Free Banished by Sophie Littlefield Page B

connected the farms out past the creek to Trashtown in one direction and Gypsum in the other. I went straight and in a few minutes I was at the creek. It was nearly dry—we’d had little rain or snow over the winter—and there was a flat rock half submerged in the lazy flowing water. I’d come here to sit on the rock a hundred times, thinking and tossing pebbles into the water. I went there now, dangling my feet over the edge.
    “Do you mind if I sit too?” Prairie asked.
    I shrugged— It’s a free country . She settled next to me and picked up a long, skinny twig that had blown into a crevice in the rock. Holding it loosely in her hand, she traced designs in the air. For a while neither of us said anything. Dozens of questions went through my mind. I kept thinking of the names carved into the wall.
    “If you’re my aunt, where have you been all this time?” I blurted out. It wasn’t what I meant to say, and all of a sudden tears blurred my eyes and threatened to spill down my cheeks. I wiped my sleeve hard across my face.
    “Oh, Hailey,” Prairie said, and her voice wavered. “I … had reasons for leaving when I did. I didn’t know about you. I meant to come back for your mom, but by the time I could, she … well, she died. I never even knew she was pregnant.”
    “But you … you left my mom here alone with Gram. And then she killed herself.” I didn’t bother to keep the accusation out of my voice, even though I wasn’t sure I believed what Milla had said.
    “I know.” Prairie’s voice got softer. “That’s something I have to live with every day of my life.”
    I considered telling her that I’d never leave Chub with Gram. Never .
    “Didn’t anyone come looking for you?” I asked instead.
    “Gram didn’t report me missing,” Prairie said. If she was bitter, she covered it well. “I was never officially a runaway. And the police had better things to do than search for me.”
    “But—why didn’t you come back, you know, later? After I was born?”
    I heard the crack in my voice and I hated it, hated that Prairie heard it too.
    “I didn’t know, Hailey. Alice said your mom—” She hesitated and I saw that she bit her lip the very same way I did, catching the right side of the bottom lip between her teeth. “She never let me know about you.”
    Why should I care? My mother was nothing to me. I had no memories of her. As far as I was concerned, I’d never had a mother at all.
    “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I muttered. “Chub’s my family now. We’re fine, we don’t need anyone else.”
    Prairie nodded, more to herself than to me, I thought.
    “I see you found your mom’s hiding spot,” Prairie said gently.
    “Her … what?”
    Prairie put her hands to the back of her neck and twisted the clasp of a thin silver chain. As she closed her fingers on the pendant, I knew what I would see.
    “It’s just like yours,” she said. “When I saw it on you … well, your mom never took it off. Neither of us did. Mary—our grandmother—she gave them to us. They’re very old. She said they would protect us.”
    She handed the pendant to me, still warm from her skin. I had noticed that the stone in the necklace I wore absorbed my heat and held it, almost like it carried energy. The necklace in my hand was identical to the one around my neck, right down to the twisting, curling scrollwork that held the stone in place, the looping bale through which the chain ran.
    I handed the necklace to Prairie. It would have been nice to believe there was magic in the necklaces, but I wasn’t counting on it. “I guess we should go back,” I said.
    We didn’t talk, but the silence felt all right. When we got to the house, Gram was still sitting in her kitchen chair. She gave us a calculating smile and blew smoke in our direction. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
    “I’m taking Hailey out to dinner,” Prairie said. “We’ll be a while.”
    This was news to me. Chub, who had