Page 15 of A Summer to Save Us
Because Dad would have a fit!
Oh, and if you had jumped, he wouldn’t have had a fit? Besides, you couldn’t care less about Dad; he ignores you anyway.
There’s also a third option: go back and live my miserable life, isolated from everything.
I stare at the bubbling Willow River for a while. The urge to jump has faded and given way to something else—the vague fantasy of actually leaving both Cottage Grove and Kensington. It’s not the first time I’ve thought about it, but how far would a girl get without words? They would find me.
However, with River, I wouldn’t be alone. Something inside me tingles, like when you hold your hand over a glass of sparkling water.
I’m not someone who does crazy things. I divide my world into three safe zones and climb onto my windowsill every morning and consider jumping.
River is silent next to me, smoking. Perfect halos float past me and gradually dissolve, fizzle out into nothingness.
How can he casually say that he wants to jump at the end of the summer, as if it were his own personal vacation plan?
So, what are you doing for vacation?
Me? Nothing special. I’m jumping off a rock in Yosemite this year. I like trying something new every now and then. So what!
And from a highline, whatever that is. Doesn’t he have a family he’s attached to? Or friends? And why wait three months and not do it now? Maybe that’s just a ploy—he’s trying to lure me away from the edge, and once he succeeds, he’ll take me to my dad.
I steal another glance at him. He’s lying back with his head on the copper rail like a pillow. Eyes closed, his arms are stretched out to the right and left like wings. They’re lean but muscular like he actually wants to fly with them. F-L-Y. His hair frames his face, beautiful in a strangely broken way, like this old enchanted bridge. As if he had already jumped and irrevocably lost a part of himself.
A fallen angel. That’s what he reminds me of. Only the smoking cigarette between his fingers disturbs the picture. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice one of the two pigeons approaching his hand, but when he raises his arm to blindly flick the butt away, the pigeon flies a few feet further, cooing and eying him suspiciously.
Now that his eyes are closed, I grow a bit braver. I pull my phone out of my back pocket and think about the forum.He doesn’t know me or have anything to do with my life or Kensington. I’ll probably never see him again.
You are under arrest. You just scared a pigeon. Besides, it’s almost impossible not to scare a pigeon. What kind of law is that, anyway?
I slide my cell phone over the wood next to the track in his direction, like I’m curling, but I don’t dare draw his attention by knocking on the planks with my hand or whatever.
Nevertheless, he opens his eyes and immediately sits up as if he were just waiting for a reaction from me.
My mouth is dry.
Before I can nod at my phone, he grabs it.
I press my nails into my palm. I’m communicating with a stranger! I cannot believe it.
When he reads the text, he laughs mockingly, a broad chuckle with enviably white teeth. “You have no idea about America’s strange laws. In Little Rock, Arkansas, flirting in public is punishable by thirty days in jail. And in Alabama, men are only allowed to beat their wives with a stick if it’s no thicker than a thumb in diameter.” He taps his forehead and slides the cell phone back toward me. “That’s absurd. I mean the beating in general.”
I don’t know what to do. I clumsily pick up the phone and hold it tightly against my chest. It’s quiet for a while. A bumblebee buzzes by, and I spot a fly wriggling in a spider’s web between the railroad ties. Without thinking, I destroy the web, but unfortunately, the fly falls into a narrow crack where I can’t get it out.
“You couldn’t have helped it anyway. The threads stick like the best putty. Once caught, forever lost.”
Was he watching me?
Do you know any more strange laws?I type shakily, just to do something, and nudge the phone toward River again.
He reads the words and looks up. “Bizarre knowledge and weird things are an obsession of mine.”
I’m weird, I think.
He shoots the phone back at me. “By the way, if you don’t tell me your name, I’ll call you Jon Snow from now on.”
I wonder how he managed to get me to communicate. I never speak—or rather text—with strangers. Okay, I don’t meet strangers either. I’m either at school or in my room.
Kansas, I type, surprised and shocked at myself.
