Saundra Mitchell: Mistwalker

But right before I started kindergarten, the town trust paid to pave the walk. They even put warmers beneath the concrete to keep it clear. Come December, we’d be tromping through knee-deep snow to get anywhere except school.

Everybody argued about why they did it and how they found the money for it. But I guess people were making noises about busing us to Narraguagus, and pride set in. Like everything else in Broken Tooth, it came down to tradition—we always had schooled our own, and we weren’t about to stop without a fight.

I liked it. I liked that I could find the place my dad scratched his initials in the old servants’ stairs when he was seventeen and sick of school. My granddad had done the same, and his father, too, back when it was just ten boys taking lessons with the rich owner’s son.

That wood contained one slice of me, the same way the Jenn-a-Lo claimed one, and the coast, and the jack pines, and the sea. I had planned to wait until graduation to add my initials. Instead, I broke in this past summer, the day of the funeral, to do it. It was too sunny outside, but nice and dark in the back hallway.

Bailey snapped her fingers in front of my face. The crack dragged me out of my thoughts, and I cooled my cheeks with my hands.

“Sorry.”

“Where’d you go?” she asked. She clasped the back of my neck and pulled me in roughly. It wasn’t a hug. It was a good shake, but it meant the same thing. I leaned into her, long enough to get her perfume on me, then threw my shoulders back.

“I’m all right.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” And to prove it, I tugged my bag onto my shoulder and said, “I think you should write about worm digging to pay for college. Make up some stuff about how cuts and worm bites get you good and tough. Ready for the world.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It doesn’t have to be true,” I told her, and started up the stairs. “It just has to get you by.”

Some days pretended to be normal.

Because our school was a mansion once, it had good places to sit. The elementary kids hung out in the solarium. They were allowed to run in there and get their ya yas out. Plus, it let them soak up what little sun made it through the trees up here.

The foyer was for us, the high school kids. When I walked in, Seth had already staked out our favorite corner. The far edge of the window seat, where the light was the warmest. Great, weighted oaks cast their shadows, and by lunch, the foyer was dark. In the morning, though, it was quiet and kinda pretty.

Sliding into Seth’s lap, I looped his arms around me the way I always had. Solid and warm, he melted to match me. He rested his chin on my shoulder, brushing his nose behind my ear. Everything fit.

“Morning,” he murmured. His voice buzzed on my skin.

“Yessir, it is,” I replied.

Seth smiled. He always did when I played literal with him. Holding me tighter, he fell quiet. He shifted and twitched beneath me. Fighting back a smile, I let him squirm. He was waiting for me to ask how it went with Daddy, and I wasn’t about to. It was a sore subject, and anyway, he was going to tell me whether I asked or not.

“Yesterday was good,” he finally said.

Reaching back, I trailed my fingers through his hair. “Catch anything?”

“Nope.”

It wasn’t a surprise. The traps had been out too long. Yesterday was an exercise in baiting and dropping, a chance for Daddy to get used to a sternman who wasn’t a Dixon. I tried to push that aside. Twisting to look at him, I asked, “Everything run smooth?”

There was a hitch in Seth’s answer, a little hesitation. “He kept coming on deck. I know how to gaff a buoy, but he kept wanting to show me.”

Secretly, that made me feel good. When I was on the Jenn-a-Lo, Dad barely slowed down between traps. It was up to me to keep up. And I had no problem doing it. There was nothing better than hauling a string in record time. Well, if the pots were all full, that made it a little bit better.

To soothe Seth, I turned in his lap. Draping my arms over his shoulders, I tugged at the short hairs on the back of his neck. I kissed his downturned mouth and ignored it when one of the Eldrich boys hooted from the stairs.

“You did good, though.”

“Think so?”

I nodded, our lips skimming when I spoke. “I do. And when you go out Wednesday, just tell him to get his ass back in the cabin where he belongs.”

Seth snorted. “That’s gonna go over.”

“It will with me.”

He’d known me my whole life. So he knew when he could pick me up. Picking up meant spinning. Used to be, I’d press my face against his neck. Breathe his after-shave and get my thrills from the smoothness of his smooth skin. All of a sudden, though, whirling in the foyer seemed like too much.

“Stop. Enough,” I said, and I wasn’t laughing like usual.

To his credit, Seth did. He tipped me so I could hop to my feet again. There was a space between us, one I filled by brushing my hair back and staring at the floor. In all the spots inside me that happy tried to fill, guilt pushed it out. I couldn’t be playing at school. Laughing and copping feels. I just couldn’t.

Looking past Seth, I stared down the hall. It was full, and one of the kindergarteners, Kenzie Fisher’s kid sister, skidded along the slick floor. She crashed into Kenzie’s legs. Without warning, Kenzie hauled her up and tossed her over her shoulder. Fat cheeks turned red, and the little Fisher’s eyes bugged out.

There was only ever two years between me and Levi. I couldn’t have held him upside down if I wanted to. But stupid me, stupid, irrational me—right then, I wanted to, so bad. Seth’s rough hand skimmed across the back of my neck. Leaning over, he kissed my hair. He turned me, subtly, because he knew me too well.

“It’s okay,” he murmured.

It wasn’t, but I said “I know” anyway.

With a pair of metal cutters in one hand, I turned my bead tray with the other. Somehow, I was supposed to turn a spool of wire and about fifty million little glass spheres into a bracelet, one with “depth” and a “point of view.”

No idea what that meant, so I started with blue beads and figured I’d throw some silver ones in to go with.

If anybody asked, I was going to say it represented the Milky Way. The way it looked on a lightless, cloudless night, when we were halfway to Georges Bank. There, surrounded by sea and not a thing else, you were a real tiny slice of infinity. From there, you could see the shape of galaxies, silver and flickering, forever out of reach.

“Are you using those needles?” Brennan asked.

His voice dragged me back to class, and I shook my head, handing the needles over. There were only six of us in Metalwork and Jewelry, and it was obvious everybody else wanted to be there.

They swirled their fingers through bowls of lamp-work beads, choosing another color, caring what came next on their wire.

When they twisted their pliers, their base wires became luxurious shapes, half-moons or Greek squares. They managed to suspend cheap seed pearls in loops and whorls. When they clamped off the clasps, no ragged edges remained.

Mrs. Baxter had demonstrated all of that in the first week. Mechanical technique she called it. I didn’t have it.

Give me sink rope or claw bands. Give me zip ties and bait bags. I knew what to do with those. I could drop a lobster pot like it was a French-hook earring; it was elegant, even. But with delicate little pretty things, I was hopeless.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked wearing it just fine. For my last birthday, Seth gave me a pair of silver wraps that held on to the top of either ear. I wore those almost every day, just like the silver stud in the curve of my nose.