Free Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel by Joy Jordan-Lake

was snoring by now against Welp’s shoulder, and I made a mental note to abuse L. J. tomorrow for that. Welp himself came to long enough to see where we were and then squeeze his eyes shut, like Emerson might be on the verge of missing a turn and sending us all plunging over.
    I watched the lights in the Valley and felt Jimbo’s chin on the top of my head and tried to feel safe. Although without guardrails and at night, the point where our mountain ended and the Valley began was not clear to me.
    The whole day, in fact, had been unclear to me: just where the point was when someone goes plummeting over the edge, and whether you get to see that coming before it happens, or whether sometimes the edge is under your wheels before you find there’s no reverse gear.
    Em’s truck eased off the side of the road on the thin strip of grass before the Look dropped off into air. He parked, startling us, and we all sat up, L. J. snorting awake and rubbing his eyes.
    Emerson unfolded himself from the cab and joined us back in the truck’s bed. “Pretty, isn’t it?” He said this to the new girl.
    She nodded, pointing. “What is there?”
    “Nothing but valley,” I dismissed it. You can’t be raised on a mountain without growing a good, healthy disdain for the pitiful souls who live on flatland and closer to sea level.
    Farsanna’s head was cocked toward the Valley, the clusters of white lights, and the lines of red and blue glowing pinpoints way out toward the airport. She waved a hand across the clusters of white. “And ...?” she said.
    Innocent as this hand gesture and one word might’ve seemed, I knew it for the challenge it was. The new girl wasn’t accepting that so many clusters of lights could be only nothing.
    “Nothing worth seeing,” I persisted, a little peeved now. “And it’s dangerous at night anyhow.”
    The new girl waited for me to explain.
    “Nobody goes downtown at night, and it’s late.” I reached for the Mickey Mouse watch on Bo’s wrist. I’d hoped it would announce we were nearing eleven, our summer curfew, but it was still only nine-thirty. “And anyway, it’s rough and dirty, not at all safe this time of night and it’s crowded.…” I stopped myself there, irritated that crowded and nobody might seem to contradict each other, when in fact we all knew why they didn’t.
    My own cousin didn’t help matters any. “There are some splendid examples of Victorian architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on several streets. They’re desperately in need of rehabilitation now, but someday perhaps someone will have the foresight to fix them back up. And the lights down by the river aren’t half bad. It’s predominantly warehouses now, but someday …”
    Welp spit off the side of the truck. “What Turtle here was trying to say was the Valley ain’t safe at night, not in town anyhow, because there’s a certain kind of nobody lives there.”
    It was, in a way, exactly what I’d been saying. And hearing it bounced back to me, all crawling with ugly from Welp’s mouth, meant I had to switch sides. “It’s worth seeing,” I contradicted myself, quickly and loudly. Which I meant not one bit, but it had to be said.
    The truck radio, fuzzed in static but on Em’s favorite station, introduced the next band, Kool and the Gang. Emerson cranked up the volume.
    Then he and Jimbo, the two tallest of us, looked at each other over the tops of our heads and had clearly reached some kind of agreement without speaking.
    “Hang on, then,” Em called as he slammed the cab door behind him and U-turned onto the two-lane road that looped down our mountain. Welp clutched the side of the truck as if he’d been loaded into a carnival ride with the safety bar gone. “ What ? Where we going?”

5 The Way of the World
     
    Bo leaned back against a six-bag pile of mulch and manure and laced his hands behind his head. “Wherever the spirit leads and the road rolls is where