Free Blue Vengeance by Alison Preston

know about it. It eased his load somehow. But he worried about having been unaware of her watching him the day of the botched trial run.
    You missed, didn’t you?
That’s what she’d said. She had seen him.
    She couldn’t know for sure how far he wanted to take it. Could she? No. It was as unlikely as the story about Jesus waking up after three days of being dead. She couldn’t know, but she could have an inkling; she seemed pretty smart. She could probably make a yo-yo go ’round-the-world.
    Maybe she could help him by making unexpected loud sounds as he took aim. Mimic a barking dog, say, or the blast of a train’s whistle.
    His real plans were starting now, with Janine. Her appearance in his life shifted things for the good.
    He took his yo-yo out of his pocket and after a few tries made it sleep for the first time in his life.

13
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    At one o’clock the next day, Danny started walking towards the St. Mary’s end of Lyndale, where Janine had said she lived. He couldn’t wait for two o’clock, had no idea why he’d suggested two.
    Lyndale Drive formed the arc of the D that framed the Norwood Flats. It had been built as a dike during the flood of 1950. One end of the arc was at the Norwood Bridge, the other at St. Mary’s Road. Danny’s house was in the middle.
    It was hot. The air in the lane shimmered as he saw her moving towards him down the lane. She was carrying something that required both hands. When he got close, he saw that it was a flat of eggs.
    â€œWhat the…?”
    â€œYeah,” Janine said. “It’s eggs. Don’t worry. They’re rotten. My dad’s going to kill the egg man.”
    â€œThere must be what…three dozen eggs here? This is great.”
    In Danny’s house the eggs used to come in pristine one-dozen cartons from the A&P or Dominion store. It hit him that eggs were another thing he could make for his mum and him to eat. Dot must have already bought some; she’d served them to him lots of times. He’d have to learn how to cook them, but how hard could it be?
    Janine’s eggs were nothing like the ones from the A&P. Hers came from an egg man who her dad was going to kill, and there were feathers attached to some of them.
    â€œI thought we could balance them on the fence posts with gravel,” she said, “and you could shoot them. They seemed too good to throw away. My dad was glad to know they were going to be put to use.”
    It would be very satisfying to hit an egg. Danny thought of Paul. He would have liked to shoot at eggs, especially rotten ones. But it was too late for Paul.
    He and Cookie used to eat milk chocolate eggs at Easter (when Jesus purportedly woke up after his three-day death). They got them at Wade’s drugstore. It would never happen again.
    Sometimes she hadn’t been able to stop once she got started. He tried to step in a couple of times — not with the Easter eggs, but other times — when he saw that she was eating way too much for it to be okay. She had told him to go away in a voice that scared him, a low voice that wasn’t hers.
    It had turned into a secret thing, the eating too much, and Danny wondered if that could have been his fault, because of poking his nose in.
    With Cookie being his older sister had come an assumption that she knew better than him. Still, she only made it to fifteen. How much could you really know after only fifteen years or so? During some of those years you could barely walk or talk. His mother was forty-nine, and she didn’t even know she was supposed to get up off the couch.
    Cookie had seemed pretty normal in her younger days, before the weird eating got a hold on her. She had gamely gone along to the toboggan run in the winter and taken a couple of slides down the riverbank. She hadn’t liked it much. Danny hadn’t either — it was scary — but they both felt as if they were supposed to like