Free The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel by Val Brelinski

stomach as they moved with the current. She let her head lie back on hischest, watching the clouds in the sky move past, and the tiny holes where the stars were sleeping, each with one eye open. She could feel his legs under hers warm and wet and him moving his feet a little bit, but everything was so gentle that it was as if he and she weren’t really moving at all, as if the sky was the thing sailing past all slow and easy, as if they were merely resting on the water. “Hold your breath,” he said in her ear, “and keep holding it.” And then he had slipped out from under her and she was alone in the water, floating like before, only slightly heavier now, her legs hanging free in the cool of the water, the darkness below her still pulling her smoothly along on its current, until suddenly, just like that, her body twitched in recognition of its untetheredness, its terrible precarious freedom in this deep volume of water, and she jerked and thrashed and fell. She had taken in only a mouthful or two of water when he got her. He held her up and kept treading water until she quit choking. “Put your arms around my neck,” he said, so she did. He turned around in her arms until he was facing away from her and then he began swimming. “Let your legs hang free behind you,” he said as he pushed his arms through the water. She rode on his back to the shore.

    Grip gave Jory a striped Indian blanket to hold around her in case she felt cold. He showed Frances how to move the gearshift when he put in the clutch, and then he changed gears about a million times so Frances could shift over and over. “Like that?” she would say. “Like that?” as they lurched down the road. Jory sat on the metal floor of the truck, her back leaning against a huge cardboard box of paper napkins. Grip had turned the transistor radio on, but Jory could still hear Frances happily babbling away above the song about making love in the green grass behind the stadium. Jory took her comb out of her back pocket and tried to rake through her wet rat’s nest of hair. She couldn’t swim and she’d nearly drowned and she probably looked horrible and like a complete baby. Her shorts and shirt were damp and clinging to her braless front, she had goose bumps everywhere, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. She just sat there doing and saying absolutely nothing like some sort of idiot child. Rhonda Russell would have been doing and saying plenty.
    “Hey, you doing all right back there?” Grip had turned around in his seat to look at her.
    She nodded and tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t seem to work properly. For some stupid reason she could feel her throat getting tight with tears. When he turned back around, she took the pointed end of her comb and stuck it through the side of the cardboard box. Hard.

    Back on Ninth Avenue, everything appeared unchanged. Jory had almost expected to see the house in flames or her mother standing in the driveway in her bathrobe surrounded by police cars and revolving lights. But, evidently, no one had even noticed that they’d been gone. Frances had already hopped out of the truck and was running toward the backyard, where Afro Cat could be seen lying in a patch of late afternoon sun. Jory folded up the Indian blanket and put it on top of the cardboard box. She walked as casually as she could past the driver’s seat. Grip grabbed at her back pocket as she tried to step out the truck’s door. “So, when’s our next swimming lesson?” he said, tugging gently on the fabric of her shorts.
    She still couldn’t think of anything to say, but now it didn’t seem to matter. She couldn’t bear looking at him, but she smiled down at the truck’s metal floor, and after a moment he let go of her pocket. She didn’t turn around to watch him drive away either—she kept walking toward the house, waiting for the sweet twinge that would start in the small of her back, the happy eye in her spine she knew would