Free A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson Page A

work perfect if I was five. And if Big had been born stupid. So al I said was, “Mrs. Lynch is with Liza. Big, are you okay?”
    She didn’t answer or blink. It was like talking to my mom, how she was now. Big’s lips sagged open, and her eyes looked like no one was home behind them, and that scared me more than anything that had happened yet today.
    I crouched down on my haunches by her and whispered, urgent, “Big? Big? Did you hear what Liza was say—”
    She stayed flopped, but she shushed me with a noise so hard it didn’t seem made of sh sounds—more like a hard t had gotten at the front. She stared at me like she was only just now real y seeing I was there. She flicked her gaze back and forth, like the good blond girls on Days of Our Lives always do when they’re being al sincere and desperate. I tried again, lowering my voice and saying, “Liza was saying, ‘Give—’”
    Big sat up so straight, so fast, it was like God had shot her spine back into her body from space. Her hand darted out, and she pressed it over my lips, her middle finger almost going up my nose.
    “We’l talk about it later. Hush now,” she said, and she was Big again.
    She stood up, moving in her normal quick way, staring al intent across the lawn with her brow furrowing up and her eyes gone squinchy at the corners. Officer Joel was looking at the silver box, one hand rubbing at his mouth. The two guys I didn’t know had their heads bent in toward each other and were talking, while Chief Warfield stil glared at them al toad-throated and indignant.
    I stood up, too, and fol owed Big to the edge of the patio, nervous. “Who are those two guys that Chief Warfield hates?”
    She made angry, thin lips. “Oh, it’s too stupid. That one in the glasses is from that junior col ege over in Barth. He teaches about dinosaurs, and apparently Joel brought him along to say how old the bones were. Which he did not know. However, he was able to confirm that they are not the bones of any kind of dinosaur, so that’s a load off, eh, Mosey? I might have guessed al on my own that brontosauruses weren’t sleeping al snuggled up to stuffed ducks in the Plesiolistic era, but what do I know? I never went to col ege.”
    It seemed to me from her tone that this would be a bad time to point out that she’d kinda melded Pleistocene and Paleolithic and was letting dinos into both to eat up cavemen, but at least it made sense now. Chief Warfield was a deacon at Calvary, where believing in dinosaurs was a sin, but Officer Joel was a Methodist. That was good, because Big got antsy anyplace where, as she put it, there were more Baptists than people.
    Big added, her voice only a jot milder, “The dinosaur guy cal ed in that older one, who is some kind of bone teacher, too. So pretty soon we’l have most of Mississippi’s masters of higher education in our yard to tel us the sky is blue and water’s wet and that is not a T. rex.”
    Chief Warfield headed across the yard toward us. Big watched him coming, her hands flexing into fists and then opening without her knowing.
    Past Chief Warfield I saw two heads pop up, peering over our tal wooden fence. It was Jim Place and his basketbal son, Irvin. They must have cut through the Baxters’ side yard and come up through the woods.
    “The Places are peering over our fence,” I cal ed to the chief, and it came out sounding real whiny. When I was little and complained about another kid in that voice, Big would turn me around and pretend she was searching my heinie for a tattletail.
    The chief glanced over and saw them. “Y’al move along,” he cal ed, but real mild. He didn’t even wait to see if they obeyed, just came straight up to us, so they stayed right where they were.
    “Olive says there’s a dead body in here?” Mr. Place hol ered at his back.
    That made Chief Warfield throw them an irky look over his shoulder. He cal ed, “Go on, then,” instead of answering, but they didn’t.
    “Olive? Mrs.