Nothing but Ghosts Read Online Free Page B

then and her skirt fell loose, that if I had been smart enough, I would have known to worry, I would have guessed. But all I could see was the light in her eyes and the way Dad kissed her back and how the hair fell out of the clip again and it made her even prettier.
    Sammy Mack was the excuse; that’s all. She knew. Thinking back on it all tonight, I’m certain. Sitting here on this stoop I wonder if I’ll ever be so brave as her, if she passed along her courage.

Chapter Seven
    I wasn’t hanging around for that head-banging bird; I just wasn’t going there this morning. I got out of bed when it was still dark, went downstairs, tiptoed past Dad, threw some lunch into my backpack, stuffed a granola bar into my pocket. “See ya,” I wrote on a note to Dad. “Have a blast.” Then I was on my bike, and that’s where I am now, smashing molecules with my silver zipper, breaking the atmosphere apart. It’s all big estates between our house and MissMartine’s. Even though it’s August, the lawns are mostly green, the border flowers mostly on fire, and I can’t hear if the cicadas are out; there’s too much wind in my ears.
    The road dips, banks, straightens, banks up, and now I’m pedaling hard against an upward slant, not smashing anything. I stand and lean over my handlebars. By the time I reach the two stone posts on either side of Miss Martine’s drive, I’m completely out of breath, but here the angles work in my favor again, and I roll through, just like I always do, and start to zipper down again, rising near the house on the back of borrowed speed and sailing back down to the shed on the other side, where I park and chain my bike. Old Olson keeps some of the big machines here—the mowers, the whackers, the chain saws. The little minicart is gone, which means Old Olson is out there somewhere, and I go off toward the stream, sticking close to the dark ridge of shade. I stop behind the big birch tree andtake a long look at the house. Some of the windows are on fire with the morning sun. The big old door is shut. Nothing emerges from the shadows. No one.
    No Yvonne, no Amy, no Peter yet. Maybe not even Ida or Reny. It’s an hour too soon for Danny and Owen, whose mother, power broker that she is, drops them off five minutes late each day, jabbering away on her cell phone. Beside stalks of blown-to-dust cattails I walk. Next to the windberry. Past something Yvonne calls prairie-drop seed that smells like black licorice.
    At the edge of the watercress stream, by the crossing stones, I stop and make my way, looking for turtles and little green frogs and the snakes that make alphabet shapes. I’m quiet, and that’s why Old Olson doesn’t see me, doesn’t even guess that someone’s there, watching him watching the dirt that is the hole. He’s squatted down to the ground, pitched out over the edge, sifting the soil with his hands, and I get a picture in my mind of the old gold miners in my history book, searchingfor their lucky strike. I can’t imagine what’s there, what Old Olson might be mining. If I ask him, I’ll destroy the quiet. The nasty bugs haven’t swarmed in yet, but there’s a bunch of butterflies—monarchs with their stained-glass wings, twirling low and high. Old Olson, I think, is not as old as his name. His arms look strong beneath his shirt. His back is as broad as Owen’s.
    “Hey,” I say finally, because it feels like spying, and just like that, Old Olson bolts up straight.
    “You’re early,” he says when he turns to find me.
    “Yeah, well,” I say. “I guess.” His eyes are truly very tiny, blacker than blue in this light. He doesn’t seem all that glad to see me. “I’ve got this bird,” I try to explain. “This bird that wakes me up.”
    “Parakeet?” he asks me.
    “Finch,” I say.
    He looks at me as if I’m crazy. “Come back in an hour,” he says. “With the others.”
    I take the backpack from my back and sling it upagainst a tree. “Outa here,” I