Free The Little Woods by McCormick Templeman Page B

earth, bowing their heads toward it in obeisance. Lily pads and lotus flowers rested on its smooth surface. It was as if we had emerged from the forest path directly into the apse of a magnificent cathedral. My breath caught. I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my life. I felt someone’s eyes on me. I turned to see Brody smiling.
    “This is the place that’s supposed to be haunted?” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
    “Well, it’s not haunted during the day, silly,” Brody said, smiling like a little boy.
    “Okay, so where are these salamanders?” I asked.
    Alex gently placed his hand on my shoulder. “They’re usuallyaround more after it rains, but it hasn’t rained for a few days. It probably would have been better to come tomorrow after it rains tonight.”
    “You can tell it’s going to rain?”
    “Yeah, I have Native American blood in me and we can all tell magical stuff like that about the weather.”
    “Really?”
    “No,” he said, laughing and crinkling his face into a sneer. “What are you, a crazy racist? I read the weather report in the paper.”
    “Oh,” I sighed, my voice catching in my throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “Don’t worry. I don’t really think you’re racist. I was just messing with you.”
    “Are you really Native American?”
    “Nope.” He smiled and tousled my hair.
    The five of us rustled around in the woods for a bit, looking for salamanders, finding none. I did see violet dragonflies, beetles fat as prunes, and frogs the size of thimbles. All the while mist swirled around me, and I found that it had a near-hallucinatory effect. Maybe these woods really were haunted. If they were, this was the epicenter, this little pond. There was something like a presence here that I found seductive and calming. Was Clare out here somewhere, like everyone said? Was it her presence I felt tugging at me through the mist and the trees, urging me to follow? I could have lost myself forever in that strange call. I could have, but I shook myself out of it. It’s lucky when you don’t believe in ghosts.
    I was sitting by myself, playing in the mud like a child, whenHelen called out, “Let’s go swimming!” Before I even realized what was happening, she’d stripped down to her bra and underwear and cannonballed into the pond. Noel shook her head and laughed. The boys were quickly stripping down to their boxers. I tried not to look, simply because I wanted to so badly that it made me feel like kind of a perv.
    “You want to go in?” Noel crouched in the mud opposite me. “If you’re shy about the boys, we can go in at the same time and I’ll do something crazy to distract them if you want.”
    I thought about it for a minute. “Naw. Too cold,” I said, shaking my head.
    Noel rolled her eyes. “At least come hang out with us.”
    Nodding, I brushed the mud from my jeans and followed Noel down to the edge of the water.
    “Wood, you better be coming in,” Alex said, his grin wonderfully potent.
    I shook my head.
    “You have to,” he said. “You can’t sit out there all alone. Come on. The water’s not cold.”
    This I knew to be a lie. He was shaking, and goose bumps were rising on his chest.
    “She’s not coming in,” Noel said firmly, walking into the water in her mismatched bra-and-underwear set as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
    They didn’t stay in long. Fifteen minutes maybe, and all the while I sat there on the bank talking to them. It looked fun, but cold, and I really didn’t need to subject anyone to the full extent of my granny-pantied splendor.
    “Do you guys come here often?” I asked.
    “Not too often,” Alex said. “It’s really against the rules, but we risk it sometimes.”
    “I come out here all the time,” Noel said proudly. “But for me it’s allowed because it’s with Asta. We go looking for herbs and mushrooms and stuff, and we always stop here and dangle our feet in and talk.”
    “You