Free The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown

birthdays. They sat down in the middle of the field in the tall grass and no one could see them.
“she’ll look today,” sadie said, predicting what would happen next.
she practiced smoke rings. In a year she would be caught with ritchie Merrill, an older boy who drove a motorcycle, on the schusters’ bed while babysitting their eight-year-old. The news would spread, and she would become infamous in school, and she and betty would no longer be friends. but that summer neither of them knew that this would happen. In their bliss they believed they were forever bound in their conspiracy against Francie. They would always press their foreheads together, and stare into each other’s eyes, and know exactly what the other was thinking. It was the beginning of summer, and they could predict nothing more than what they’d come to expect from summers past: the possibility of days of endless letter-writing, and grape-flavored ice cubes, and gum-wrapper chains, and a new attraction to plan—their own Aquacade, where they would convince beth Filley to let them use her pool and devise an elaborate swimming performance, all of them in matching suits, doing flips and headstands in the water, dreaming about being watched and applauded. They would have their stack of books from the library as they always did— Flambards and its sequel, The Edge of the Cloud. They expected that boys would continue to keep clear of them, that they’d find evidence of them—murdered robins riddled with silver bbs, muddy trails in the woods littered with potato chip bags, and soft drink cans, and trampled violets—but that they’d remain elusive as they always had. sadie would form the basis of her knowledge about sex from Mrs. sidelman’s books, from the bits of the love letters she’d been able to read, the man, who did not seem to have ended up as bea brownmiller’s husband, discussing the plumpness of her lips, the curve of her hip, the strangely intoxicating scent of chlorine in her hair.
    April 3, 2003
     
    R
    ay returns the next day, and the one after that, parking in the same place at the end of sadie’s street. she avoids him for a week, and then he stops
    coming, and she feels as if somewhere inside of her a space has been carved out. The day he comes back she walks down there, purposely passing the truck, letting herself feel the longing, drawing it out until he puts the truck in gear and drives alongside her.
    “Going for a walk?” he says to her over the chug of the old truck’s engine.
she won’t look at him. she looks ahead, places her feet carefully on the pavement until the truck forces her to the side of the road, to the mud, to the brambles beginning to bloom.
“stop it,” she says through the passenger window. “Just stop it.”
He looks at her from under the brim of his Filley Farm work cap. His eyes look startled, as if she’s just given him a slap.
“I can’t,” he says. she notes the longing in his voice, and her heart swims. she takes hold of the passenger-door handle and tugs the door open and climbs in. He gathers her into his arms, his mouth wet and searching. They kiss on and on, and then he puts the truck in gear and this time she allows him to drive her away. They take the back road up the mountain, past Filley’s gravel lot filled with sleek Mercedes, Audis, a lexus.
    58
    smoke billows out of the stone chimney. His father opened the produce store fifty years ago as a seasonal roadside stand. now it’s popular with the wealthy people who come over Avon Mountain to buy native corn, fresh eggs, or Christmas trees and mulled cider.
    ray has her pulled in tight under his arm. At the stop sign, he leans down to kiss her. Like teenagers, sadie thinks, a little abashedly. He tells her that the manager, ludlow, keeps the fire going in the hearth, and she tells him that people like that—stopping in for tea, or coffee, or fresh cider, sitting around that hearth with home-baked crumb cake. “I remember your father