The Creek Read Online Free PDF Page B

say. Nana said that there were things no one could stop. Life was a force of nature, a hurricane, a riptide. The only thing you could do, Nana said, was look at the sky and watch out for storms and, of course, hope your roof didn’t blow away.
    Nana told Penny these things at her house in Key West, with its wraparound porch infested by termites. She told Penny these things over sweet tea laced with honey as they sat on the swing watching the sunset, the famous Key West sunset.
That was the best sunset,
they said every time, no matter what.
    Nana was old, nearly eighty, and everyone agreed that old Nana was sharp as a tack. Her hair was the color of tarnished pewter and her hands were gnarled with arthritis, but she always cooked a Key lime pie with meringue topping when Penny came to visit.
    Penny went to Key West to stay with Nana every summer at the same time, the week before school started. Just Penny—not Teddy. “Just us girls,” Nana liked to say. No boys allowed.
    Every morning when she was in Key West, the first thing Penny did was shake out her shoes. Nana told her to do this: shake out your shoes. Penny wondered about it, but Nana just shook her head, and said, “You’ll see, dear, you’ll see.”
    One morning last summer, Penny was shaking out her shoes as usual when out plopped a shiny black scorpion. It waved its claws at her like a miniature demon, and Penny screamed. Nana came running, but by then it was gone, disappeared, under the old iron bed.
    “See, Penny,” Nana said. “Scorpions like to live near you, where they can do you the most harm. You have to be careful. You have to think like a scorpion. You have to shake your shoes out.”
    Penny was remembering all these things as she hid in the storm drain. The storm drain was at the end of the cul-de-sac, the lowest point on Mockingbird Lane. Underneath, there was a rectangular space large enough for several kids to stand up in. At the back a long corrugated pipe, big enough to crawl through, opened out into a gully in the woods near the Devlins’ house. The pipe had once had a grate on the end to keep out small animals—and children—but some enterprising teenagers had cut it off years ago. It wasone of her favorite places—cool despite the summertime heat, redolent with the pungent smell of dried leaves. It was a perfect hiding place for flashlight tag; she’d been sitting there for nearly a half hour now, and no one had found her yet. She shifted her rear end on the corrugated metal grooves, trying to get comfortable.
    Penny usually liked flashlight tag. It was a tradition of summer, like swimsuits and corn on the cob and fireflies. And she was good at it, maybe because she didn’t mind the dark, not like Teddy who was terrified, who had to go to bed with a night-light on and the door to his room opened a crack.
    She flicked on her little flashlight and began sorting through the beer-can collection that lined the sides of the storm drain. It was Teddy’s. Penny sniffed a can, catching the acidy-sweet whiff of long-ago beer. She admired the florid paintings on the sides—the German castles and the huge-breasted women. She had no breasts to speak of herself, unlike Amy. The training bra her mother bought her sagged awkwardly in the front and rubbed the skin under her arms raw. She’d stuck it in the back of her sock drawer, out of sight, preferring to wear cotton undershirts that fit her like a second skin. She didn’t need sliding brastraps to remind the boys that she was a girl.
    She shifted the cans around and then paused, a shiver running up her spine. Some of the cans were filled to the rim with fresh cigarette butts, and the Old Milwaukee can had been crushed and punctured by something sharp, like a knife. Had someone been down here? The boys didn’t smoke, and besides, this was her and Teddy’s secret place.
    Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to be down in the storm drain now, after dark. Especially since it was so close to