Free Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell

pebble-shiny creek lay at the foot of their hills; and they were their hills. They owned them. Not like our hills. We just lived on ours.
    Callie’s grandfather had willed her fifty acres along with the mineral rights, which meant the old man never sold out to the coal companies while everybody else around him let their land be stripped raw.
    Besides the Virgin Mary, he was a dead person I would have really liked to meet.
    Through the hillside trees I saw the railroad tracks, the same tracks that led to the mining office behind Skip’s house, the same ones we used to fantasize about following out to California after we bumped off Donny.
    Zack Mercer ran out next. He grinned at me and whirled around to go back in and ran into his mom’s legs. She grabbed him gently by the shoulders and told him to slow down.
    She looked up and gave me a slow female smile. “How are you, Harley?” she said.
    “Okay,” I said back.
    Then she whipped her head around in the direction of the dogs and gave them a steely, military stare. “Shut up,” she yelled harshly.
    Esme and Jody exploded from the house and took off for the swing set. Zack tore after them.
    Callie composed herself and walked toward me, smiling in a stirring way again. I remembered our meeting at Shop Rite and how she had gone from a childish excitement to a deep depression with the quickness of a finger snap.
    “I just got off the phone with Misty,” she said.
    She didn’t have any shoes on, but she crossed the sharp gravel driveway without flinching, making me wonder what the bottoms of her feet felt like.
    “I called to tell you Jody could stay for a while and then I’d run her home for you,” she went on. “We should have planned on that in the first place.”
    “That’s okay,” I said.
    “It turned out to be a beautiful day. Aren’t you hot in that coat?”
    “No.”
    She moved closer to me. “Did you have dinner?”
    “Yeah.”
    “But you haven’t been home yet.”
    “I ate in town.”
    “Oh.”
    I got the feeling she was taking notes again. Not out of nosiness but because she wanted to reconstruct me later at her convenience, piece by insubstantial piece, like a house of cards.
    She lifted one of her bare feet and brushed the top of the other one with it.
    “Well, I have something for you anyway. You want to come in for a minute?”
    “In?” I said.
    She turned away from me again and shouted at Esme to quit pushing her brother so high on the swing.
    “In the house,” she finished.
    “Sure,” I said.
    I tried not to watch her walking in front of me, but her jeans fit like someone had rubbed the color on with a piece of powder-blue chalk. They had been worn and washed so many times, I bet the denim felt like a puppy’s ear. I tried not to think about that while I tried not to watch.
    The inside of the house was all wood too. Even the floors. Except for the kitchen floor. It was made of stones of all different shades of gray set in mortar and polished to a high gloss.
    It was one of those open houses where the rooms weren’t really divided off with walls and the downstairs ceiling went all the way up to the upstairs ceiling. A big stone fireplace separated the kitchen from the living room, and a wall of glass shelves covered with knickknacks and framed pictures separated the living room from the jungle room. There was nothing but air between the shelves making it seem like the plants were in every room.
    I didn’t see a TV so I guessed the big room with the fireplace was a formal living room, something we didn’t have and my mom always wanted. She said any decent house should have one room for the TV where the family hung out and another room without a TV for people to visit in. I never saw the point in that because everyone I knew preferred to visit in front of a TV.
    The room didn’t look formal though. The furniture looked beat-up and there were toys everywhere. Through the doorway at the end of it, I saw a mirror over a chest of