The Waters & the Wild Read Online Free PDF Page A

?”
    â€œYes. We were invisible. Why can’t we?”She stood up and spread her arms. Sarah got up, too.
    Haze stared at them. The talking-cat look again. Bee had an impulse to kiss him.
    She put out her arms like wings. “Come on. We can’t do this without you.”
    He stood reluctantly, wiping his hands on his thighs. She could tell he felt foolish, was only doing it for her and Sarah.
    â€œWhat are we supposed to do?”
    â€œThis!”
    Bee took off, running down the grassy slope, yelling, feeling the breeze lifting her hair, whipping it against her face. Sarah followed her, then Haze, all of them screaming as loud as they could.
    It felt as if they levitated—who knew? There was no one there to tell them it hadn’t happened.
    Â 
    When they collapsed into a heap at the bottom of the hill they were out of breath, panting. Bee lay with her head on Sarah’s warm stomach and her feet sprawled over Haze. Her belly hurt, but she didn’t tell them. The yellowish glow of the world pulsed before her.
    She put her hands into the pocket of the boy’s black suit jacket she’d found in a thrift shop (the gray sweatshirt with the missing cuff freaked her out too much to wear now) and felt something there; she’d forgotten the flower.
    â€œLook what someone gave me at Lindsey’s party.”
    â€œWho was it?” Sarah grinned at her.
    â€œI didn’t see.”
    â€œA secret admirer?”
    Haze was scowling at the plant. She didn’tlike how worried he looked all of a sudden. She wanted to see the smile that changed his face so much, when you could get one out of him.
    â€œIt’s a weird-looking thing,” she said. “Do you recognize it, Haze?”
    She handed over the crushed blossom. He examined it gingerly, pushing his taped glasses back up on his nose. “It’s not a local plant. Digitalis purpurea. Foxglove. It’s also called dead man’s bells or witches’ gloves.”
    â€œThat’s frightening,” said Sarah.
    Haze took the flower over to a trash can and tossed it in, then wiped his hands on the grass.
    â€œGo wash your hands, Bee.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œDigitalis is a deadly poison,” Haze said.

9
Hand in Hand
    I t was a stucco house with barred windows, off Venice Boulevard. Haze lived there with his parents, who were both middle school teachers. Luckily, not at the school he went to. He was already unpopular enough. His father taught math, would stand at the front of the classroom scratching his head so thatdandruff snowed onto his shoulders. When he got upset, he stammered. Haze believed that even though he had black hair (no dandruff, thank you!) and the same speech impediment, he was not his father’s son. He believed he had learned the stutter and that his hair color was from his mother. It made much more sense to him that his father was an alien who had abducted Haze’s mom for the sole purpose of spreading his (its?) seed. He sometimes wondered why the alien had chosen his mother, though. She had been much thinner at the time, and her black hair was not yet streaked with gray. She was smart, too. Maybe the alien liked her large eyes that reminded him of his own species. She almost never took her glasses off, but the alien could have seen her eyes through his alien-viewing device while she was sleeping.
    Haze imagined the abduction as sterile, anesthetized. His mother never felt a thing. So he hadn’t been born out of pain, but there was exploitation, and no love, either. What did that say about him?
    But, on the other hand, maybe his mother desired the alien. She wasn’t that interested in his father. Maybe this had been her brief means of escape. Who knew? Stranger things had happened; they were happening now.
    The birds of paradise outside Haze’s window were huge, with leaves like shields and thick char-black weapon beaks. They seemed threatening to him—vicious,