Free Precious by Sandra Novack

this; she couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a parent. She couldn’t imagine it at all.
    She rides now, alone. She will not look back, or dwell on what might lie around the corner. She will not be afraid. She comforts herself, imagines words flashing in her mind:
    SISSY KISCH
    World-Famous Ghost Detective!
    Then she amends:
    SISSY KISCH
    World-Famous Ghost Detective
with her sidekick, Scooby-Doo!
    She imagines Scooby-Doo sitting in the basket, coating it with drool every time he tries to communicate, because, as Natalia often said, he never learned to enunciate. Sissy has a vague belief that nothing is permitted to happen to a heroine, and that surely nothing bad has ever happened to Scooby-Doo. Still, she doubts, holding in mind a reservation that children often have when they are of two minds and worlds: that which is real, and that which is imaginary. How that line for a nine-year-old, in any day, blurs. Not everything is so pleasant, not every harm is kept away. Just a year ago, on their way home from the park, a squat-looking man approached her and Vicki, and then followed them in his car, and the girls hid behind bushes while he circled the block.
    When he first approached them, he exposed the hard flesh of his penis. “My God,” Vicki said later, and laughed nervously. “Did you
see
that?”
    Sissy hadn’t. She had kept her eyes closed. She lied and nodded. “That was wild.”
    If Vicki were here now, Sissy might pretend to be brave, and in pretending, she might find her bravery. If Vicki were here, Sissy would have no choice but to be brave.
    There is still the task, the truly awful task, of making her way past the hedges, past the fence, to the park. And yet she is compelled. She is compelled and she is bored and she is lonely, and the house, the empty house, is unbearable, worse than the torture of the outside world. She holds her breath and counts to ten, but it doesn’t rid her limbs of their shakiness, or her mind of its worry. If she pedals, if she rides hard, she will not die, and if she does not meet the face of a murderer, she will not be killed, and if she does not come across any bad thing lurking in dark places, she will not disappear. She breezes past the hedges, past the fence. She closes her eyes and reminds herself there are no such things as lunatic madmen or bogeymen, or Gypsies who steal children away.
    And yet, she believes in all these things.
    This is the way the story goes: peril, at every corner.
    She barrels down the hill to the park, follows familiar paths, and does not turn when Milly Morris calls out to ask her what’s she doing, and where Eva is, again. She pedals until her mouth is dry from the heat and flat air. At the park, she abandons her bike. She walks across the baseball field toward the woods, and at the place where the tree stands with its low branches spread wide like arms, she takes the secret path— wide enough for a single-file line, worn from trampling feet, each side riddled with bramble and packed with mosquitoes that nip and suck on flesh. A sting, a bite. One, two, three. A swat at her ankles, her knees. A welt. She hears the wild hum of cicadas, already dying. Gnats dart back and forth. Sissy trails toward the creek until the woods open up. She walks to the water hole that, over the years, was dammed by those who told and told others, those who lugged sandbag after sandbag across themuddy banks. Ivy covers the grounds. Moss grows around the base of old trees. Here, the ground is moist and cool. Water bugs race across the stilled water.
    Sissy searches, hunting for clues—a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon; a piece of bubble gum; a message written hastily in the mud; a vine that tightens around the base of a tree trunk, possibly signaling a knot, a noose. She performs a ritual, snapping off a branch, sticking it in the mud, to bring back what is missing. She waits. Across the river, under the trees, ferns slope up and form a natural barrier. She