Free The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson

they say I’m stuck-up. You think I’m stuck-up?”
    Trout shrugged. “I don’t know you at school. You don’t seem stuck-up to me here.”
    “I just never had a close friend.”
    Trout hip-checked her and smiled. “Before me.”
    Staggerlee laughed then and started running water into the sink. “Yeah,” she said.

    THEY WERE QUIET walking out to the river. Trout had her hands in her pockets. She was wearing her loafers again and taking high steps to keep the dirt off them. Staggerlee smiled.
    “I told you it was a losing battle.”
    Finally Trout took the shoes off and tucked them under her arm.
    She looked out over the water. The sun was pretty today, faint and orange in the sky. “Last night when Rachel called—it was to tell me about this guy Matthew who keeps asking her all these questions about me. She set up a date for when I get home.”
    “Are you going?”
    Trout nodded. “I don’t really know why I even said I would, but I did. She makes it sound so great—like everything’s so much fun.” She frowned. “I tell Rachel all this stuff but—like we’ll be sitting in my room and she’ll be telling me everything about some boy who she thinks she’s in love with. It makes me feel awful. Sometimes I even make up some stupid boy. And later, I’ll lie in bed thinking how bad it feels—to have to lie to someone like that.”
    Staggerlee squinted, thinking. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “No one ever told me I had to lie about it or had to keep it quiet, but somehow I just knew.” She brushed her hair back from her face with her hand. “I have all this stuff—all these thoughts going on inside me and they all seem so—so dangerous.”
    “I see guys in Baltimore wearing these pink triangle pins and I know it’s about . . . about being gay,” Trout said. They stopped walking and sat down beneath the shade of a sycamore tree.
    “Gay,” Staggerlee said softly.
    They stared out at the water. Staggerlee felt the word settling inside her. It felt too big, somehow.
    “I don’t know that’s what I am, Trout.”
    Trout frowned. “If you like kissing girls, that’s what you are.”
    Staggerlee shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “It sounds so final. I mean—we’re only fourteen.”
    Trout nodded. She picked up a stick and started scratching their names in the dirt. Staggerlee and Trout were here today. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t be gay.
    Staggerlee read it over her shoulder and smiled.
    Trout picked up one of her loafers and started rubbing it out.
    “Why are you doing that?”
    “I don’t want anyone to find it and get stupid.”
    Staggerlee watched her a moment. “You think the day’ll come when you can write something like that in the dirt and it won’t faze anybody?”
    Trout smiled and started writing their names again. “Guess it won’t ever come if it doesn’t start someplace, right?”

Chapter Fourteen
    THE SUMMER MOVED PAST THEM SLOWLY. EACH morning, after cooking and cleaning, they walked down to the river, their fingers laced, Creek dancing around them. On hot afternoons, they pulled their shirts up and pressed their bare stomachs into the cool earth.
    They were left alone. Each morning, Staggerlee’s father went to the airport. His hired hands moved slowly through the fields, watering and feeding the crops there. Some afternoons, Staggerlee and Trout joined them in the fields and sat listening to the men’s tall tales of fifty-pound fish they had almost caught in the Breakabone River and money they would one day make. And once, when they had fallen asleep among the tall stalks of corn, Staggerlee and Trout woke to hear the men laughing and telling stories about different women they had loved.
    And in the late afternoon, they would sit on the porch, drinking lemonade from tall sweating glasses while, upstairs, Staggerlee’s mother rested, a book propped against her growing stomach.
    “I miss Charlie Horse,” Staggerlee said one