Free Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon Page A

them.
    “Tessa!” they taunted. “Tessa the witch!”
    I dropped to the ground. My feet crunched into the snow. I was so angry I felt my body dissolve, until I was one voice screaming through the dark. “I hope all of you die!” I cried.
    Before I turned and ran home, I swear they all looked genuinely frightened. I flew through the night in a blaze of rage and heartbreak, then collapsed in the cornfield behind my house, hidden away from the world. I huddled against a stalk, grabbed the root, and bent my whole body around it. Tears of frustration ran down my face.
    Finally, maybe hours later, I sat up and stretched, blinked at the moonlight. I turned and looked up through the corn at my house, the dark windows. Shivering, I pulled out my book,
Sister Carrie,
and read about Carrie for an hour, getting lost in her world of factories and concrete before dragging myself off to sleep.
    Things remained tense between Mary and me throughout the next day. My tenacity surprised me, but I discovered a stubbornness in myself that I’d never known I had.
    “Please, Mary,” I said again and again, then rushed off in tears or anger when she refused to budge.
    “Tessa, I’m telling you,” she said, following me back into the stacks, “I barely remember anything at all.”
    I kept my eyes on the shelf in front of me. “You aren’t that old, Mary. You remember. I
know
you do.”
    “It’s too dangerous, anyway,” she said.
    “Couldn’t you show me just one time?” I asked. My eyes filled with tears, and I turned to her. “Just once?”
    “You know, Tessa,” she said, “it’s beautiful to see you so sure of what you want, so passionate about something. But
why
does it have to be the trapeze? I gave all that up. For good.”
    “Because I’ll be good at it,” I said, surprising myself.
    She stared at me as I purposefully arranged a pile of books. “I don’t think I can do it,” she said, finally. I looked up at her and was surprised by the expression on her face, a look of something like wistfulness. Her face closed then, like a trap door, and she turned and walked away.
    She avoided me for the rest of the day, sending me back into the stacks again and again with books to organize and shelve. I was nearly crazy with frustration, but when the sun went down I walked home slowly, scheming all the while. I walked through the town square and ignored the group of kids sitting under the tree, even when they tried to provoke me. Maybe I could get Mary to hang up the trapeze and learn by myself, I thought. Riley Farm opened up in front of me, but I barely noticed. Maybe there was someone else who could teach me.Though I knew that such a thing was unheard-of in Oakley, before Mary Finn.
    When I stepped into the house, it took me a second to notice my father standing before me, in the dark hallway. I pulled back in surprise. He’d been watching for me, I realized, from the living room window, and all at once I felt like I’d been caught doing something wrong.
    His eyes bored into me. I stood immobilized, my heart skipping forward and hammering against my chest. I saw it then, in his hand. A book.
My
book, the one I had carefully hidden under my mattress the night before.
    Slowly, I looked back at his face. He was massive in front of me, a mountain. He could have reached out and picked me up between his fingers, I thought, crushed me under his toe. There was nothing more terrifying in all the world than my father standing there with
Sister Carrie
in his hand. He loomed over me, then leaned forward.
    I jumped, sure he would hit me. I braced myself for it, my whole body tensing into a wall of muscle and bone. My father lifted his hand, and I shut my eyes. A moment later a loud
thwap!
shook the house. I opened my eyes, saw my book lying on the floor, its pages twisted and crushed.
    “Get this trash out of here,” he said. “Get it out
now.
”
    He turned and left the room, and I crumpled to the floor, snatched the book up into