Jane by April Lindner Read Free Book Online

before I could thank him. But he knew my name. And he had cared enough to run afterme. The next time I saw him, I wanted to speak to him but hadn’t dared to.
    “Well?” asked my mother. “There’s no boy you like?”
    I couldn’t bring myself to utter his name, to break the magic spell of secrecy and expose my crush to the ordinary light of day. “Not really.”
    My mother withdrew her hand. “You’re a cold fish,” she said.
    Tears rose to my eyes. I knew there was no use pleading my case, and before I could think of anything more to say, she turned and walked away. “I’m not,” I whispered to the empty room.
    I knew, even if the world did not, that I wasn’t cold. But maybe my mother had been right about one thing: maybe I should have smiled at the cute gatekeeper; maybe I would on the way back in. For now, though, it was too late. I kept walking.
    The driveway fed into a two-lane road at the bottom of the hill. Lucia had mentioned horse farms a mile or so east, so I headed in that direction. The shoulder was narrow, the road winding. I picked my way along the marshy grass, trying to stay out of the street. Traffic on this road was infrequent, but the cars that did drive by tended to be going above the speed limit, or at least that’s how it felt as they whooshed past close enough to rustle my hair.
    The road was slick. Petals from a stand of dogwood trees had been driven down by the torrential rain and made a pretty pattern on the black asphalt. I had been walking for about ten minutes and had just reached a sharp turn in the road when a sleek black sports coupe — quieter than the other cars had been — approached me from around the bend. I jumped back in surprise and before I had time to think heard the squeal of tires behind me and the wrenchingsound of metal on metal. The car had slid on the wet pavement and skidded into the guardrail on the opposite side of the road. It screeched to a stop, its front compartment filling with pillowy white air bags.
    I gasped and found myself running up to the car, where a man in a navy blue jacket and mirrored sunglasses was picking his way out from under a deflated air bag.
    “Are you okay?” I asked him. “Are you okay?”
    “What the fuck were you doing in the road?” he yelled at me, his voice thunderous as he removed his sunglasses. “It’s dangerous… the road is wet. I could have hit you, for chrissake. I could have
killed
you.”
    This struck me as unjust. “I wasn’t in the road,” I told him, working to keep my voice calm. “I was on the shoulder. And
you
were speeding.” I hated being sworn at and being wrongfully accused; one reminded me of Mark, the other of my parents.
    The man looked at me strangely. He rubbed his chin, then ran a hand through his dark hair. “My car’s going to be in the shop for a week,” he said sullenly, as if conceding a point he’d rather not have admitted to.
    “Are you all right?” I asked him again. “Should you go to the hospital?”
    “The hospital?” He looked at me blankly. “What for?”
    “If you bumped your head. Or strained your neck. You seem disoriented.”
    Then he startled me by throwing back his head and laughing. “Disoriented? I’m oriented all right. The air bag knocked the windout of me, that’s all. But my dog could have gone through the windshield.”
    An enormous, panting black Labrador retriever stood on the backseat, his nose poking over the partially rolled-down window. “Is he hurt?” I asked.
    “He’s shaken up. You’re lucky he’s indestructible.” Then his voice grew gruff again. “Where could you be walking to all the way out here in the middle of nowhere? I suppose you’re one of those
fitness walkers
.” He emphasized the last two words with something like scorn.
    “I am
not,
” I said, as if he’d accused me of being a criminal or a con artist. What business was it of his why I was out walking? “Maybe you should check your car and see if it will