Free Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown Page B

glanced at my watch again.
    A girl slid onto the bench beside me and smiled. My lips twitched in response. She was wearing a bikini top and
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soccer shorts, bobbing a flip- flop sandal that dangled from her foot.
    When I didn’t say anything, she stuck out her hand. “Katie,” she said.
Sometimes I really wished we didn’t have this effect on humans. It could be more irritating than flattering, and right now her timing sucked.
“Calder,” I said, licking the salt off my fingers and shaking her hand. She made her hand go light and limp in mine.
“I don’t remember seeing you around here before, Calder,” she said. It was almost a purr, and I turned to look at her more closely. She didn’t take her hand back, so I had to let go first.
“My family has a sailboat down in the marina,” she said. “She’s called Ragtime. You should come by and check her out sometime. Maybe go for a sail?”
“I don’t know,” I said, fighting back a smirk. “I’m not much of a water person.”
“Well, maybe a movie?”
This was getting ridiculous; I wasn’t even turning on the juice.
Lily stepped out of the Blue Moon and stopped on the sidewalk, facing us. She looked at me, her gray eyes wide, and then at the girl beside me. Her mouth popped open in a small o.
“Sorry,” I said, not looking the Katie girl in the face. “Gotta go.”
I stood up, tossed the fry box in the garbage, and jogged across the street. Lily looked around nervously and pulled at what appeared to be a pair of striped socks she was wearing
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    on her arms. As I got closer, I saw she had cut holes in the socks for her hands; she clutched a piece of paper in her right.
    “Well, you’ve clearly recovered,” I said, keeping my tone low, my cadence slow, in that comforting way I knew put humans at ease. I locked my eyes on hers but was only able to hold her gaze for a second.
    “Um. Yeah. I took a dozen hot showers, y’know? And Mom about drowned me in chamomile tea.”
I smiled and tried to think of something clever to say. My mind turned to pudding.
“I’m not sure I really thanked you properly the other day,” she said, looking at her shoes.
Is she purposefully avoiding eye contact? “Oh, sure you did. You said something that sounded like it anyway. You were kind of mumbling the whole way back.”
She looked up at me then. “Did you really carry me home?”
I blinked. “No big deal.”
She shook her head and stared past my shoulder. “It was just the weirdest thing ever. One minute I was on the rock, and the next minute I thought I was going to drown, and then it was like I was flying.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. Panic seared my veins, and I instinctively took a step back as the first little hairs rose off the back of my neck. “You hit your head really hard on that rock. Did you have to get stitches?”
She didn’t seem to be listening to me.
“It was just so bizarre.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. It sounded like she’d been repeating that line to herself for quite a while. Even now I wasn’t sure she was
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talking to me. “It was just like . . . Never mind.” She shook her head again.
    “No, tell me. You’ve made me curious.” Terrified was more like it. Did she know she’d been pushed?
“Well, this is going to sound weird, but, there aren’t, like, any dolphins in Lake Superior, are there?”
I forced my face to stay controlled. “Dolphins? Now you’re just being crazy. This is a freshwater lake. It was probably just the cold affecting your brain.”
“I know, it’s just that I . . .”
“So, what’s the paper you got there?” I asked, pointing to the most convenient distraction I could find.
She looked down at her hand as if she’d forgotten she was holding something. She pulled one of the socks up over her elbow.
“Oh. This. I need to get a job.”
“Don’t you have to start your new school on Monday?”
“No. It’s so late in the year, my mom arranged to homeschool us for the last couple