Free The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos Page B

Ethan’s O.K . now .
    When the bus pulls away, I stand in the driveway watching it become smaller and smaller and think about how I wish that was true, that Ethan was O.K .
    Now it’s night, and following my own routine, I lock Ethan into his room, wishing it could be otherwise. I started locking him in as a last resort after the alarms we installed failed, and I awoke too many times to find him up and wandering. I lie on the white bed with no discernable trace of Jeff. Sometimes he doesn’t come home until well after midnight when the store has warehouse inventory. Or so he claims. I hardly ask anymore what his reasons are. If he’s going to do it—erase himself—then why doesn’t he just get it over with?
    I hear Rebecca sliding open the glass door to the deck so slowly, so carefully, it makes me wonder how many times she’s done it. I hear her feet on the driveway, and I know she’s headed for the lake, for Greg. I think of getting up, of following her. I think of telling her not to do it. But I don’t. I lie on the bed and think of my son sleeping in the next room with his mouth open, quiet, not banging. I know that soon we will drive to the lake in our separate cars, Irene and Magda and I, and we’ll wonder whether we can ever step inside her blueness. I think of my daughter sneaking out to the woods with a boy, and I do not move. I do not stop her, and I do not dream.

Rebecca
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    G REG IS THE ONE WHO GETS US TO GO. HE ’ S BEEN saying it every day since school started, how he’s going to go out there in the woods and find her and how he’s going to get a look at her for himself. It’s November now, the leaves are changing, and I’m tired. I just keep quiet and look at my hands when he talks and talks and talks. I wonder if Greg will talk so much when he’s older, or if something happens to guys along the way that stops them from talking. Then they try to act like they’re not there at all, like my dad, or they seem to go backwards, like Audrey’s dad. I don’t know much about Greg’s dad, but he never says much to me either, and Greg does enough talking for both of them. There’s nothing anybody can do about it.
    Then there are boys like my brother who hardly talk at all.
    Even Greg. Greg with the way he comes up behind me outside on the steps and swirls his tongue in my ear,soft and hot. It’s not that I haven’t liked it. It’s not that I haven’t let him do it, his tongue moving around and around, his hands up my sweater and all around. I sweat thinking about it. I’ve even let him move his hand inside me out in the backyard along the trees. But he’s still a boy. I look at him and think: A boy. A boy is what you are, and you don’t even know it .
    We’re out behind the annex at school when he really gets on about the blue girl and finding her. All of us going out to the woods. At first it’s just him talking, talking, and talking the way he does. It’s me and Caroline and Audrey and Greg, just the way it’s always been since we were little, only Ethan used to be with us then, too, before they put him on the bus for the special kids, the little one that drives them all out of town. We’d all go out to the lake, all of us kids with our mothers, and run around with the kids who came only in summer. In pictures we look like any other little kids with tans. But then Ethan started talking in that voice of his and throwing blocks at school and biting the other kids. I saw the blue mark of a bruise on a teacher’s arm once, and my mom wore long sleeves to hide hers. He’s never bitten me, not then, not now. Once he bit my mom, a long time ago, and when she yelled for me to get him to stop, I held his head with the side of one hand and rubbed his jaw with the other to get him to release.Like a dog, really, is how it was. There’s no way to describe it, that feeling that your