Free Maiden Rock by Mary Logue

opened the door, and jumped out. She fell to her knees, but pushed up and jumped down into the ditch.
    Scrub trees growing on the sides of the driveway served as cover but Claire shoved through them and saw a flash of red ducking behind a cedar. She clawed her way through the remaining branches and tall grass.
    She ran around the cedar and saw the red jacket ducking under a pine tree.
    “Meg!” she yelled as she spurted forward. She tackled her daughter wearing the hunting jacket she had put on the night before, as she was leaving for the party. They both fell to the ground, but Claire kept a tight grip on her daughter.
    Meg sat up and Claire pulled her to her chest.
    “Meg, thank god. Oh, I don’t know what I would have done …” Claire started sobbing. All the tears she had held back all night came ripping out of her. She couldn’t let go of Meg. The tears, a river.
    “Mom, what’re you doing?”
    Meg tried to pull away, but Claire held her tight.
    ***
8:48 a.m.
    Meg knew, from the moment that her mom jumped her in the bushes at the Jorgensons’ driveway, that something was horridly wrong, even before her mom started sobbing.
    But her mother’s tears convinced her it was very, very bad. She had never heard her mother cry like that before, even when her father died. It sounded like she was crying up her guts.
    She had to help her mother out of the ditch alongside the driveway, holding her so she didn’t fall. Her mother wouldn’t stop holding onto her and sobbing. Rich stood at the edge of the driveway and helped them onto the gravel.
    Meg looked at Rich and asked, “Who died?”

CHAPTER 9
November 3, 8 a.m.
    M eg stood at the bottom of her driveway and Highway 35, waiting for the school bus. She had a hard time believing that school would happen, that life would go on as if nothing had happened. She had a hard time.
    That morning her mother had told her she didn’t have to go to school. Even Rich had suggested that she stay home, but she didn’t want to put off the inevitable. They didn’t understand. It would only get harder to see all her friends at school if she waited. All Krista’s friends.
    Especially Curt. He had called several times over the weekend, but once she had pretended she was sleeping, and the other time she had flat out refused to come to the phone. He got the message and didn’t call again. But he deserved to hear straight from her what she was feeling.
    Meg had a pile of Kleenex stuffed in the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. Even thinking about the fact that she wouldn’t be sitting next to Krista in third hour made her cry.
    As she waited, questions kept buzzing around inside her head. Why had she decided to tell Krista about Curt at the party? How stupid was that? She should have waited until they were at Krista’s house where she could have explained it all to her and
    then handled her anger face to face. Instead, she had chickened out. Curt and she had told Krista at the party, thinking that way she wouldn’t make a scene. Because of this stupid decision, Krista was dead.
    Blinking her eyes to clear them, Meg saw the school bus coming down the highway. She wasn’t looking forward to the ride. She wasn’t looking forward to anything she had to do today, or the rest of her life.
    The bus stopped and the door swung open. Mr. Jensen had his hat turned backwards as usual, and said, “Good morning,” like he always did. Then he added, “Sorry to hear about your friend.”
    “Thanks,” Meg mumbled and slunk halfway down the bus aisle. She didn’t want anyone to sit with her so she put her books next to her on the seat. She stared out the window and tried to see the fields as they drove by. But it was like she was blind. She couldn’t see the world anymore. Just what she was feeling.
    This year in world literature she had read a French poem in which the gray sky was described as being like the cover of a pot. That’s how she felt. Like she was inside a container and someone