Free The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips Page B

Pickford, you’d have sense enough to know you’re good as anybody.”
    “I don’t look anything like Mary Pickford.” I popped a chinquapin in my mouth and took my time chewing. I looked like Papa’s other sister, who lived in Memphis and visited by train every spring. We had the same hair, same chin, and same Moore nose with a hump in the middle of it.
    “Virgie Moore,” declared Ella, “you better learn to take a compliment. Somebody tells you that you look like you could be in a picture show, best just to say ‘thank you.’ Quit blushing and standing there like a stump.”
    I looked to Lois for support; she shrugged.
    I didn’t blush. But I didn’t like to feel like I was on display with everyone looking at me. With boys and most grown-ups, you ended up feeling like they were holding up some yardstick to you. I didn’t like being measured was all.
    “I’m only sayin’ it because I have this—”
    Ella interrupted me. “You do not have a hump in the middle of your nose, so don’t get started on that. We don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
    Arguing with Ella was a waste of energy. So I stopped talking. Scanning the trees as we passed, I jerked to a stop. Tucked into the pulled-back bark of a pine tree, the cicada shell was almost invisible. Brown and crisp, slit down its back. I crunched through the weeds and leaves over to the tree, hiking up my navy skirt to avoid the brambles.
    “Wait a second,” I said to Ella and Lois, barely loud enough for them to hear. They were a good twenty feet ahead of me then. But they stopped and backtracked, not looking at all surprised.
    “Found you one?” asked Lois.
    “Mmm-hmm.” I pried it off gently, not breaking the little leg husks. It stuck to my collar like it’d been waiting to get a nicer home than that dirty bark. I’d add it to the box under our bed at home. I liked to keep enough to wear them sometimes in winter. They kept real well if you were gentle with them. And I didn’t wear them out in public, of course. Just at home.
    Ella looked disgusted. “I can’t believe you throw a fit if your hair musses, but you’ll wear a bug like it’s made of diamonds.”
    “It’s not a bug. The bug’s gone. It makes its own sculpture of itself and leaves it behind.” I didn’t usually do my shell collecting with an audience. It seemed more serious—and a lot quieter—when I was alone.
    “It’s skin,” said Ella, wrinkling her nose.
    “I know,” I said. “But look how perfect it is.” It was my first memory of something that was not Mama or Papa or warm fire or dinner table. I’d been wandering around in the backyard, while Mama was hanging clothes on the line, and I came across a cicada shell, which, of course, looked just like the one I’d just found ten years later or so. They weren’t creative creatures. I stared at it until Mama pulled me away, and when she did, I pulled it off the tree. Crushed it in my hand with a grip not used to being gentle. I was horrified that I’d killed it, and Mama kept telling me it wasn’t alive to kill. But the next time I found one, I picked it up as gentle as if I were holding a butterfly by the wings.
    Ella had plopped herself down on a stump, hands on her hips, just like her mama did when Ella sassed her. “If you’re not partial to Henry Harken, what about Tom Olsen?”
    Tom lived next to Ella and Lois, and he served as our personal messenger service. When they had a message for me, he’d ride his bike over to our house, give me the note, then wait until I’d responded and carry it on back to the twins. He had pretty gray eyes with long lashes like a woman’s. I’d mostly noticed his eyes—I’d had time to look because he never looked straight at me, mainly looked over my shoulder or kicked his bicycle tires. But he was always smiling, showing his barely crooked teeth to the space over my shoulder. His eyes and crooked teeth seemed nicer to me than Henry Harken’s expensive