Free Shadows on the Train by Melanie Jackson Page A

get,” she’d giggled. There were so many sandwiches she’d had to stuff some of them in her flowered-print bag.
    I’d sort of hoped Talbot would forget about bringing along the walkie-talkies. He’d constructed them last month out of old telephones and radio transmitters. Oh, and elastic bands and duct tape for holding everything together were also an integral part of the design. The walkie-talkies were Talbot’s solution to my habit of running into villains—and sometimes not running away fast enough.
    Pantelli burst into rude laughter at the sight of the walkie-talkies. I clapped a hand over his mouth. After all, Talbot meant well.
    â€œFine. I’ll carry this thing around,” I promised, though not in the most gracious tone. Talbot was such a worrywart! I stuffed the walkie-talkie into my knitted rainbow purse, whose strap I’d refastened with safety pins. “At the very least, it’ll build up my biceps.”
    This was a complaint as much as a joke, but Madge, emerging from the lake, overheard and smiled with approval. “It’s great that you’re giving thought to physical fitness,” she remarked and proceeded to squeeze water from her auburn tresses. Why was it, I wondered, that when Madge did this she resembled Aphrodite fresh from the foam, as a reporter had remarked last month? Whereas I looked like I’d just been through the carwash—without the car.
    â€œC’mon, Di,” Talbot urged. Yelling, he and Pantelli charged into the lake with maximum splashes. I followed more reluctantly, expecting icy temperatures.
    But Annette Lake was surprisingly warm. “The lake’s shallow,” Pantelli explained, treading water ahead of me. “Annette’s a mere leftover of a way bigger lake that once covered this whole valley.”
    We swam easily to the raft anchored twenty-five yards out. Hauling myself up, I prepared to bask in the sun.
    Pantelli challenged Talbot to a race to shore and back. “Go on,” I told Talbot, who had a concerned, should-we really-leave-you? expression under the long, wet, but still soulful forelock he kept shoving out of his eyes. “Unless the Jaws shark shows up, I’ll be fine.”
    Both boys made fins with their hands and hummed the DOO-doo-DOO-doo Jaws theme music. I laughed heartily. I believe that sophisticated wit should be encouraged.
    Talbot and Pantelli kick-started themselves into violent crawls toward the shore.
    I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. Maybe the sun would tan my freckles together. That’d be a better option than trying to scrub them off with a Brillo pad, which I’d done in the spring after Liesl the Weasel Dubuque made fun of them: You oughtta write START on one side of your face and FINISH on the other, and challenge people to find their way through the freckle maze.
    Roars from the beach. Talbot had got there first and was pretending to storm it in a reenactment of D-Day, 1944, at the beaches of Normandy.
    Talbot was a history buff. At home he had all these board games of famous battles: D-Day, Gettysburg, Waterloo, the Somme. He and his dad replayed the battles, complete with their own sound effects of bomb explosions, gunfire and people screaming with agony as they died.
    Normally Talbot and his dad were such quiet people too…
    Lately Talbot had started reading historical biographies. This meant his socials marks, already stratospheric, soared even higher. I’d overheard a teacher remark regretfully to him, “I just wish I could give you more than a hundred percent, Talbot.”
    Like, give me a break.
    Right now, Madge, a lot less enthusiastic about his pas–sion for history, was shooing Allied Commander St. John away. “Not yet!” I heard him shout. “I have to secure the beach first!”
    I grinned. Not yet, not yet , I started to hum. I couldn’t get “Black Socks” out of my head. It was as if the song