shocked by the reality of breathing, and at first she seemed to take in no air. She examined her fingers, nails, and naked skin for blood, but found none. The absence of blood helped her breathe more easily, her lungs freed from their confusion.
Another dream. Of course. How could she mistake it for anything else?
She was annoyed to realize that her ribs still bore their painful rash and long lines like raw, infected incisions.
But her feet, thank goodness, were unchanged. She still had the delightful webbing and impressive new size, longer than in her dream. Abbie knew she would have to dress in a hurry. Before school, she would swing by Payless and pick up a few new pairs of shoes.
Derek lingered after class. He’d written a poem based on a news story that had made a deep impression on him; a boy in Naples had died on the football practice field.
And now here was Derek standing over Abbie’s desk, on his way to six feet tall, his face bowed with shyness for the first time all week.
“I lied before,” he said, when she waited for him to speak. “About my age.”
Abbie already knew. She’d checked his records and found out for herself, but she decided to torture him. “Then how old are you?”
“Fifteen.” His face soured. “Till March.”
“Why would you lie about that?”
He shrugged, an adolescent gesture that annoyed Abbie no end.
“Of course you know,” she said. “I heard your poem. I’ve seen your thoughtfulness. You wouldn’t lie on the first day of school without a reason.”
He found his confidence again, raising his eyes. “Fine. I skipped second grade, so I’m a year younger than everyone in my class. I always say I’m sixteen. It wasn’t special for you.”
The fight in Derek intrigued her. He wouldn’t be the type of man who would be pushed around. “But you’re here now, baring your soul. Who’s that for?”
His face softened to half a grin. “Like you said, when we’re in this room, we tell the truth. So here I am. Telling the truth.”
There he was. She decided to tell him the truth, too.
“I bought a big house out by the lake,” she said. “Against my better judgment, maybe.”
“That old one on McCormack Road?”
“You know it?”
He shrugged, that loathsome gesture again. “Everybody knows the McCormacks. She taught Sunday school at Christ the Redeemer. Guess she moved out, huh?”
“To her sister’s in … Quincy?” The town shared a name with the city south of Boston, the only reason she remembered it. Her mind was filled with distraction to mask strange flurries of her heart. Was she so cowed by authority that she would leave her house in a mess?
“Yeah, Quincy’s about an hour, hour and a half, down the Ten …” Derek was saying in a flat voice that bored even him.
They were talking about nothing. Waiting. They both knew it.
Abbie clapped her hands once, snapping their conversation from its trance. “Well, an old house brings lots of problems. The porch needs fixing. New kitchen tiles. I don’t have the budget to hire a real handyman, so I’m looking for people with skills …”
Derek’s cheeks brightened, pink. “My dad and I built a cabin last summer. I’m pretty good with wood. New planks and stuff. For the porch.”
“Really?” She chided herself for the girlish rise in her pitch, as if he’d announced he had scaled Mount Everest during his two weeks off from school.
“I could help you out, if … you know, if you buy the supplies.”
“I can’t pay much. Come take a look after school, see if you think you can help.” She made a show of glancing toward the open doorway, watching the stream of students passing by. “But you know, Derek, it’s easy for people to get the wrong idea if you say you’re going to a teacher’s house …”
His face was bright red now. “Oh, I wouldn’t say nothing. I mean … anything. Besides, we go fishing with Coach Reed all the time. It’s no big deal around here. Not like in Boston, maybe.” The longer he spoke, the more he regained his poise. His last sentence had come with an implied wink of his eye.
“No, you’re right about that,” she said, and she smiled, remembering her new feet. “Nothing here is like it was in Boston.”
That was how Derek Voorhoven came to spend several days a week after class helping Abbie fix her ailing house, whenever he could spare time after football practice in the last daylight. Abbie made it clear that he couldn’t expect any special treatment in class, so he would need to work hard on his atrocious spelling, but Derek was thorough and uncomplaining. No task seemed too big or small, and he was happy to scrub, sand, and tile in exchange for a few dollars, conversation about the assigned reading, and fishing rights to the lake, since he said the catfish favored the north side, where it was quiet.
As he’d promised, he told no one at Graceville Prep, but one day he asked if his cousin Jack could help from time to time, and after he’d brought the stocky, freckled youth by to introduce him, she agreed. Jack was only fourteen, but he was strong and didn’t argue. He also attended the public school, which made him far less a risk. Although the boys joked together, Jack’s presence never slowed Derek’s progress much, so Derek and Jack became fixtures in her home well into July. Abbie looked forward to fixing them lemonade and white chocolate macadamia nut cookies from ready-made dough, and with each passing day she knew she’d been right to leave Boston behind.
Still, Abbie never told Mary Kay about her visits with the boys and the work she asked them to do. Her friend wouldn’t judge her, but Abbie wanted to hold her new life close, a secret she would share only when she was ready, when she could say:
But there were other reasons Abbie began erecting a wall between herself and the people who knew her best. Derek and Jack, bright as they were, weren’t prone to notice the small changes, or even the large ones, that would have leaped out to her mother and Mary Kay — and even her distracted father.
Her mother would have spotted the new size of her feet right away, of course. And the odd new pallor of her face, fishbelly pale. And the growing strength in her arms and legs that made it so easy to hand the boys boxes, heavy tools, or stacks of wooden planks. Mary Kay would have asked about the flaky skin on the back of her neck and her sudden appetite for all things rare, or raw. Abbie had given up most red meat two years ago in an effort to remake herself after the divorce tore her self-esteem to pieces, but that summer she stocked up on thin-cut steaks, salmon, and fish she could practically eat straight from the packaging. Her hunger was also
She was hungriest when Derek and Jack were there, but she hid that from herself.
Her dusk swims had grown to evening swims, and some nights she lost track of time so completely that the sky was blooming pink by the time she waded from the healing waters to begin another day of waiting to swim. She resisted inviting the boys to swim with her.
The last Friday in July, with only a week left in the summer term, Abbie lost her patience.
She was especially hungry that day, dissatisfied with her kitchen stockpile. Graceville was suffering a record heat wave with temperatures hovering near 110 degrees, so she was sweaty and irritable by the time the boys arrived at five thirty. And itching terribly. Unlike her feet, the gills hiding beneath the ridges of her ribs never stopped bothering her until she was in her lake. She was so miserable, she almost asked the boys to forget about painting the refurbished back porch and come back another day.
If she’d only done that, she would have avoided the scandal.
Abbie strode behind the porch to watch the strokes of the boys’ rollers and paintbrushes as they transformed
