Free The Liberation of Gabriel King by K. L. Going

said about me and Frita needing to watch ourselves. Maybe this was what he’d meant.
    “Pop said we ought to be careful—” I started, but Frita interrupted me.
    “Hush up,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you that liberatin’ is serious business?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, there’s no kind of serious business that isn’t risky. Besides, we’re watching out, aren’t we? Why else do you think we’re in the bushes?”
    I had to admit Frita had a point.
    “Come on,” she said. “Let’s check things out. I bet you two dollars it’s not so scary once we get up close.”
    Frita darted out of the bushes, but I grabbed her back again and held on tight.
    “Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” Frita told me, real stern. “It’s broad daylight.”
    Frita pulled loose of my grip. She dodged an old tire and a car fender, then she hesitated. We’d never been this closebefore. I closed my eyes and held my breath. Then I opened one eye and watched as Frita darted the rest of the way to the door. She touched it with her palm, then looked back over her shoulder and grinned.
    “See?” she said. “Not so scary. I told you.”
    Far as I was concerned, Frita could have all the glory. I stayed planted in my spot, but Frita didn’t put up with that.
    “Get over here, Gabriel King,” she hollered. “You can’t cross this off your list unless you get out of that pricker bush.”
    I crawled out and scooted around to the back of the trailer where Frita was trying to see in the back window. There were a thousand voices screaming inside my head and every one of them was telling me to run, but Frita couldn’t hear them.
    “Let’s see if Mrs. Evans’s corpse is really in there,” she said. “I’ll give you a boost.”
    I shook my head. “No way.”
    “You have to,” Frita told me. “I’m too big for you to boost up, and we can’t see in even on tiptoes. All you got to do is look.”
    “What if I see her?”
    Frita was making her hands into a cup shape so I could step into them.
    “Well, then you can cross corpses off your list too.”
    Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. I guessed the quickest way out of there was to take a peek, so I put one foot in Frita’spalms and rested the other one on the side of the trailer to balance. Then I put my hands on the window and pulled myself up. The old wood was scratchy beneath my palms.
    “What do you see?” Frita asked. “Do you see Mrs. Evans? Is she dead?”
    Frita was pouring out questions, but truth was I couldn’t be sure exactly what I saw. The old curtain hanging over the window made everything look ghostly white.
    “I see some furniture,” I said, “and there’s a pile of clothes in one corner. There’re some shoes in the pile and…” Wait! Were those shoes, or were they feet? Sure did look like feet. Maybe underneath that pile of rags was Duke’s dead momma. Maybe that’s why our parents didn’t want us near here. I turned to look at Frita, but all I saw was Mrs. Evans coming at me with a broom.
    “
You kids get away from here!
”
    Frita let loose such a high-pitched scream, a dog started yelping from across the street. She pulled her hands out from under my feet so fast, I didn’t know what had happened. One minute I was peeking in the window trying to trace the outline of a corpse, and the next minute I was lying on my back in a cloud of dust and Mrs. Evans was raising her broom high above my head.
    For a minute I was frozen stiff, but then that broom was coming down quick. I rolled onto my side and clambered to my feet. I felt like I’d been hit by an eighteen-wheeler, but I got up and ran like the dickens.
    “
Don’t you kids be coming around here! I don’t want to catch you near this place ever again. If I do, I’ll
…”
    I could hear her yelling after us halfway back to my place. On every other occasion Frita could run way faster than me, but I was so scared I clear out beat her to my trailer. I got there a full minute before she did.
    Frita could