myrna asked, both eyebrows raised.
    “Tad tried to touch me,” Jane said cheerfully, grabbing a towel from the laundry hamper sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, “so I punched him and he fell into the water, and it turned out he couldn’t swim— can you believe that, I mean, he takes this old boat out when we aren’t even sure it will float and he can’t swim, is that dumb or what?—so I had to go in after him so the idiot wouldn’t drown. And him bigger than me and everything! Boy, was he ever embarrassed. Trying to feel me up and then I saved his life. Billy thought the whole thing was hilarious. He was laughing so hard he could hardly row the boat.”
    My stomach was a lump of ice. Now we’d really get it, especially since there was no one else around to provide distractions. What were you doing in a leaky boat? Why were you wearing that clothing alone with two boys? What right did you have to punch him when you’d excited him by wearing that clothing? Emma, why didn’t you tell me Jane was going out in a leaky boat? Why didn’t you make Jane come home instead of going out on the lake? Why didn’t you give her your sweatshirt to wear over the tank top, if she was going to be alone in a leaky boat with two boys?
    “Are you all right?” Myrna said.
    “Huh? Are you kidding? Of course I’m all right!”
    “Well, that’s good.” Myrna sounded like she was trying very hard not to laugh. “Is Tad all right?”
    “Oh, he’s fine, thanks to me.” Jane shook her head, showering the kitchen with lake water. “He was more scared than anything else. And embarrassed because he’d tried to grab my boobs—”
    “Jane!”
    “Oh, breasts, all right, anatomically correct hoo-has, anyway, he did it once like it was a joke and I yelled at him and Billy said he’d better not do it again, but Tad said girls were supposed to like that and tried to do it again anyway, so I punched him. I think I may have knocked one of his teeth loose.”
    “How did you feel when he did that?” Myrna said.
    “Huh? Mad!”
    “Good. Tell me what you would have done if you’d been alone on the beach, and a grown man had tried to do that to you.”
    A grown man. What if it’s a grown man and he’s in your bedroom and he’s breathing on you? You don’t do anything. You lie there and wait for it to stop, because if you do anything else he’ll wire your mouth shut and put staples in your stomach. He can do anything he wants to, because if you try to tell anyone your mother will die.
    But Jane just said, “Oh, Mom ,” the way she complained about being told to eat her spinach, and recited, “I’d scream as loud as I could and go for the crotch and the eyes, and when I broke away from him I’d run like hell, and if I couldn’t break away or it was too dangerous to try, like he had a gun or something, I’d outthink him until I could.”
    How could I outthink somebody who’d gone to medical school? Where would I even start? But Myrna just nodded and said, “Good. Emma, do you know all of this?”
    “All of what?” I asked, my throat very dry.
    “Self-defense techniques.”
    Self-defense