Free No Place Safe by Kim Reid Page A

school, or from here to my school?”
    “Hold the bag open wider or I can’t get all the leaves in. My school is twenty miles away. More like here to your school, maybe closer.”
    “How much closer?” Bridgette was nearly useless as a bag holder, and I dropped more leaves back onto the ground than into the Hefty bag.
    “Why are you so worried about how far six miles is? You’re starting to get on my nerves. When Ma gives us the ten dollars for raking, you better believe I’m getting more than half.”
    “That’s how far away from us that last boy went missing. Now he’s dead.”
     “Who told you that?”
    “Ma. When y’all were talking about him going missing, she said it was just six miles from our house.”
    “Don’t worry about that.” It seemed a patronizing thing to say even to a nine-year-old, but I had nothing else to offer. I decided I’d still give Bridgette five dollars even though she’d been no help to me at all.
    “I think the saddest thing about dying would be not seeing your mother. I can’t imagine not being able to see Ma every day. Maybe you could see her from heaven, but it wouldn’t be the same.”
    I reached the wet heavy leaves at the bottom, my nose startled by the rank smell of decay, and stopped to stretch my back. Maybe Ma and I shouldn’t talk about missing kids when Bridgette was around.
    “Six miles is farther away than your school. I had it mixed up. It’s a good ways from here,” I said, but I don’t think she believed me.
     
    *
     
    My boyfriend Kevin was two years older than I, and this made him exotic to me. Before that first kiss during a game of hide-and-go-seek, I thought him exciting and out of reach because he’d ride his bike up and down the street, sometimes stop at the top of the driveway of the boys’ house where we’d all play basketball but never come down to join us. When I was feeling bold, I’d go up to him. We’d make small talk about what school I went to, or I’d ask him about his bike, but I could never convince him to join me and my friends. I’d tell him he didn’t have to play ball, that we also had fun just hanging out and watching whoever was playing. When he turned down my offers, that made him all the more interesting.
    That’s why I was surprised when he finally decided to hang with me and my friends that night. I was glad I’d been wearing my favorite peach-colored shorts and the black T-shirt that was a little snug. Anytime he came near me, which he did often for no reason I could see, I hoped I wasn’t too funky after a day of basketball in the summer heat—broken up only by bathroom and Kool-Aid breaks and no attention to personal hygiene. When lightning bugs came out from wherever they go during the day, I wondered why he suggested hide-and-go-seek when the rest of us complained that it was a child’s game, and being twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, we had no use for children’s games. But he insisted, and later, crushed between yellow flowers and red brick, I found out why.
    Every meeting with him after that first kiss was ripe with the tension of children wanting to play adult games. That was early summer, before two boys were found at Niskey Lake and Kevin fit a killer’s profile. Now our meetings were full of that same tension, but worry, too. I worried about him being the kind of boy the killer might want. He didn’t worry at all. That night, he was giving a house party and I was there to be his girlfriend, not to worry about killers.
    The basement was mostly dark, illuminated by a mix of bare bulbs in blue, green, and red. We fast-danced to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff”andFoxy’s “Get Off,” the boys hoping the lyrics might give the girls ideas. Like every other girl at the party, I wore double-cuffed Levi’s and Candies, except my Candies only had a two-inch heel because Ma said any more than that was hookerish. And mine weren’t really Candies but knockoffs from Butlers. On my walk over to Kevin’s