SelfSame by Melissa Conway Read Free Book Online Page B

made sure to bump Ben roughly with his shoulder as he went past. His friends were less subtle: one boy pointed a finger in Ben’s face and said, “Watch yourself.” Another said, “Next time your little girlfriend won’t be around to protect you, Webster.”
    If Paula thought Ben was going to stick around and thank her, she was mistaken. He merely tossed Sorcha a look she couldn’t decipher before picking his bike up and riding off. Paula did exactly what Sorcha expected her to do: burst into tears. Sorcha put her arm around Paula’s shoulders and steered her away from the prying eyes of random students attracted to the disturbance. They ended up back in Paula’s car, where they stayed until Paula got control of herself and had fixed her runny make-up.
    Sorcha was late for first period, but didn’t particularly care. As soon as she sat in her seat, her thoughts flew back to Elizabeth. Later, when she went to her locker to get her sack lunch, there was a note from Paula.
    “Sorry, Sorch, but I’m going home sick and you’ll need to find another ride. Talk to you later. P.”
    Paula’s ‘sickness’ probably involved her heart more than anything. Sorcha wished she could smack Dalton for sending her friend’s self-esteem into another tailspin.
    Sorcha’s parents, Michael and Amelia, commuted into the city together for their respective jobs, almost a hundred miles one way, so not only did she rarely see them, but she couldn’t count on them for a ride. She called her grandmother and left a message, but it was Wednesday, the one day of the week Fay wasn’t home – she spent each Wednesday pitching in at a homeless shelter in Poughkeepsie.
    By the end of the school day when Fay hadn’t returned her call, she resigned herself to taking the bus, but then she went and took too long trudging to the bus stop and missed it. The schedule mounted under plastic on the inside of the dirty, graffiti-defaced bench shelter told her the next bus would be an hour coming. If she walked, she’d be halfway home by then, so she zipped her jacket, tightened the strings of the hood against the wind and set off.
    If she thought the unaccustomed exercise would take her mind off Elizabeth, she was mistaken. The wind blew the clouds across the sky, reminding her of one of Enid’s favorite childhood games. She and Elizabeth would sit in the grass, weaving baskets and watching the clouds, calling out when they saw a recognizable shape: “Look, there’s an eagle. A bunny! A mushroom!” Then Elizabeth would tell a story about all the shapes they’d seen, but said it was really the Cloud People who were telling it; they sent the shapes as a message to anyone below who could interpret it.
    Today she saw a whale, a hook-nosed man’s profile and a coffin.
    She made it out of town and had almost reached the dirt path that paralleled the highway when the driver of a truck ahead of her performed a screeching half-donut in the street, sending up stinking puffs of burnt rubber and leaving black tire marks on the road. She could see there were four occupants, but the truck shot past so fast she couldn’t make out any of their faces.
    “Wow, impressive,” she said to nobody, shaking her head. She’d seen the jacked-up truck before, parked at school. Whoever was driving was either in some kind of major hurry, was immaturely showing off for his friends, or both.
    She crossed the street and ducked through the tear in the chain-link fence that had been erected to keep pedestrians off the privately-owned land all along one side of the highway. The landowner had long ago stopped mending the fence, probably because it had become a losing battle. The popular path was several feet wide with well-packed dirt. Sorcha had walked it many times, but never alone.
    The first thing she saw was a bicycle lying on its side in a patch of wild grass. Right away she recognized it as Ben’s. She looked around for him, doubting he was just sitting somewhere taking